BT and Virgin Broadband – Vive la Différence?
8
on August 4, 2009
With our upcoming office move, one of the many things to sort out is moving our broadband.
We have two broadband lines – one is your traditional broadband-over-a-phoneline from BT and the other is Virgin (formerly Telewest/NTL) cable broadband. We have two lines for two reasons. The first is to separate voice and data (we use VOIP for our phones), and the second is redundancy. If one fails, the other is likely to still be working.
Dealing with BT and Virgin to get the lines moved were two very different experiences.
I can’t work out which I’m happiest with.
With Virgin I was speaking to a human with a few seconds and five minutes later everything was organised for me. However, it did cost £150 and will take 15-20 business days to be processed.
With BT I was on hold for what felt like an eternity, the lady who eventually took my call had to keep putting me on hold to deal with basic questions. In all, it took about 45 minutes. But the cost to move the line is £25 and it’ll be done within 5 working days.
So both pleased me and annoyed me in different ways. If BT could have got me through to a human quickly and not kept putting me on hold they’d have been the stand-out winner.
Do you use an annoying “push 1 for this, push 2 for that” system on your telephone lines? We can if we want to with our VOIP provider, but we don’t. I do know of a few small companies that do though (don’t worry Simon, I wont name and shame!).
It’s not big and it’s not clever. I guess it’s another of those small things that make a big difference.
8 Responses to BT and Virgin Broadband – Vive la Différence?
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Patrick Johnson
I do think you get what you pay for.
I had a meeting with someone today who said “There is no such thing as Good Cheep”. I don’t completely agree with that but if you had been a new customer wanting a line put in at the new office would the circumstances be different?
BT has all of their sales staff based in the UK. once you are signed up you have to speak to someone in another country who are certainly not properly trained and who as you experienced put you on hold every five minutes.
Either BT should sort their act out or maybe add another menu to allow you to select a playlist for your hold music. You will have to listen to it invariably for hours and hours why not make it a good listen.
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You absolutely get what you pay for.
Not sure which I would prefer above – sounds as if Virgin did best, however, 15-20 days is a long time to wait.
We don’t use an IVR to managing inbound calls – people answer them as soon as possible.
And hold music is the work of the devil. :)
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Duane,
Why are you buying broadband from the big-2 providers? Both have plenty of customer care horror stories, complicated pricing structures (BT Broadband Office seems to have really low pricing for the basic service for first 3 months, then it ratchets up) and fairly poor quality of service.
There is a really good middle-tier of broadband providers for business including people like Zen, Clara, AAISP, BeThere and ourselves, Gradwell.
You can also get expedited installs (we did one last week the next day), service level guarentees and decent throughput.
Also, if you’re using VoIPfone then you ought to consider using their BB service. Most of your VoIP problems won’t be related to whether your connection is up or down, but instead it will come from your ADSL router and the quality of the path across the internet from your office to the VoIPfone servers. If you use their BB, then the path should (if it’s like ours) be just a few metres of gigabit ethernet cable.
cheers
peter -
Hi Peter,
We did consider gettinfg voipfones own broadband service, but we’re mid-contract with BT. So it made mroe sense to move the service to the new office.
The reason for the other being cable is because if the local BT exchange dies, we still have connectivity as it’s a totally seperate system
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James Mason
It isn’t Virgin who take the time, it’s BT messing them about so that they can “appear” better. The sooner BT goes bust the better – they are arrogant, inconsistent in their advice and get paid whether they help you or not and usually it is NOT!
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Ruth
Just a note to James Mason – BT and Virgin have completely different infrastructure so actually, Virgin has control over its own lead times.
BT Openreach could be blamed if it was a telecoms company who bought lines directly from Openreach at wholesale costs….but Virgin aren’t one of those companies.
So if it takes 15-20 days to shift a standard line, then thats Virgin’s issue – not BT’s :)
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See what all the fuss is about
My on recent Virgin experience and thoughts on this:
http://askm-videos.blogspot.com/2009/08/virgin-you-get-what-you-pay-for.html