Internetless

For the past two weeks Katie and I have been “surviving” without internet. By surviving, I was able to fix my neighbours wireless router in exchange for piggybacking on his connection (a warning for everyone else, don’t use a low WIFI channel when your router is next to a cordless phone).

The resulting connection, whilst good, would randomly disconnect, load pages quite slowly and completely disappear from a wireless search meaning any web design work or research was very hard to do.

The reason for the disconnection you ask? It begins with “B” and ends in “T”.

One random day at work I was on my lunch break when I received an email to my Gmail account telling me that my ISP were suspending my service. My first thought was “WTF?!” followed by a re-reading of the email to determine that BT had instructed my ISP that we no longer had a valid BT phone line.

After a phone call to BT, they politely instructed us that we had an account in arrears, something that we found really hard to believe since we have paid every bill since we se up the account. Further questioning revealed that when we activated the line and we received our phone number, we were due a charge for setting it up, something that I asked and was told would not be charged to us.

Fair enough, there may have been a mistake, how about we just pay the charge and be done with it? No, say BT, we must disconnect your phone line (without telling you) first, then you can moan about it later.

So there we were, without a phone line or internet. I call up, pay the charge and ask them to activate our phone line, so we can keep the same number and go on our merry way. “Certainly Sir”, says the Indian Call Centre Rep, “that will take 4-5 days to activate for you”. We wait 4-5 days, sure enough our line is restored, however the phone number is completely different.

We can’t reactivate our internet without the same BT phone number, this means another call with BT. “Certainly Sir” says a different Indian Call Centre Rep, “this will take [another] 4-5 days”.

We wait the allotted time, sure enough the number is restored and our internet provider could be called to re-activate our service. Without wanting to continue a theme here, how many days have we had to wait for this to go live?

Yes, you guessed it, 4-5 days (and a £25 reconnection fee I hasten to add). It should be going live today. Or maybe it could be another four or five days…