Please cut off our broadband for a week
It’s not something our customers ever ask us, but it does happen, and can usually be avoided.
Our customer was looking to cut their telephone bill, and decided to transfer their telephone line to Opal Telecom (The B2B division of Talk Talk). The first we knew about it was the early morning phone call: “We don’t have any internet access today”. After checking the router and line were okay we spoke to their ISP, Lumison who were able to tell us that BT ceased the ADSL service. Great. We’re not in a blame game here, but surely there can be some procedure where Opal/BT/ISP flag up to the customer “You are about to kill a well used ADSL service, are you sure?!”
Anyway, the client had a “spare” BT phoneline, and we arranged for Lumison to reprovide the ADSL service on to that one – still, it takes a week. (Why so long? BT Openreach. It could easily have been more than two weeks if they didn’t have the spare line.)
In the meantime, since our client is on our Silver support package we provided them with Internet access via the Vodafone network. It’s pretty limited, but at least they could still send and receive email.
Moral of the story: if you are thinking about doing anything with your phonelines, speak to your IT company who might just be able to save you a week of downtime.
Hi Martin – agreed, many customers don’t realise that BT Wholesale will automatically disconnect broadband with any ISP if the wholesale provider of the telephone line is changed! Glad our team could help you with the details you needed to diagnose the Opal / line change problem, and sorry the customer suffered any delay in getting the service up and running again – you know we push as hard as we can for things to get delivered as quickly as possible!!