Setting up a phoneline is what BT do as their main business but for some reason, many of you experience problem after problem when it comes to having a telephone line installed. It is one of the main reasons why this website was setup in the first place having experienced this ourselves. Here is another unhappy BT customer with telephone line problems….

Dear BT Complaints

I moved about 3 months ago and asked BT to take my number to the new address – you would think this was a simple task seeing as I have been with them for two years already. I was told it would be connected the day I moved in and do you think it was? No, of course not!

So I rang and asked what was happening and was told that it would be done within 24 hours. I thought fair enough and left it at that. Well I can tell you that it didn’t take 24 hours, it took nearly two weeks of constant calling and waiting for engineers to come round to finally get my phone fixed up.

To make matters worse, they often either didn’t turn up at all or turned up when I wasn’t expecting them to. Bear in mind that all the time I was calling BT I had to use my mobile phone and you can’t call free phone numbers from a mobile.

Anyway it was all sorted so I decided to get broadband installed. First of all I went with AOL, but BT kept refusing the order so I scrapped that idea and just decided to go with BT as most internet providers use BT equipment anyway. Well it took ages for them to connect it all up but eventually they did.

It is impossible to talk to anyone as I just can’t hear anything and as for my BT broadband, well that keeps disconnecting every few minutes. This is a nightmare; again I have been on the phone nearly every day and have had several engineers round telling me there is no problem! What am I supposed to do?

Original post: British Telecom Complaints

Another unhappy BT Vision customer complaining about a problem regarding broadband speed when they tried to join from Sky.?

Dear BT Complaints

I have made a complaint on several occasions to BT without success. I was contacted by BT to join Vision for £4.99 per month which I considered but as I was a Sky subscriber I informed the BT advisor I would need to cancel my subscription and then join Vision.

So I cancelled my Sky subscription and got back to BT who then informed me there was a time limit on the offer which they did not tell me before but they could offer me the service for £6.99 per month but I would require an outside aerial. I gave this some further thought and then decided to purchase an outside aerial as advised by BT.

I got in touch with BT yet again and informed them of my decision to join Vision as I had now fulfilled the requirements needed to join cancelled my Sky subscription purchased an outside aerial its now all systems go. But to my surprise and utter disgust the operative informed me my broadband speed does not meet up with required standard to supply Vision.

You can imagine my disgust at this stage, however they suggested sending out an engineer to check my broadband speed. The engineer performed his check and informed me the results confirmed I had more than enough speed to get Vision with a reading of 7320kbps.

Tom Mc Henry

Original post: British Telecom Complaints

Dear BT Complaints

I wrote to BT CEO Mr Livingston to inform him that I may be one of many BT customers being overcharged for BT services.

I have a BT line but use the services of AOL for my broadband and calls. This has been my situation since May 2005. When I moved to AOL it would seem I had an “unlimited evening and weekend plan” in place. I also had “Friends and family overseas” in place. These services were listed and shown as FREE.

This has remained the situation until (to the best of my knowledge) April 1st 2009 when it would seem BT began to charge for these services. It is obvious that as I do not make BT call and have not done so since 2005, I cannot make use of these BT services. I have therefore been overcharged for my line rental between April 1st 2009 and today the 13th Mar 2010.

I pay BT by direct debit and have (I believed) no real reason to check my bill each month and this situation could have continued indefinitely had I not for once decided to check it. I spent a great deal of time discussing this situation with you customer service centre. The staff agreed to change my account to a “Line Only” Contract but would not agree to reimbursement of my overpayments to BT since last April. This on the grounds that I did not ask for a “Line only contract”.

I feel certain that BT did not intend to charge persons in my situation that are paying for services that they cannot use. It would seem, that such accounts as mine, that were not automatically reverted to “Line Only” when moved to another service provider have been overlooked when your billing policies were changed in April.

I am certain that many other accounts are in the same situation as mine but as yet this anomaly has not been discovered. I look forward to your response and the reimbursement of monies paid for “NO services rendered”.

