yes the title is ironic!

with BT briefly in the news this week, because they’re having to lay several thousand people off because of “lower than expected profit forecasts”, it seems an ideal time for me to post about my latest fun with ‘britain’s most loathesome corporation’:

about fifteen months ago, i had to sign up for phone and broadband for BT, because i needed to have a new phoneline put in and BT still have a monopoly on this, even tho’ in theory the telecoms market is supposed to be ‘free’.

anyway, needless to say it wasnae too long before BT - ‘britain’s most loathesome coporation’ started to fuck with my mind on a regular basis.

for the first three months, they sent me red bills and disconnection letters for both my phonebill and my broadband bill - even tho’ i’d set up a direct debit on both accounts. so six times in the first three months i had to ring their bangalore call centre and explain to some semi-intelligible, non-english speaker on the other end that i had a direct debit set up on the account and shouldnae be getting red bills. each time i was assured that the problem was sorted and would never happen again. you can guess the rest.

then there was the download speed: my broadband was supposed to be 8MB, but i rarely got above four. now i’m aware that you never get the maximum rate, but i know for a fact that my local exchange supports up to 12MB, so i’d have expected to at least hit 5 or 6MB fairly consistently.

next came the mysterious ‘additional charges’ which started appearing on my bill every month; a quid or two here and a quid or two there. after reading the small print on my contract, it transpired that BT will charge you if you go over your monthly download limit and this was what the ‘additional charges’ were.

‘fair enough’ you might say, apart from one small detail; BT’s terms