Ten years ago, when I was still a journalist with the <em>Sunday Times, </em>I wrote a lengthy and protracted rant against Britain’s monopoly telecoms company, BT. Now there’s a paywall at the paper so you can’t see the article unless you’re a subscriber. But those nice chaps at <em>The Register</em> liked it so much they sent me a vulture tee shirt. You can read their comments <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/09/25/sunday_times_savages_bt/" target="_blank">here</a> and a bit of BT’s response <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/10/09/bt_and_oftel_fight_back/" target="_blank">here</a>.

Actually this was not their full response. So incensed were the company they demanded I attend a dressing down from the BT chairman who would ‘put me right on a few things’ in his office a day or two after it appeared and expect a retraction the following week. I told the PR hack who made this demand that he was through to the wrong department and I’d transfer him to the right one. Unfortunately we were very busy at the time, his call was in a queue and he didn’t seem much minded to wait for someone in Mumbai to answer.

I think what got to them were comments like this…
<blockquote>The progress of BT from fat, lazy public monopoly to fat, lazier private one was the last great tragedy of 20th-century British commerce.</blockquote>
And…
<blockquote>BT stands between Britain and the wired world, a pre-information-age dinosaur struggling to lip-read a script it can never understand.</blockquote>
Oh and the fact I suggested BT could stand for 'Big Thief'.

<!--more-->The article wasn’t <em>just</em> a series of insults aimed at this much-hated company though. It had a serious point. When state monopolies are privatised they are generally divided into at least two entities: the part that deals with the delivery backbone, and then, through competition, the companies that sell to the consumer. So you can choose gas and electricity suppliers from a variety of companies, even though you only have one wire or pipe into your house.

BT kept hold of both. Yes, there’s some competition for the pipe if you live in urban areas where there are alternative suppliers. But millions of us still rely on a BT line for our phone and broadband, and while there’s some competition behind that, the amount depending on where you live, BT at the time managed the lion’s share of the wiring and were not exactly pulling their corporate fingers out to get the internet to Britain.

The argument was simple: split the company in two, between the backbone and the consumer end, and allow true free competition to reign.

BT is a very rich company with a lot of money to lobby politicians. The split never came. Yes, things are a bit more competitive today. But if you’re someone tied to a smaller phone exchange you probably ultimately depend on BT for your increasingly vital broadband connection. I fall into that latter category, and in truth my village exchange only got connected to broadband at all because my local county council was willing to bung BT a fat subsidy to put the equipment in so that the company can then earn a fat sum selling it to customers. Great, eh?

So, ten years on are we better off? Or is BT fatter, lazier and more greedy than ever? Guess what? The latter, and let me tell you the horror story of my own broadband connection by way of explanation.

Our little exchange got broadband at the end of 2006, first at 2mb then at 8mb (which BT finally agreed to roll out to early customers after some complaints). I run on an annual contract. Every September I have to talk to this dreadful company and try to work out how much I’ll pay. It’s a little like doing business with some South American drug  cartel. That bewildering array of prices and options on the website is just a shop front for the innocent. Peer beneath the surface and you'll find there's a whole new world, a murky web of deals on offer only for the persistent able to track down the right voice among BT's teeming call centre corridors.

The opening shot on the phone was a £3 discount, £19.99 per month with line rental on top, just over £30 in all. OK, I said with a sigh. An email comes through saying the deal is done and it will cost me £16.99 a month. I spend half an hour on the phone getting bounced from continent to continent querying this (BT naturally does not respond accurately to queries sent by email). Finally someone comes on and says the £19.99 figure was correct and the £16.99 one ‘was just generated by the computer when the order was placed’.

I could have argued that a computer figure surely ought to be the right one. But  I was now three or four hours into the whole thing and just wanted to get on with some real work. The BT call centre computers always say ‘We’re very busy right now’ when they put you on hold for ages. I wonder what BT thinks we’re up to with our time?

