Wednesday 23 February 2011

Don't Choose the Post Office for your Phones and Broadband





Before we moved house, on 19th January, we contacted Post Office Telephones who assured us it would be easy to transfer our phone and broadband package to the new address; we could even keep our phone number. We were a bit surprised that in this day and age it would take ten days, but on the tenth day we picked up the phone, got a dialling tone and made some calls. Surprised at the lack of incoming calls I eventually checked the line by dialling our number from my mobile: - number unobtainable!
"Oh, no" said the call centre operative, your number isn't xxxxxx, its yyyyyy! And so it was - all they had done was reconnect the phone, using the number of the previous occupier. Previous occupier however was adamant that he had cancelled his contract (he was also a Post Office customer) and given up his line.
In the meantime, broadband would now take another 10 days to connect! To cut a long story short, five weeks after moving we are still using previous occupant's phone line (god knows who's paying....). We are told we can't have broadband connected because the phone line isn't in our name and that our email account had been cancelled because we've moved our broadband contract to another supplier (which we haven't). We've spend hours on the phone to "technical support" being passed from one operative to another - and on more than one occasion ending up back where we started - and when we tried to escalate the matter to the complaints department we were referred back to technical support!
They have now promised to "look into" (not, note, "resolve") our complaint within 14 days - but as that was in a letter (sent to our previous address) on 4th February I don't hold out much hope. If it wasn't for the 3G dongle I bought to get internet access for my laptop aboard Starcross we would have no email or internet connection at all.
So - the motto is "Don't Move House"  but if you do make doubly sure you don't have your phone and broadband from Post Office Telephones!

1 comment:

Halfie said...

Let's hope someone from the Post Office comes across this blog and sorts it out to your satisfaction.