Kind regards

John Fesel

The original post is created by: British Telecom Complaints

This is a BT customers complaint regarding problems with a request for a mac address code to change broadband provider and BT delaying this.

The first email is the response from BT Broadband and below is the response from the customer.

Broadband Customer Services….

Dear Sir

I am sorry to inform you that unfortunately there will be a delay in being able to generate your MAC code. This is due to the fact that we are currently in the process of upgrading broadband capabilities at your local exchange.

Whilst these upgrades are being carried out, we are unable to generate MAC codes . However I have sent a issue to the wholesale team who can deal with this for you and they will send you a mac code as soon as possible.

The delays are due to the network upgrades, which have been sanctioned by OFCOM as they affect all service providers and not just BT Retail.

Once again please accept my apologies for any inconvenience caused. We can have a mac code generated for the 26/03/2010 if you have any queries in regards to this please call 0800 800 030.

Regards
BT Broadband

Customer Reply…..

Dear BT Broadband

I find this unacceptable and symptomatic of the customer service that I have received from you. For you to delay issuing a MAC code and to put a Tag on my line to prevent me from being offered a better deal by your competitors is disgusting.

I will be following this up with OFCOM because I’m certain that your delaying tactics are against competition laws.

I will also be writing a strongly worded letter of complaint to Oftel and Watchdog about the service I have received at the hands of the Customer Options Team, if I have not received the MAC code by the end of next week.

Original post created by: British Telecom Complaints

We may never know why runaway Toyotas suddenly seem to be everywhere. The scariest possibility, however, is that faulty computers are driving some victims to their deaths with frightening randomness.? Suspicions that an elusive software glitch in computer-controlled throttles is to blame, combined with powerful images and harrowing tales, has tapped into our primal, science-fiction fueled fear of killer computers.

Whatever the ultimate cause of Toyota's troubles, the possibility of a “ghost in the machine” has consumers wondering about the wisdom of trusting their lives to computers — machines they know are apt to hiccup and fail. Old-fashioned mechanical linkage between gas pedal and throttle somehow seems safer than the new “drive-by-wire” technology, and this new understanding of just how much of a car's activity is computer-controlled begs the question of whether we've been too fast to trade mechanical for digital.

Or perhaps the Toyota incidents are a signal that we’ve passed some tipping point in the relationship of man to machine? Some experts are wondering if our cars have become so automated and easy to use that drivers are now too detached, unaware of the inherent risks in motoring down a highway at 70 or 80 mph and unprepared to regain control if something goes wrong.

Computers fail in unpredictable ways. What's worse, they seem to fix themselves unpredictably, too. Anyone who's experienced a surprise computer crash, followed by a reboot that seems to magically resolve the problem, understands this maddening element of 21st Century life. Perhaps an IT worker at your office will ask you to reproduce the problem — but often you can't.? So your helper shrugs and smiles and slinks away, and you go back to your tasks, left to wonder when the ghost in your machine may reappear.

It's one thing to lose a document to such a ghost, but quite another to risk your life with one.

Toyota steadfastly maintains it has no ghosts. Still, millions of Americans are now aware of so-called “drive-by-wire” technology that until now they'd been blissfully ignorant of. And they are becoming aware that more by-wire technologies — brake-by-wire, turn-by-wire, etc. — will soon put only zeros and ones between them and a potentially deadly accident.

“We are talking about this all the time now,” said Jake Fisher, senior automotive engineer for Consumer Reports.? “There is a lot of feeling that having no mechanical linkage sets up a situation where the electronics could go haywire and you couldn't control the car.”

While that may be true, it's a little late for the debate.?The first drive-by-wire car was introduced back in 1988, and Toyota began converting all its models to electronic throttles in 2002.?The vast majority of new cars sold in the U.S. today uses drive-by-wire.? And when new federal regulations requiring a safety tool called electronic stability control kick in during 2012, all cars will employ it.

Computers as scapegoat?

Bill Visnick, senior editor at Edmunds.com, thinks that computers are right now being used as a scapegoat in the Toyota incidents.

“For people looking for an explanation, it seems like a handy one,” Visnick said. “You know, 'Those darn things! Computers control everything nowadays.' People complain that technology has taken over our lives. Well, I'm not ready to go there just yet.”

