A number of years ago I remember my friend Damon writing a series of posts in the JEB forum, in which he suggested that BT stands not for British Telecom but for Bloody Terrible. This is a sentiment with which I can now sympathise.

For the past twelve months or so, we have been fortunate enough to have wireless internet in our house. It was a highly exciting development when my mother agreed to have it installed, and it has been even more exciting since Babel bought me my own computer and I can actually use it I got my computer at Christmas, and for the first six weeks or so, everything seemed to be going swimmingly well. But when we hit February, problems started to develop. Quite often I’d be using my computer bt night when suddenly the internet connection would cut out. Initially I assumed this was just some sort of random network problem and the signal was temporarily too weak for me to connect to, but it seemed different to any kind of connectivity issue which I had experienced elsewhere before. My computer was still able to detect the network, was proclaiming it to have an excellent signal in fact, but whenever I tried to connect to it it would say it was unable to, and Windows was unable to diagnose and repair the problem. What’s more, I soon discovered that leaving my computer switched off for twenty four hours and hoping it would cure itself was not successful. The only way to get the internet connection back was seemingly to turn the wireless hub off at the power and switch it back on again. This admittedly worked every time, but doesn’t seem an ideal solution to the problem.

The issue began affecting other members of the family too, and eventually my mother decided to ring BT about it. All of BT’s technical internet help is based overseas in Mumbai, and to be fair they are sometimes very good and have solved other problems we have had in the past. Initially, we thought they’d solved this one too. After the first phone call, they took remote control of our computer and adjusted the wireless settings so that the wireless was now operating from a different channel. The internet worked perfectly for a couple of days or so, and then went down again

Over the course of the next few weeks, my mother called Mumbai on a number of occasions. Every time they changed the wireless channel, and every time the connection lasted for about a day before it died. Every time they advised us not to keep a microwave near our PC, as this might disrupt the wireless signal. I hasten to add that there is not a microwave in the remote vicinity of any of our computer equipment

Our main PC is actually connected to the hub via an ethernet cable, and generally when you ring technical help they ask for this to be taken out and placed in one of our laptops so that they can examine the settings on that. So far every time my mother had called she had used my sister’s laptop because I had been at work. Gradually she began to develop the theory that the problem might be the fault of my laptop, seeing as my computer is the newest and we never used to have the problem before. So, on Sunday afternoon we decided that we should call Mumbai with my laptop, and thus it was that I was able to experience the full unhelpfulness of technical help

I explained to the first man I spoke to exactly what my problem was, and he asked me to put the ethernet cable in my computer. I duly did so, and he proceeded to change the channel. I informed him that we had already tried all the available channels. He ignored me and told me my wireless was now working. I explained that yes it always works after you change the channel, but it stops working again within twenty four hours which is what the problem is. I queried whether it was normal to have to reset the channel every day and he assured me I wouldn’t have to do it again and asked whether there was anything else he could help me with. I said I’d quite like to know why my internet connection had been malfunctioning and whether we potentially needed a new hub. He said that if the hub was broken then our main PC wouldn’t be able to access the internet either. I repeated the point that the PC is connected via a cable as opposed to wirelessly, therefore perhaps the part of the hub which sends out the wireless signal was broken. He assured me that this could not be the case and signed off.

Great. Well, at least the internet was working again, so I went back upstairs to make the most of it. I played on Facebook for a bit, but Babel had given me a Typing Tutor CD a few weeks ago and I was more interested in playing with that. So it was that it was my father who a mere forty five minutes later was the first to notice that the connection had gone down yet again.

I mean, honestly! Forty five minutes. It was a bloody joke :cry:

We called Technical Support again. Once again they wanted to put the ethernet cable in my computer. Once again they changed the wireless channel and informed me my problem was solved. Once again I told them, erm no it isn’t

I made the point that I had phoned less than an hour ago to report the same problem and my wireless had failed again already. This seemed to make no impression at all as they stuck to the script and told me the wireless was working. My protestations that it was not merely earned me a lecture on not keeping my microwave near my computer and, eventually, an offer to send me an email which would teach me how to connect to a wireless network. Irate by this stage, I started to complain that I knew perfectly well how to connect to a wireless network and that there’s was the only one presenting my computer with any sort of difficulties, but by now the customer service operative had clearly had enough and signed off with the parting shot that I should have faith that my wireless connected was mended.

Oh, great! So my wireless doesn’t work and it’s my fault because I don’t have enough faith in… what exactly? Some Indian god? The angel Gabriel, patron saint of telecommunications. Well I do beg your pardon BT, we obviously didn’t read our contract carefully enough and realise that we were only entitled to a wireless connection if we had faith.

In case it isn’t evident, I am more than a little annoyed about this and the inconvenience it is causing me. I can’t see a way to get the problem resolved, unless I offer to pay for an engineer call out. One thing’s for sure, I shall be very, very reluctant to get my internet via BT once I have my own place

Tags: BT, wireless

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 9:18 am and is filed under Random rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.