BT Broadband

Well they have finally shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun but then tripped over the bloody stump and it accidentally went off and blew their head off with the second barrel ..... but in the process they managed to give me my MAC code so I could change broadband providers....

When we were with BT basically we went down to option 1 with a 10GB limit because it simply wasn't worth paying for option 3 with the unreliable speeds we were having.... I mean having unlimited broadband with BT at our house was like having an Olympic sized swimming pool but only being able to take a bucketful at a time and then swim in it.... so logic dictated that if we can't use it then there isn't any point in paying for it....

It doesn't work that easily though because what they give you with one hand they take off you with another... we got our BT bill through the other day and I nearly dropped through the floor.... mainly because we had gone over our 10GB limit by a whopping 25GB (allegedly) .... which didn't seem right because for 10 days our BRAS profile dropped down to 135Kb/sec (just above the speed of an average voice modem...remember those?) which meant for the rest of the month we had to be downloading 24 hours a day 7 days a week at full tilt and even then it would have taken 39 days to download that amount.....at our connection speed.. and they charged us £1 for every Gigabyte they claimed we were over !!! Needless to say the maths didn't add up....

So...... I fired off a well aimed ballistic email missile .... which was countered by an automated response from BT saying they had received my complaint... followed by the next day a call from a lovely woman with a soft Irish accent who offered us BT option 2 for £12.99 a month for a year... I umm'd and ahhhh'd and eventually I said I would have to think about it .... so I did all of the calculations and believe me they don't make it easy with their billing system it would be easier decoding the Da Vinci Code than a standard BT bill....eventually I decided to go with the Post Office Broadband for £25 a month all in including line rental and home phone..... which is a long way from BT's complicated billing system of

£37.something.... for line rental and something else even more obscured by numbers

£16.something.... for Talk Any time

£15.something.else .... for ... never mind it's beyond planet boredom

£1.50 processing fee... whatever that was... by the looks charging us for paying our bill these days

I'm surprised they haven't charged us for depreciation of copper wire over a 20 year period and the coffee and pie expenses of their engineers....basically with BT it came to a LOT a month.... and lets face it even if the Post Office Broadband is utter rubbish... it will be a huge step up for us, we haven't had rubbish broadband for well over 2 years here, I mean I've dreamt of rubbish broadband for longer than I care to remember.... oh the luxury of having rubbish broadband again.....


There are "some" people in BT who are genuinely helpful I won't name names because anybody reading this blog might jump on the bandwagon of desperation and deluge the poor woman with help requests.... lets just say hats off to Ann P... through all of this she has been a genuinely helpful person and a lovely personality to boot... If I'm sorry for anything it will be because I will no longer be able to deal with Ann .... The North East's answer to the Claire Rayner of broadband woes.... I'll miss her and her wicked laugh.....Adieu !!!

That said ....... I've told the kids to lay off the you tube because that will jack up our GB limit very quickly and until May 4th we are on a ticking meter, after which they can drown in youtube.com for all I care.... but "just" to be on the safe side I've blocked all video sharing on our network.... not that I don't trust the little bar stewards...In fact I've blocked all high bandwidth sources.....Muahahahahahaha.......

Oh some of you may remember me removing Xbox boys wifi connection to his Xbox because he went behind my back and re-enabled his Xbox connection on a "looking for jobs" day? ...... Well he perked up today when I told them we were swapping broadband provider and said it was unlimited broadband... so he immediately chipped in "So does that mean I can have my Xbox connection back now ?" ...I paused ....... "no.... it doesn't..... I took it off you because you breached my trust, and I said at the time you weren't getting it back.... guess what ?....."

That's me off his Christmas card list ..... (again.....sigh....gutted) if he wants his xbox connection back he'll have to buy his own wifi adapter .....

Prior to all of this broadband jiggery pokery we went down to Llanelli Coastal path to watch the first Welsh Marathon,.... Andrea had a few of her club members running it so we went along for the ride.... a good day was had by all, even Freya but that wind got us again, well Freya at least she kept coming up to me saying "Daddy I'm TOLD (cold)" so I had to take her and her friend Hannah back into the car park to warm them up.... but I only lasted about 20 minutes .... having two little girls in the same car when they aren't strapped into car seats DOES YOUR FREAKING HEAD IN !!!! .... I think every seat belt was pulled out to it's full extent then let go to major giggles about twenty times each... until eventually I said "Right ... That's it..... lets go back and see what Mummy is doing"

Apparently some of the club runners did very well .... actually they all did well, to knock a marathon out like that.... Oh well it's Andrea's turn next weekend .... she's off to the big smoke to do the London Marathon.... she'll be fine.... she'll love it... I'm really proud of the work she has put in, even if that has meant I haven't seen as much of her as I would have liked and the almost constant injuries she's had.....then so be it..... but she's a bloody trooper that woman.....I'll give her that :)