He thinks electronic throttles — which perform without incident millions of times each day — will ultimately be exonerated by investigators, but public concerns?will force the auto industry to take a new look at its digital conversions.

“This will only increase the discussion about what's an appropriate level of electronic control for devices we use in our cars that are tied to our safety,” he said.

Industrial design guru Donald Norman, a professor at Northwestern University, a former Apple Inc. designer ?and author of “Design of Future Things,” is more skeptical of the throttles and the expanded role of electronics in cars.?

“Every company has software problems,” said Norman.

The number of possible interactions is huge in a car with dozens of computers on board, so it's impossible for Toyota to be sure its cars are 100 percent clean of software bugs, he said.

“No professional software person ever says that. They say there are 'no known bugs' in the software,” said Norman.?

Furthermore, because unintended acceleration incidents are rare, finding any potential bugs is even harder. ?“But just because it can't be reproduced in a lab doesn't make it any less serious,” he said.?

Safer in the past?

Concerns about random computer errors are justified, Fisher said, but it's important to know that mechanical linkages also fail at random intervals.

“A cable could get kinked, the springs could get stuck, the springs could break. A stuck-open throttle could happen with a mechanical failure, and did happen,” he said. ?Meanwhile, he noted, airplane passengers trust their lives to fly-by-wire technology every day, since commercial airliners have long since traded mechanical for digital controls.

That may be, but the idea that a crazed computer could one day send you hurtling madly down a highway at breakneck speed is enough to give one pause about new technologies.? Still, the conversion to digital will be hard to stop, or even slow. Already, designers are well on their way to creating computer-controlled automobiles that will literally drive themselves around town.

But even if electronics aren’t ultimately shown to have been to blame for Toyota's surprise acceleration problem, Norman said, the publicity has brought to light a serious problem with today's heavily-digital cars: We're only half-way to our destination.

“There’s nothing wrong with automation,” he said. “Many automated features are very safe; you never have to think about them, like fuel injection. … The problem with automation is when it's really half-automation.”

For example, he said, new features in some luxury cars offer help with staying in lane, with avoiding collisions and with maintaining a constant speed.? But none of them is fool-proof, and some might be actually make driving more dangerous by lulling drivers into a false sense of security.

Take the pledge

?“The automation that's a problem is automation that's not quite there yet, that works fine until it doesn't work,” he said. “….These tools are not really good enough to fully protect you, but they kind of work so you start relying on them, but then they fail and you are dead.”

The false sense of security is easily observed during bad weather, each time a four-wheel-drive SUV careens past you down a wet or frozen road at reckless speed.? Even though 4WD offers little help with stopping, many drivers seem to feel invincible when driving in storms.?

“You see them driving without snow tires, they don't have a sense of the road surface, and when it comes time to stop, they are the first ones to spin off the road,” Fisher said.

This is a slight variation of what is sometimes called the Peltzman Effect.? In the 1970s, economist Sam Peltzman claimed that car safety devices could be counterproductive because they actually encouraged reckless driving.? While some of his claims have been discredited, it's hard to argue that today's drivers aren’t more detached than ever from the physical act of driving. That, in turn, can contribute to unsafe behaviors. Some cars make it possible to drive 90 mph while feeling as comfortable as sitting in a living room chair.

Ease of operation=hard to control

This detachment may be playing a role in the Toyota unintended acceleration tragedies, Fisher said.? For example, he said, drivers who pilot manual transmission cars are intimately aware of how to disengage their transmissions from the car's drive train by shifting into neutral, something they do dozens of times each day.? But many automatic transmission drivers have never once put their car's gear box into the neutral position and have trouble performing that task in life-threatening crises.

Newer luxury cars have even more automation and ease-of-use features. The car most associated with the acceleration problem, the Lexus ES350, is particularly automated, Fisher said. It boasts push-button starting and a neutral position that's out of the driver's normal operation range.

“It's a very isolating vehicle, he said. “That makes it incredibly easy to operate, but some things, like putting the car in neutral, are not obvious.”

