28 Nov 2008 (updated 28 Nov 2008 at 21:12 UTC)
»
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is
indistinguishable from malice"
— Grey's
Law
The above rule (inspired, no doubt, by Clark's
Law and Hanlon's
Razor) is often applicable to the actions of British
Telecom.
Regular readers of my drivelings may be surprised to
find that I actually think I've been kind to BT in
reporting their actions as incompetence, rather than
anything more sinister.
Sometimes, however, it's virtually impossible to
give them
the benefit of the doubt. One example of this is their
repeated insistence on a 'Special
Faults Investigation' (SFI) engineer visit, when we're
asking them to fix faults. SFI is an optional service which
we don't usually want, and they repeatedly try to charge for
it after explicitly being told that it was not required —
a criminal offence under the Unsolicited Goods and Services
Act 1971. In fact, although it's supposed to be a charge for
services beyond the limit of their responsibility,
in the customer's own equipment or wiring, they've also
been known to apply charges after themselves clearly stating
that no such work has occurred.
(Update: The ISP reports that today they've had
someone in BT refusing point blank to fix a fault unless
an SFI is booked. This is a clear-cut fault where the end
user has tried two separate modems, RJ11 cables and filters
and the problem persists — it's definitely a BT fault.)
I have a similar problem with my line, although
thankfully
BT haven't refused to send an engineer to investigate. Since
about 2:30AM on Monday morning, my DSL line has turned
to crap — it seems to be caused by RF interference
from something outside my house. I did similar tests to the
above, with different cables, different filters and
different modems. The usage graphs look like this, with ugly
purple stalactites eating my connectivity:
Even when it's connected, it's getting lots of errors and
running at half the speed it should be; below the 'Fault
Threshold Rate'.
When the engineer arrived, I'd disconnected
everything else on the line and connected the DSL
modem directly to the master socket, at the ISP's request.
With no filter, since there was no analogue equipment
present.
The engineer held up the little adaptor which lets you plug
an RJ11 into the BT socket, and told me that it was "not a
filter"... strangely. He then went away and reported in the
fault
ticket that "customer also had filter
incorectly [sic] installed which I believe to be a genuine
mistake as he had already had a nte2000 master plate
installed". A doubly confusing statement, since I didn't
have a filter installed — the filters I use
are the NTE2000 faceplate
type, and were quite
clearly sitting on the floor near the socket. I'd also
told him why I'd removed it. So his report in the
ticket really does look like it's an excuse to charge for
the SFI, pretending that
there was some work done on my side of the line.
It gets better than that, though — they also
have a
Service Level Guarantee which says that faults should be
fixed within 40 hours, and they're required to pay
compensation if they fail to meet it. There's a kind of
'chess clock' which
counts the time during which the ticket is with BT for
action, and BT
keep 'clearing' tickets with totally bogus responses, as
shown in the Cisco-IPv6 tickets I posted here
and here.
They do this so much that the ISP found it necessary to
implement an autoresponder, rejecting the bogus 'clear' and
flipping the clock back to BT so that the SLG clock kept
counting. Obviously, they apply this with care, only when
they're sure that BT aren't clearing the ticket for
genuine reasons, but only their fraudulent attempts
to avoid the SLG.
Today, we found that BT have implemented their own
autoresponder, flipping the ticket back to the ISP even
while we're waiting for BT to take action. Again, it's
really hard to put this down to BT's normal institutional
incompetence — it cannot really be interpreted as
anything but a
deliberate attempt to defraud their customers by
circumventing the Service Level Guarantee.
I've posted a copy of the fault
ticket, although I truncated it at about the 50th
clear/reject cycle. We're up to about 1000 cycles now, and
counting... :)
Fucking Useless, Criminal, Telco.