Our research suggests that 13 million households have suffered problems with their broadband. If you’re one of them, and have a broadband tale of woe to share, we want to hear from you.
When I get home tonight I’ll be utterly disconnected from the world thanks to my broken phone line, which also knocked out my broadband connection.
This is the second time I’ve experienced this problem in the space of a few weeks. The first time required a seemingly endless succession of calls to BT to get them to diagnose the issue. After speaking to a variety of departments, a missed call-back appointment and being cut-off from them mid-conversation on more than one occasion, I managed to persuade BT to send out an engineer.
The engineer arrived promptly and agreed that the line was disrupted, but that they couldn’t trace the source. Thankfully, after changing some wires in the road as well as in our flat, he managed to get it working.
Broadband down again
Yet, just four short weeks later, we’re facing the same problem again. After a 50 minute call to BT on Sunday afternoon, the company has agreed to send out another engineer. However, they stress that if the problem is found to be with the wiring or equipment within my boundary, they will charge £129.99. Perhaps that’s a fair charge, but it does seem a bit steep if it’s not me who caused the problem.
So that’s my story – have you experienced something similar? If you’ve had problems with slow internet, intermittent service or if you’ve had a nightmare setting up a new internet connection when moving house, I want to hear from you. I’ll use a selection of case studies in our up-coming Which? magazine article on broadband problems.
We’re also campaigning for better broadband, calling on providers to deliver the speeds you’re promised and to fix bad connections as speedily as possible. Join more than 26,000 others by signing our petition.