Norman disagrees with the detachment premise, and instead blames a lack of standardization in the new feature implementation.

“It's really a design issue,” he said. “Every automobile has different ways of handling these things. … We've all experienced a situation where you are in a new car and you want to blow the horn but you can’t find it. It's the same with the on-off switch.”

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How to stop your car when the throttle is stuck

Drivers who are in mortal danger cannot be expected to find and work unfamiliar controls, he said. Industrial designers have the bad habit of building interfaces for ideal conditions, and creating designs that create unnecessary struggle in stressful situations.

“When danger happens, you can't think creatively,” he said.

That’s especially true if you have been conditioned to think less and less about driving, Visnick said.? Clearly, automakers are moving toward a world where cars speed up and slow down on their own, maintaining safe distances by communicating with each other.? The fact that so many drivers talk, or even text, while driving shows that many consumers would be happy to surrender control to their cars.

“They are telling you they would prefer to be doing something else,” he said.

Visnick thinks the current wave of runaway car stories will ultimately be a blip on the march toward fully automated driving machines. He expects steer-by-wire to appear next (some high-end cars already have a form of electronic-steering assistance) and brake-by-wire soon after.

“I don't think anybody is going to generate evidence that the electronic throttle really is the culprit for unintended acceleration,” he said.?

Norman, on the other hand, expects things will get worse as we move toward completely automated cars.? Highways jammed with speed-controlled vehicles will handle traffic more efficiently — moving cars along in synch only a few feet apart – and that will cut down on the volume of accidents, he said. But when accidents occur, they'll be much more serious, involving hundreds of cars. He compares the situation to the interconnected power grid, which is generally more reliable, but fails spectacularly when it fails because of the domino effect.

“The number of deaths per year will diminish, but when there is a crash hundreds of people will die,” he predicted.? ?

In the meantime, automakers need to do a better job of standardizing their designs when new electronic features are implemented, he said.? Designers should do a better job of taking into account what drivers might do under intense stress, and be slow to change current standard layouts for essential items like gear boxes.? And they should design in safety features, such as “brake overrides,” which instruct the car to let “let the brake win” if a driver – or a ghost — pushes both the brake and the accelerator at the same time.

And how can Toyota restore consumers’ faith in their cars, and in digitized automobiles in general?

“The best way to make people feel better is honesty,” Norman said.? “When the? trouble happens you admit it, make assurances? that the problems are rare and that the world's best people are attacking it. The airline industry does this. The (National Transportation Safety Board) does thorough investigations and makes recommendations, and that reassures people. … The auto industry has to learn to do that as well.”

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The original post: The Red Tape Chronicles

BT send incorrect bills, ignore customer complaints, fail to return calls, send engineers that don’t turn up and leave us on hold on the phone for hours.

Hundreds of BT Customers have contacted us here at BT complaints at your wits’ end because BT make it so difficult to resolve even the smallest niggles. You complain of ludicrously complex electronic switchboards, countless hours stuck on hold, phone calls not being returned and call centre staff who cannot even speak our language.

Thisismoney.co.uk produced a charter for the basic level of service they believe every company should provide. It starts by focusing on the telecoms companies which, despite being in the communications business, generate more complaints than any other industry…

Britain’s internet and phone companies show a shameful disregard for their customers – leaving 4.1m people unhappy with their service every year. Official figures show that an incredible 3.3m customers have been left waiting three months or more for their phone or broadband provider to resolve a problem.

A Money Mail investigation has revealed these staggering facts:

• One in four adults in the UK made a complaint about a mobile phone, broadband or landline last year;

• One in five of all complaints to phone companies are about bills being wrong, or overcharging;

• Just 30 % of people who complained were satisfied with the result – while a whopping 42% were left unhappy. By comparison, 46% who complain to banks and 49% to retailers are left happy.

The problems run throughout the industry, from giants such as BT, Virgin, Sky and TalkTalk to smaller players including 3 and the Post Office.

Customers have been shunted from one company to another, when they have been taken over by a rival. Those with Tiscali, AOL, NTL and Bulldog appear to have particular difficulties resolving problems.