Two days later I get an email from Warren Buckley, Customer Services Director, to say thank you for renewing my contract. Two days after that the same Warren writes me a letter saying, ‘We’re sorry you have decided not to renew your BT offer.’

Quite where that last one came from I’ve no idea. I try to find out. I spend another hour on the phone, to all the wrong departments, all over the place. No one seems to know. So out of interest I decide to phone up for the MAC code which will allow me to move to another phone supplier. Here’s where it gets really murky.

If you’re an existing customer with a genuine problem you are, to BT, mere pond life to be ignored. But the moment you say you want to stop giving them money you suddenly jump to the top of the queue. When I ring and ask for a MAC code I am sent straight away to a cheery Scottish woman who’s <em>so</em> sympathetic, can’t understand why my contract is about to expire either, though she confirms it is, and would really love to keep me as a BT customer. She spends a while tapping away on the computer and comes back with a suggestion of a slightly reduced bandwidth contract for just £10.99 a month! A special deal, for little old me.

Bells ring. I’ve been here before, two years ago, when exactly the same thing happened… and the price I was promised never ever materialised. In fact BT called me a liar when I said I'd been offered it.

By the time this thought has gone through my head the Scottish lady is typing in the order confirmation.

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I never agreed to this. I’d like to see this price in writing, please. Can you just email me the new numbers?’

Long sigh. No, she says. The only way I can see the cost of my new broadband is <em>by accepting the offer</em>. After which it will be up there for me to see.

‘All these conversations are recorded anyway,’ she adds, ‘so you can always confirm what I’ve said.’

Another bell rings. Two years ago when they choked me like this I raised a formal complaint which forced a very grumpy BT ‘customer service’ man to take up the case. He told me that for some reason the tapes of that particular conversation ‘weren’t available’. So I’m not falling for that one again.

All I’d like, I say, is confirmation in writing of the price. It’s not a lot to ask. In most walks of life people are very willing to confirm a price in writing, particularly for an annual contract that's worth several hundred pounds.

No, she insists, so I say, ‘In that case I’ll have the MAC code please.’

Long pause and then the frightful words, ‘I’ll put you through to the right department.’

Note that. Even though I’d pushed the number for a MAC code BT didn’t put me through to someone who could supply it. Just someone determined to stop me leaving their appalling company.

Nor did she put me through to the right department. Ten minutes on hold and someone says, ‘Not me.’ Ten more minutes on hold and the next person says, ‘Not me either’ then goes through to the whole routine to persuade me to stay once more. After forty very determined minutes I finally get something that BT are obliged to provide by law.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the last decade I must have spent days on the phone to these people, getting bounced from department to department, chasing missed service appointments, querying wholly inaccurate bills, asking them to fix lines that have been down for weeks, then trying, and usually failing, to get even some modest compensation for their failure to deliver something they’ve been paid for.

That, I think, is what irks me more than anything. Most of us get paid on results. Deliver something and the customer forks out. Fail to come up with the goods and we’re empty-handed. BT have wangled themselves into a position where they can dip into our pockets whether they’re doing the job or not. It’s a scandal that the political establishment have allowed the dinosaur of ten years ago to get even lazier, greedier and more stupid over the ensuing years.

And who’s my new provider? I really don’t have much choice. This is a BT-only exchange, so all those great deals you see advertised by the likes of TalkTalk and Sky aren’t available (not that TalkTalk’s sales people seem to know whenever they make that regular cold call). So my options are limited and my new supplier of line rental and broadband will be Plusnet. Who are owned by… BT.

Sigh. At least it’s supposed to be an independent company, with just a single contact point, not the web of confusing department stretching from Scotland to India that BT hope to baffle you with. Frying pan into the fire? We’ll see. But honestly it surely can't be worse, and it's a real relief to know I will, in theory, never have to deal with BT again.

And the price? It's about the same, more than that £10.99 special offer, if it was real, but I don't really care. This isn't about cost. It's about getting a reliable service from a company I can trust. BT didn't fit that description ten years ago. It's even further from it now.