The competitive marketplace

One of the first things I did when I moved in to the new house was order a broadband & telephone package. There are two technical choices for broadband in this country - ADSL & cable.

For the non technical amongst you, ADSL is via the telephone wires (twisted pair wires), cable is via fibre optic to very near the house and then coaxial cable from then on in. Cable is technically faster

Being a speed freak I went for cable. It was only 1.5 Mb/s compared with 1Mb/s but I figured it could only get faster. Cable in Rugby is supplied by a company called NTL. And therein lies the story.....

Things get cheaper if you order in packages so I got a broadband & telephone package. This meant that I would have to wait before I got a telephone connected but it couldn't be that long, could it. I ordered on the 10th January and an installation date was set for the 26th. I even got a nice bit of paper that said the installation would take place on the 26th a.m

"Yeah, right", I said, and took the whole day off.

At 12 I rang them to confirm that they did have the date in their computer system (there was one occasion when a service department didn't know what the sales department had set), and was told that yes, someone was coming out. So I went back to waiting.

It always annoys me, this waiting lark. You're stuck in the house and you can't go out. If I nipped down the road for a paper you could bet your bottom dollar that whoever you were waiting for would turn up. So I waited until 2pm, when I saw two men standing outside the house looking at the connection plate in the raod.

At this point it is important to realise how cable gets its signal to the house. Bear with me.

Cable is fibre optic but it doesn't go straight to the house. The fibre optic cable goes to a junction box somewhere in the locality. From there it is wired with coa cable to terminal boxes sunk in the road outside the houses. When cable is to be connected to the house all that needs to be done (I thought) was to run a coax cable from the terminal box to the customer's house, terminate it in a box on the outside of the house and then connect the necessary bits through to appropriate terminal boxes inside the house (such as a telephone socket and a broadband socket).

So, two men standing outside the house. Looking at the box. I went out to talk to them.

"Morning", I say

"Morning", they reply.

"So, how's it going?", I ask.

"It's blocked", they say.

An interrogation then ensued. It appears that in my case the coax from the junction box to the terminal box hadn't been run and these men were there to pull the cable through. However, the pipe that should have enabled them to do this was blocked.

"So, how long will it take you to clear it?", I ask.

You KNOW what's coming, don't you?

"Oh, we can't to do that, mate; It's not our job. Need to get someone out to clear it".

A conversation about the contractual arrangements ensued. From what they said, someone would come out and clear the blockage, then they would pull the cable through, then they would tell someone else to come round put the cable under my lawn to the front of the house ("we don't do digging", they said) and someone elese would finish off the connections to the inside of the house and test the circuits.

I then spent several happy hours phoning NTL. I was told that it would take a maximum of a week to get the cable to the house connected. Whilst I was on the phone, the contractor turned up to connect the internal wiring. It appeared that he could do this without the externals being connected, so off he went, did a neat job, drilled holes in the wall, brought the connections from the telephone socket and broadband box to the outside of the house and tied them off, ready for the installation of the external box. He left me with my cable modem and an installation disc and told me that once the externals had been done I would be fine. He also assured me the the rest of the work could be done without my presence, so that was alright then.

So I waited a week. I know they said 'A maximum of a week', but I knew darn well that the thing would go right to the edge.

A week later I rang, just to confirm that the system would be installed by the end of the day.

"Let me see", said the nice lady at the other end of the phone. on the computer. "Oh, I see", she says; "There's a call out for construction. The earliest they are going to be able to get there would be the 22nd February". Deadly silence at my end. I asked her to repeat what she had just said. I was very nice about it. I explained that I was without a telephone (I was using my mobile and office phone) and she had just told me that at the minimum I wouldn't have a telephone until the end of February. She agreed it was a problem, but explained that there was nothing she could do. "They're very busy", she said.

Umm.

I put the phone down, went through the stages of shock, anger, resignation and bitterness over the next hour.

Then I rang British Telecom. "How long to reconnect my phone", I said.

"Half a day tops", they said. "It won't cost you anything"

"Do it".

2 hours later I was reconnected.

This is not the end of the story. A few days after the first installation date I got an invoice from NTL for the period 26th January to .... I rang them up. I was very nice about it. I explained that I was being billed for an installation that hadn't happened.

It appears that because the internals had been wired that I had been marked down as installed. The man apologised, and gave me my first month free (I hadn't yet cancelled)

When I DID try and cancel the installation (the wiring to the house) I was told I couldn't cancel the installation because I was marked as installed. What I would have to ask for is an un-installation of my non existant installation.

So I did.

I subsequently went for ADSL via the telephone line