So, today, we demand firm action by regulators to force these companies to end the shambles. Some of the main problems you highlight include:

• Bills for a service for which you have not signed up;

• Phone calls which are not returned, as promised;

• Engineers who fail to keep their appointments;

• Confusing electronic switchboards which result in you being passed from department to department;

• Being left on hold for extended periods of time;

• Staff who cannot understand that you are not a technical expert, but need simple, basic assistance, and;

• A failure to take complaints seriously, or even acknowledge there is a problem.

YOUR RIGHTS

You might feel stuck in no man’s land, where the phone or broadband provider holds all the power. But you do have some basic rights:

• If your wrangle has dragged on for months, you can move to another supplier, claiming they are in breach of contract. They should not charge you an early cancellation fee;

• You are entitled to have them fix your problem for free if it isn’t your fault, though getting their engineer to admit a problem is their fault can be hard;

• If you are left without a service, then any claim will depend on your individual contract. Business customers are able to get compensation for loss of service, but normal consumers often are not;

• If you have been overcharged, you are entitled to deduct excess charges from your bill.

Pay what you think you should be charged and then write to both the customer services and the billing departments.

Joanne Lezemore, senior solicitor with Which?, warns: ‘Customer services staff and billing staff often fail to communicate with each other – so while one knows that the customer is disputing a bill, the other will not have been told. ‘This can end up with the customer getting a bad mark on their credit file.’

The ace up your sleeve is the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982, which states that services must be provided with ‘reasonable care and skill and within a reasonable period of time’. This not only covers the service you receive – but the way your complaint is handled.

For instance, if you have been stuck without broadband for months, then you could argue that the company has not given your problem reasonable care in reasonable time. However, you must take all the relevant steps to ensure that the company can provide you with the service – such as following the instructions on introductory computer disks that are sent to you.

A spokesman for TalkTalk says: ‘Is the service of telecoms companies as good as the best examples in other industries? Frankly, it is not. One of the major obstacles is that if something goes wrong then we are often dealing with a bit of copper wire buried beneath your house. However, we are doing everything we can to improve service and seeing what more we can do.’

BT says it judges its service against competitors and other industries such as banks. A spokesman says: ‘We regard customer service as one of the primary ways we can persuade customers to stay with BT or join. The cost of poor customer service is very high, as the business needs to pay more to sort out the issues that should have been dealt with properly in the first place.’

Here is the original post: British Telecom Complaints

This BT customer service complaint was detailed on the thisismoney website and we wanted to share it with visitors of BT complaints and include it in the report that will be sent for investigation along with all comments on this website. Email us you complaint if you want your complaint to be included in the report that will be sent to BT, Watchdog and Offcom.

Paul Harris, journalist of thisismoney (pictured right) was left hanging on the phone by BT customer services

They didn’t say exactly where the call centre was based, but I swear I heard a tiger roaring in the background. The chap’s accent was hard to understand at first, and he had just as much difficulty comprehending mine. But I wasn’t going to let him go. Not after so long.

It had taken more than 40 minutes to get to this stage, and he was the first human being I had managed to contact, unless there was actually a bloke playing ghastly music down the phone each time I was ‘transferred’.

Every other part of the process had been a push-button… please hold… your call is in a queue… we value your custom… nightmare. I lost count of the number of times I keyed in my telephone number. Followed by a hash. And a star. And a sigh.

But I really should have known better. I had done a very stupid thing. I had tried to ring BT.

You’d think that of all the people in Britain who might have got their telecom system sorted, British Telecom would have been pretty near the top of the list. The clue’s in the name, you see. But you’d be wrong. For in the world of communications, where the idea seems to be to make it as difficult as possible for your customers to communicate, BT is king.

Of all the services that need to be contacted when you move house (and the Harris family are serial movers) this is the one I have come to dread most. They get things wrong. They don’t listen. They don’t do what you ask. Things don’t happen on time, or at all. Worst of all, they’re a phone company that doesn’t seem to like answering the phone.

