David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

The new telephone number now works and I'm now on unlimited dialup. You don't realise how much you would miss broadband until you revert back to dialup!

BT managed to get everything sorted after my dozen phone calls lasting a total of over 3.5 hours. The crazy thing is that each department cannot help alone and has to transfer calls to other departments. Also, people within the same department read off different sheets.
 
Towards the end, I was told by one woman that I would have to allow 15 days for BT to do some preliminary checks before they could install the line. This was after I was promised it would be active last Thursday. A problem in the exchange occurred but no one could explain what the problem actually was. One person guessed it was down to paperwork.

I went through at least 3 different orders. The first 2 were cancelled by BT, again for unknown reasons.

When I was told it would be 15 days before BT could even consider setting up the line, I explained I had been waiting for over a month. She didn't believe me until I was able to reel off the original order number! I gave notice to BT early in May.

I then cancelled everything and was determined to look for an alternative. Data rates for using a mobile laptop card are ludicrous and I'm not in a cable area. So I'm more-or-less tied to BT :-(

So, I went back to the very first department I ever dealt with and in 5 minutes, I was provided with an installation date of this Thursday. No 15 day wait, no hassle. Just the promise of an engineer if required. I didn't believe that the line would be installed so I made a note of exactly whom I was speaking to.

That was on Monday. Tuesday morning and I had a service!

Why couldn't that happen right in the beginning? I've spent more than enough time this week in BT phoneboxes (which you can't seem to find many of these days) dialing BT's freephone number - 0800 800 150.

This leads onto another point - why do mobile phone networks charge for 0800 numbers?

Anyhow, I'm waiting for my number to be banded around the broadband availability checkers and as soon as it has and as soon as I can sign up for broadband, I certainly will do! I'm just hoping I can get it now!

I was with Tiscali but am thinking of either Tiscali, Virgin Broadband (not cable), Orange or AOL. Anyone had any experience with these?

My requirements:

• Under £20 per month
• Around 1 Mbps, perhaps 2 Mbps
• No data caps (fair usage is OK)