OK, I do whinge a lot on this blog, and I do hope that my goading makes a very small difference to improving the tech and media world we live in. Let's face it, there are plenty of people out there whose voices aren't heard and who suffer from bad broadband, poor EPGs, bad support service, silly prices and plans, and virtual monopolies.
But today I come in praise of an organisation that has singularly been lambasted on this blog in the past. It is our telecom virtual monopoly, BT.
Since moving here to The Boathouse, where they are the only last mile provider, my wifi has been infuriating, dropping its connection regularly and running slower than 4G on my phone. This is made worse since everything here is on wifi - the Nest heating controller, the Sonos audio system and, of course, my sort-of cord cutting TV services (the Freeview signal is so bad that we don't bother any more..). My wife has to video conference for hours when she works for home and her colleagues in Mountain View reckon we live in the back of beyond, so unreliable has the connection been.
So, with no heating, music, TV or work I did what comes naturally and blogged and tweeted about how lousy BT is as a company. I have done this many times in the past and the result has been radio silence (apart from some nodding, I suspect, from you out there in blog reading land).
But this time I got a response from the @BTCare social media team. We swapped a couple of tweets, but then I was surprised with a real world phone call from a very friendly Irish fella called Richard.
He suggested a few things and didn't treat me like a dork - I do know how to reconfigure a router. Unfortunately they didn't work. In the end I crawled up in the attic (the best place to have your wifi router in a large house, by the way) to have a look at the hub and realised what had happened - the previous owner had the hub in serial with a BT Business box and the two were just clashing. So, I tried a BT5 hub, but that didn't work. All this time Richard was calling me to find out how I was getting on in my frequent visits up the ladder to the dusty attic.
Yesterday he arranged to get a new hub to me and today I installed it and hallelujah! Everything is behaving nicely and working much faster.
So, let me publicly thank Richard and the social media team at BT and commend the company for taking such a proactive approach. It's nice to be able to spread some praise for once!
But today I come in praise of an organisation that has singularly been lambasted on this blog in the past. It is our telecom virtual monopoly, BT.
Since moving here to The Boathouse, where they are the only last mile provider, my wifi has been infuriating, dropping its connection regularly and running slower than 4G on my phone. This is made worse since everything here is on wifi - the Nest heating controller, the Sonos audio system and, of course, my sort-of cord cutting TV services (the Freeview signal is so bad that we don't bother any more..). My wife has to video conference for hours when she works for home and her colleagues in Mountain View reckon we live in the back of beyond, so unreliable has the connection been.
So, with no heating, music, TV or work I did what comes naturally and blogged and tweeted about how lousy BT is as a company. I have done this many times in the past and the result has been radio silence (apart from some nodding, I suspect, from you out there in blog reading land).
But this time I got a response from the @BTCare social media team. We swapped a couple of tweets, but then I was surprised with a real world phone call from a very friendly Irish fella called Richard.
He suggested a few things and didn't treat me like a dork - I do know how to reconfigure a router. Unfortunately they didn't work. In the end I crawled up in the attic (the best place to have your wifi router in a large house, by the way) to have a look at the hub and realised what had happened - the previous owner had the hub in serial with a BT Business box and the two were just clashing. So, I tried a BT5 hub, but that didn't work. All this time Richard was calling me to find out how I was getting on in my frequent visits up the ladder to the dusty attic.
Yesterday he arranged to get a new hub to me and today I installed it and hallelujah! Everything is behaving nicely and working much faster.
So, let me publicly thank Richard and the social media team at BT and commend the company for taking such a proactive approach. It's nice to be able to spread some praise for once!