Not that I’m unused to this sort of frustration, which, I guess, is probably being mirrored right now in thousands of homes across the land. I had, after all, done telephonic battle with Sky TV, when we discovered that some obscure code was needed in order to make the TV work.

I trained in unarmed combat with British Gas after travelling 250 miles to keep an appointment the engineer didn’t; held on the line until hell froze for the water company to find someone with a brain in customer services; noticed I could hum every bar of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons while holding for Netgear’s alleged ‘customer support’.

But this was BT. This was different. This was a fight to the finish — at my expense. The thing is, you’re kind of handicapped when the reason you’re ringing is because the phone doesn’t work. So I called on my mobile phone.

At least that way I could walk around the house with the handset on loudspeaker, even if the pay-as-you-go card was going-as-I-paid.

Post written by: British Telecom Complaints

You don't hear the words “poodle,” “tinfoil hat,” and First Amendment in the same sentence often, but they are?indeed?linked in a classic Facebook melodrama.

Dale Blank runs a Facebook page devoted to accumulating as many fans as possible for a farcical picture of a beloved poodle named Bitsy sporting a tin hat — perhaps a bit like the one you might mentally draw on someone who was espousing tiresome conspiracy theories.

Blank's intentionally clumsy Photoshop job, and his quest for fans, has a specific target — Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck.? On Feb. 8, Blank created the page with the stated intention of proving that his tin-hatted poodle could accumulate more Facebook fans than Beck, a favorite among conservative talk-show fans.?

Within a week, thanks to several bumps from the blogosphere, the poodle was well on his way, claiming nearly 300,000 fans — and enjoying logarithmic growth. Beck's page stands at about 500,000.

(Full disclosure: both easily dwarf the Bob Sullivan fan page, which sits at a modest 3,400.? Take from that what you will).

But on Feb. 18, the Facebook police arrived and broke up the party. Blank's page wasn't removed, but it was “publish-blocked.”? He could no longer post updates or solicit fans in other Facebook ways. The fan-base growth ground to a halt.

That put the tin-hatted poodle at the center of a dispute over First Amendment free speech rights and censorship. There were virtual howls that Facebook was actively siding with Glen Beck over the Poodle, that perhaps someone at Facebook was siding with the conservatives, or at least had developed a hatred for left-wing sarcasm.

In the grand tradition of the Internet, that's overstating things a bit. Facebook, as a private company, has wide latitude in its ability to take down posts and pages that it decides run afoul of its terms of service.? Even Blank said he doesn't want to raise the possibility of a conservative, subversive anti-poodle attack — that's just the kind of knee-jerk reaction he's trying to mock.

“I'm not coming from a place where I think everything is a conspiracy,” said Blank, who lives near Milwaukee.? In fact, he didn’t really have his heart set on poking fun of Beck. He simply picked the most popular target, in part to demonstrate how cheap popularity is on the Internet and on Facebook.? “I’m not so much anti-Glenn Beck as I am pro rational thought.”

Still, the conspiracy theories appeared.? It didn't help that Facebook initially failed to give Blank an explanation for taking away his ability to publish. Then, when an explanation finally arrived this week, its vagueness only added fuel to the fire.

“A Facebook administrator looks into each report thoroughly in order to decide the appropriate course of action. If no violation of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities has occurred, then no warning will be sent,” wrote a woman identifying herself as Marissa from Facebook's User Operations department, according to an e-mail provided by Blank. “If a violation has occurred, then a warning or more severe actions are taken. Unfortunately, for technical and security reasons, we are unable to provide details regarding the removed content. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Blank wasn't buying that.

“Technical and security reasons? That's just a cover for the real reason,” he said. “I like to think it's not a political thing. When I see some of the pages out there devoted to (criticizing President Obama) that haven't been publish-blocked, you wonder a little.? But I don't want to delve into that.? I just want to know why I was blocked.”

Facebook offered a generic explanation to msnbc.com in an e-mail.

