Here’s another moan about BT: The British face of Indian incompetence; or should that read the Indian face of British incompetence? :

BT, for those not in the know, are British Telecommunications; a multinational conglomerate which centres its’ operations here in the UK. Years ago BT took the British telephone network over from the Post Office Telecommunications department and had a monopoly for some years, until the rise of Mercury Communications in 1995 following deregulation of telecommunications services. Mercury tried to be as big as BT but cheaper from the off – And went bust. Following further deregulation and an independent enquiry from the Monopolies and Mergers Commission into unfair monopolisation and anti-competitiveness by BT, the telecommunications giant was forced to share its exchanges and equipment with other upcoming telecommunications companies; hence the many ISPs and phone services around in the UK today.

If you read the article “BT and the 150 Fuckwits“; you’ll realise that BT aren’t my favourite cup of tea right now. Nevertheless I still use BT as my ISP and phone-line* provider because things rarely go wrong, since in essence they built the modern UK telephone network and know it inside-out.

(* I use 18185.co.uk for calls.)

On the rare occasions that things do go wrong, however, it’s usually at the most inopportune moment and it’s nearly impossible to get any sense out of the Indian at a call-centre in India on the other end of the phone; unless you happen to get one who is experienced in speaking English and has a technical background: Unusual circumstances, but it has happened.

-So you can imagine how unbelievably pissed-off I was when right in the middle of a PC Mech online meeting, early this morning in the UK; my internet connection failed, and everything; pictures from Florida and IRC, vanished into a greyed-out window.

My BT Home Hub router was displaying signs that it wasn’t getting a signal. (The Broadband light was flashing fast orange while the Wireless and Power lights were a stable green.) I checked my own wiring between the BT phone socket and the computer – Which was all fine.

Forgetting the BT Broadband Desktop Help software I had installed I instead made the mistake of phoning BT: Ten minutes later when I had negotiated the series of complicated menus I was told that the team was available between the hours of … But if I needed technical assistance; phone 0800 800 …. After another puzzling set of menus I finally got through to … an Indian with a strong accent who spent the next 15 minutes verifying my identity:

Now to be helpful I always; within the first few sentences, state my name, account number, etc. This guy was a product of the job though; a biological answering machine: He asked me for all my details including name, account number, etc, again.

He then instructed me to bring up the router’s control panel by typing in the router’s ip address, which I did. We then went through every different way to try to make the router connect to something, without success. He then got me to check my wiring again; which I did with a continuity tester, and then he had me taking the BT socket apart and connecting directly to the phone line itself. Now I’m a geekette, and a computer-builder, as well as a blogger, so I always have a small flat-headed screwdriver lying around somewhere; but how many other people actually do same? Not a lot. He seemed to take it for granted, however, that all BT customers have a basic toolkit to hand at all times, and have at least some technical know-how….Anyway the result of this was that the situation stayed the same. He said he was going to test my line and would have to ring me on another line, so I gave him my business line number and as soon as I hung up I popped a new ADSL filter module in circuit just to be on the safe side.

I waited an hour and phoned again. This time a non-English-speaking technically-illiterate Indian picked up the phone, went all through the identity-verification process, asking me to repeat everything at least once, and tried to start the entire process of faultfinding from the very beginning again.

Eventually I got him to read the notes from the previous encounter, and he calmed down and said that a fault had been detected either on the line or at the exchange, and that my connection would be restored within the next 48 hours.

48 hours without internet! Just as I began to see red I remembered the BT Broadband Desktop Help software that I had installed on my computer and activated it while I was still trying to translate the representative’s further words into something intelligible and getting him to understand what I was saying.

The software said that I had no internet connection because the router needed resetting by pressing the reset button on the side of the hardware unit for 10 seconds and then releasing it. I told the Indian this but he wasn’t programmed to respond in that area and couldn’t understand what I was saying. He then denied that my software existed; even though it was provided by BT, following which he started repeating over and over that my connection would be restored within 48 hours. I fobbed the idiot off that he was 100% right and thanked him for his “help” before hanging up.

It was then that I did what I should have done in the first place: I held the reset button in for 10 seconds and released it, clicked the connect button that appeared on the screen, and… connection restored. Target neutralised.

It was now 5:35 AM, and I’d wasted sleeping time talking to incompetent idiots and tying to solve a fault their way that I eventually solved in less than a minute with the correct way.

- So BT users in the UK: If your internet dies suddenly, don’t phone BT, especially outside of office hours. Instead run the BT Broadband Desktop help module that you probably have installed on your computer: If you don’t have it installed you can download it HERE. Set it up while your computer and internet are running normally. – Yes I know the software used to be as much help as the Indian; but it’s now been vastly improved and is a great diagnostic tool for BT internet users only:

Use it; rather than the Indian pillock you’ll most likely get on the other end of the phone – It’ll save you much time and effort.

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