| The Worst ISP? |
The following appeared appeared in the newsgroup alt.internet.providers.uk.btinternet on June 10, 2000, under the title Is BT the Worst ISP in the UK? It may lack the bite of a comment posted a few days earlier to btinternet.support...
The media is on to you now, BTI, 'run Forrest run'.
...but it's a beautifully written article, and the solutions suggested by BT are - well, see for yourself:
I am in the sad position of being a BT Connect to Business customer.
After many problems and complaints to them about their level of service I have now received written confirmation of their position. It's a two-page letter (with another one-page follow-up including an item not mentioned in the first letter). Extracts follow.
Let me know what you think....
The first page tells me of the 50 pounds compensation they will take off my phone bill and of the complete lack of /any/ charge for their services.
(They have also recently confirmed that they will transfer the domain name they set up for me to any other ISP of my choice at no charge.)
Page 2 is the good bit. I've added a few paragraph breaks to improve clarity. Spelling errors included.
From BT's letter:
I would like to take this opportunity to respond to your query regarding email messages being deleted from your mailbox. This is likely to have been caused by the recent problems BT Connect have identified with POP, the software that is used to download messages from the mailboxes of customers.
It was found that there was insufficient disk space available. This led to a temporary file being created. Unfortunately, when there is no more disk space available, the first files that are deleted are the temporary files. BT Connect has since upgraded POP to avoid any recurrence of this problem.
However I would like to apologise for the inconvenience this has caused you. To obtain these email messages it is advisable that you contact the sender to resent them. If this causes a problem, please contact me again and I will ask the technical support desk to see if they can retrieve your messages.
There are a number of reasons why the test emails send from BT Connect did not arrive in your mailbox until six hours after they were sent. However, the most likely cause of this is network congestion.
... If Internet access is critical to your business, it may be prudent to have an account with another ISP as a back up.
... Should you require any further assistance, please do not hesitate to call me on 0808 100 1110.
Sarah Craig, BT Internet and e-Business Complaints Review Manager
ieb@bt.com
:letter extracts end.
So, BT's solution is that in order to find out who the emails that they agree were deleted from my mailbox were from, I should contact the people who wrote to me and ask them to resend the mail; only not having the mail means I have no idea who sent it in the first place.
BT advise me to have another ISP account running as a backup. Quite how this will help if people write to me at my domain name at BT Connect and their system deletes the mail from their server before it gets to me is as yet unclear.
Meantime they think that the temporary file that was deleted a week ago can still be accessed. And if the messages /can/ be recovered why the /hell/ do I have to ask them to do so? Surely it's their responsibility to do so without prompting?
The test emails sent from BT Connect (only one arrived, no idea how many they actually sent) came from BT Connect to my mailbox on BT Connect. This was between 1.00 am and 7.30 am. They state that network congestion, presumably in BT's own system, caused a six and half hour delay during the dead of night. It also seems to have caused at least one test message from BT Connect to a BT Connect client to go missing within their own network.
And they put this drivel in writing!
Feel free to call Ms Craig on the above number, or email her department, to clarify the accuracy of any of this text.
In any event, I have been with BT Connect since January and will not be charged for /any/ of their services and they are giving me 50 pounds compensation for the time and effort wasted trying to get their system to work properly.
In short, I'm paying them exactly what the service is worth.
Remember that BT Connect is sold as a business-to-business package and is advertised and promoted as part BT's claims to help small businesses access the Internet easily. Perhaps that's why they advise having another ISP connection; it's certainly not happening with BT.
So, if you have genuine complaints against BT (for any of their ISP services) then it seems likely that you too can get a /full/ refund on your bills as well as cash compensation to cover the cost of wasted calls.
Oh, and feel free to mention my name if contacting them.
--
Alan Mackie
Click here for more on the BT e-mail saga.