“Pages are meant for entities like public figures, musical artists, businesses, and organizations so they can share information, interact with fans, and create a highly engaging presence on Facebook.? They're distinct from groups or personal profiles and designed specifically for these entities’ needs to communicate, distribute content, engage fans, and capture new audiences virally through fans’ recommendations to their friends,” the statement said. “We restrict the publishing rights of Pages that impersonate other entities, represent generic concepts, spam users, or otherwise violate our Pages guidelines.? Unless they also violate our content policies, however, these Pages are left up so that those who are interested in seeing their updates and interacting with them can still do so. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for our users.”

Some might find that explanation vague as well. But before providing some helpful speculation on Facebook's actions, it seems necessary to offer some context for Blank's Poodle-vs.-Beck vote-off.? When creating the page, Blank drew on a Facebook fan-building technique that's been around at least since January.

The “bet this can get more votes than that” format has exploded in popularity in recent weeks. There's even another Facebook page that asks, “Can this dung beetle get more fans than Glenn Beck?”? But Beck is hardly the only target.? The trend appears to have taken off with a page devoted to discerning whether a picture of a pickle — yes, the kind you eat — could amass more fans than the Canadian band Nickelback. The pickle, with 2.6 million sign-ups, has won the battle, at least for now.

Nor are the groups limited to witty liberals or music haters. A group allowing people to vote for a picture of a steak over the animal rights group PETA has amassed hundreds of thousands of sign ups.

?To its credit, Facebook has recently taken a hard stand against the presence of hate groups on its site, and is working much more quickly to remove offensive material.? That, in some cases, includes pages which serve no purpose other than to criticize famous people or organizations. Facebook users have reacted by creating these “this can get more fans than that” as a clever end-around to counter elimination of these “hater” pages. So Blank thinks that Facebook might be putting a halt to these new pages, too.

Blank spent a lot of time reading the Facebook policy for fan pages. They require that a fan page be devoted to some kind of sincere commercial enterprise, and the creator have a real link to that enterprise.? The rules became an issue during the Olympics, when a user created a fan page devoted to the wacky Norwegian Olympic team's curling pants. Facebook temporarily shut the page down, until the creator linked to a Web site selling the pants.

Blank feels he's satisfied the requirement by purchasing the domain BobTheWonderPoodle.com, and linking to that site.

Fast growth might be the problem.

Another possible explanation, according to Blank: Facebook keeps a close eye on groups that experience overnight, logarithmic growth.? In the wake of the Haiti disaster, hundreds of groups sprang up claiming that they'd donate $1 for each new member, or offering some similar crowd-gathering incentive.? The groups enjoyed astronomical growth, but — again, to the firm's credit — they were quickly removed out of concern that spammers might take advantage of members, and that many of the claims were fraudulent.

“There seems to be a crackdown on anything that shows rapid growth,” said Blank, a Web developer by trade. “But if they are trying to crack down on that, there is no clear policy.”

Also unclear – and a question that might never be answered– just how popular could a photo of a dog wearing tin hat be?

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Source: The Red Tape Chronicles

Warning: This post is a rant at BT. It describes a recent BT customer experience in trying to get the new BT Infinity service, based on fiberoptic cable. As it turns out, there are a few issues with this …

A few weeks ago I got a friendly phone call from British Telecom (BT), leaving a voice mail on my answering machine, saying that they now have fiber-optic cable in my neighborhood, and that they offer me an upgrade, as one of the first customers. Well, great idea! So I called them, and yes, this new BT Infinity was indeed available, and they referred me to the web site where I could find out more. I entered the phone number, and yes, the estimate of my speed would be about 20 Mb. So I followed the online instructions, everything quite easy and straight forward, and after a few minutes I got a confirmation email that the equipment would be sent soon and that an engineer appointment has been set up. Great – really good!

So in 1.March I stayed at home in the morning between 8:00-13:00, when the engineer would come and connect everything. I should have gotten suspicious when there was no package being delivered with the promised equipment, but then I thought the engineer might bring it. I checked online, and yes, the order was being tracked ok, and the appointment appeared to set up properly.

When nobody showed up that Monday morning, I called BT. And the nice lady with her strong Scottish accent tells me that there was a problem – the order never had “gotten through”. What about the confirmation email? And the online tracking? Nope, somewhere in “the system” the order was not processed, and no actual work order had been issues. Well, since this is such a new service, I could understand some glitches. So we rescheduled for the next week.

This time everything appeared to be scheduled properly: Got a confirmation SMS, also received a very nice custom-printed announcement, on glossy paper, individualised for my address, looking very posh! And the new BT Homehub arrived in the mail too. Great, was looking forward to get upgraded. So on 8.March I again stayed home in the morning, waiting for the engineer who was supposed to come between 8:00 – 13:00 (pretty long time window, but I can understand that sometimes the planning and scheduling cannot be done in smaller windows, due to possible delays and unexpected problems). When at 13:15 still nobody had shown up, I called BT; they tried to ping the engineer, but while I was on hold he actually called on the other phone line – he would be there in 20 minutes. Ok, I am a patient person.

He comes, sets up the equipment. There needs to be a new splitter installed, to separate phone from data lines. The data line goes into a white box which is probably the DSL modem. Then there is still the new BT Homehub, which now simply acts as a hub interface for the ethernet network, the WiFi, and the BT Broadband Talk. Works all fine, but the engineer’s measurement only indicate a data rate of about 4-5 Mb. It turns out that the fiber-optic connection is only going up to the last connection box, from where the data signal then is transmitted over the conventional phone cabling.

This speed is of course lower than advertised, but is about 8x more than the line supported before. So I am happy to leave it at this lower speed. The engineer drives away to check something at the exchange or the last connection box, maybe the speed could go up. He thinks that this low speed is due to the distance of my endpoint to the connection box, and he says that probably nothing can be done.

Ok, so far, so good – at least this is a much faster connection than before. And if the story ended here, I would have never posted it, despite the few little kinks in the process.

But wait, this is not the end of the story: after an hour, the engineer comes back, dismantles the whole setup, and puts back on the old previous connection which is at about 500 kB. What? “For legal reason, BT cannot give customers an access to fiberoptic cable at a speed lower than 15 MB”. Despite the fact that the line would support 4MB and was working ok without errors on the “fiberoptic connection”, I was not allowed to get this speed.

So all the grieving and tolerating of those BT delivery failures – for nothing. Hence the headline of this post – I hope many people read it!

Summary
What BT needs to fix in their rotten internal procedures and policies:

• They need to make sure that the BT Infinity service is only offered to people who actually will receive the promised speed. This requires both to revise their telephone marketing and their online phone test tool for checking available speeds.
• BT further needs to revise their online booking system for the BT Infinity offer, to ensure that customers’ orders actually are being processed.
• BT finally needs to revise their current “legal position” which robs the customers of the possibility to increase their broadband speeds by at least a modest amount. The policy of “all or nothing” is not customer-friendly at all.

Having said this, I will concede that all the people I have spoken to at BT appeared friendly and competent – so I have not given them a hard time at all but remained friendly and patient in my interaction with them. I chose not to complain to them by a phone call to their customer service – this would only hit the wrong person, the poor chap whose ears probably fall off from all those customer complaints. Instead I want to bring this disaster to the public, and I hope that it helps to change something at BT – this company simply does not appear to be able to fulfil its vision of providing adequate IT services to Britain.

Original post: British Telecom Complaints

Here is a BT complaint regarding the unlimited evening and weekend plan that BT customer service often like to sell customers.

Dear BT

I do not want your Unlimited Evening and Weekend Plan! I do not have a contract for this and never have had one so I certainly don’t want to “Renew” it as your latest letter suggests.

The charge was added to my last bill and I want a refund.

I am fed up with receiving unsolicited calls and letters from BT, I went through all this a year ago when you added some spurious cost to my bill and refused to remove it for months. Your people ring up and waffle on for ages giving at the very least misleading, if not wrong, information that cannot be checked until later.

I only take the line from BT, all my calls a through a different company as they are much more pleasant to deal with. If this treatment continues I will be reporting BT to any, and every, complaints service I can find and be forced to find an alternative to your service”

Original post created by: British Telecom Complaints