BT SOMETIME (btopenworld.co.uk)

Member Name: webcore

Product:	btopenworld.co.uk
Date:	15/04/02 (120 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: reliability, speed

Anyone who is familiar with BT Internet will know this opinion isn?t going to be singing any praises!

Bt Internet charges customers £14.99 per month for their ?Anytime? service. This service apparently allows customers to connect 24/7 - hence the name ?Anytime?. What BT fails to make clear is that you are disconnected every 2 hours to allow others users to deter ?heavy? internet use. Dial-up users sometimes have to wait hours before they can connect due to frequent server problems, and a first attempt connection is very rare.

If at any time you are away from your computer for up to 15 minutes and no data is being transferred, BT disconnects your modem!

Because of the 2 hour cut off it is very difficult to download files without the use of a download manager which supports the ?resume? function. I think BT fails to realize that the Internet is not in existence solely for the purpose of viewing pictures and text on a web page.

As I am a web designer I use the Internet quite frequently, both morning and night. Searching through my E-mail Inbox one morning I was disgusted to find the following e-mail from BT:


============================================== ====================

Dear Customer

As part of our customer service program, we regularly review the network and level of service received by all of our customers.

After reviewing our records recently, we have reason to believe that your account has been active for online sessions during extended periods of time when it has not been used.

We remind you that this is not permitted under the terms and conditions of the BTopenworld Anytime service (please refer to paragraph 10.3).
http://www.btopenworld.com/helpnb/terms/
The reason for this condition is that such usage reduces the level of available service for all of our customers.

We wish to advise that should this practice continue, we reserve our right to suspend or ter
minate your account without further notice to you.

As a precautionary measure we suggest you reset your password. It may be that your account has been compromised and is being used by people other than yourself. To do this, please go to the URL below and select 'Change Password'.
http://www.btopenworld.com/mybtopenworld

All correspondence regarding unattended use will be sent to this email address (selected during registering for BTopenworld Anytime). Please ensure you check this email address for regular updates.

If you have any questions with respect to our unattended use policy, please email the BTopenworld team at
userhelp@BTopenworld.com
or call us on 0870 241 6307 (4.00pm - midnight, daily, national rate).


Thank you for your co-operation.


Yours sincerely

BTopenworld Customer Services

British Telecommunications plc
Registered office: 81 Newgate Street London EC1A 7AJ


============================================== ====================


After thousands of compliant about this BT?s Internet service the issue was discussed on BB1's Watchdog. An ex-employee of BT Internet openly admitted that BT was purposely making the service poor in a feeble attempt to lure customers into upgrading their expensive broadband service. (which BTW is also very poor). Staff working in the BT Customer Support call centre are all given scripts with cheesy lines to say when a customer calls with a complaint. Advice such as ?keep trying to connect? is about the best they can muster.

Even after the screening of complaints on national television BT makes no attempt to improve the service. The service has done nothing but decrease in quality since the Watchdog Programme! As a result BT suffered the consequence of having to drop their motto ?We provide a quality & reliable service?.


Evidence has shown that the BT server routing cannot handle the
demand of customers, but still, we are fobbed off with these excuses when a company as large as BT doesn?t even have the hardware powerful enough to call themselves an Internet Service Provider let alone BT ?ANYTIME?.

Summary: