Yes Alex. That actually should have been done years ago.

I used to work telesales for BT and while it wasn't too badly run there were a few things which really sucked. The first was the menu system the poor saps who called went through which was extremely confusing. Now I'd had two weeks training on products and I absolutely wasn't tech support. I still got what were essentially tech-support calls. Partly this was because BT's internet service tech-support was on a premium number. It could easily cost £20 for a single call and people weren't happy with that. People were in fact mad as hell.

BT are horribly incompetent. I requested that they cancel my internet and home telephone contract two years ago - no problems they said. Except they kept billing me for the next six or seven months after the cancellation.

It isn't just BT.
My BT broadband account has VoIP calling, and whenever I talk to one particular person on Telewest Cable we get cut off after five minutes.
Telewest obviously doesn't like the way I got so sick of thier Goddam junk marketing I opened a BT account out of spite.
Oh, and I like the way I can pay my bill over the phone.
The Vodaphone bill-paying automaton doesn't work and never has.

One of my more amusing memories is being taught software engineering by an ex-BT manager. This was back in the 90s before broadband was easily available, and before the likes of NTL really made an impact.

Needless to say all the students were kinda nerdy, technogeek types (it was a computer science course after all), and this BT guy was constantly extolling the virtue of BT, and expounded on how amazing and competent BT was.

The hatred from all those nerds had for this embodiment of the worthless British Telecom was amusingly palpable. :D

The exchange infrastructure HAS been split off from BT Retail for the last 14 months- BT Openreach runs all the technical kit.

It has been a "partial success"...

Yes, well, BT should have been broken up into a number of pieces prior to privatisation and then the pieces should have been allowed to compete with each other. However like with most British privatisations, the Treasury figured out that it could get a lot more money from selling companies in quasi-monopolistic industries than genuinely competitive ones, so BT was sold in one piece and a regulator set up to promote competition.

Of course, remarkably, Britain then went on to become perhaps the most competitive telecommunications market in the world. This was largely *because* of BT's incompetence. In most similar markets the fomer incumbent has remained dominant in new parts of the market - usually with 50% or more of the cellular and ISP markets. BT has totally failed to manage this (it has around 25% of the ISP market and after selling O2 has 0% of the mobile market in network terms and a couple of percent if you count its MVNO).

The thing that amazes me is that with my BT phone bill, I often receive a leaflet advertising various products and services that BT are trying to sell me. That is right, BT actually believes that I might actually voluntarily choose to buy something from them, and that level of self delusion amazes me.

The only reason I have a BT phone line is that I need it in order to have ADSL, which (it goes without saying) I buy from a company that is not BT. When I moved into my present flat, I had a seemingly fine (although not enabled) telephone connection. When I plugged a telephone into the wall socket I got a dial tone. I would have thought that all I needed was to get BT to switch the line on at the exchange. However, they insisted that they had to send out an "engineer" to my flat to do I know not what. This took six weeks, I was charged £60 for the privilege, and then they locked me into a 12 month contract with them. And they still think I might voluntarily choose to buy things from them.

As that was over 12 months ago, I could now theoretically buy my line rental from a company that is not BT, but that would just amount to somebody else doing the billing on behalf of BT and BT providing the service, and that would just give BT someone to blame if anything went wrong. If I lived in a more prosperous area I would have a choice of companies that had unbundled the local loop at my exchange, and I could genuinely buy the service from someone else. (I shall no doubt do this at some point).

You should have seen what it was like before privatisation! Broken down old infrastructure from the 50's and 60's with no money to do anything about it. It's not obvious to me that there was the infrastructure there for 1 let alone several competing co's

BT are not that good but have you tried to deal with any of the cable providers if something goes wrong?

Yeuck.

Having now moved to the US I can't say my experiences here are any better.

I have cable/phone/8mbps broadband from Telewest, which has now been amalgamated, along with ntl, into the very euphemistically termed 'Virgin Media'. I don't have any problems with them and the installation and setup was amazingly well done - the engineer even tuned the set-top box remote into my TV so that I would only need to use one handset. Very occasional glitches in the remote DHCP server cause some problems now and then but on the whole a very good alternative to BT for anyone considering their options.

Dave, I'm not sure about where you are in the US, but around here and in most parts of the country, cable tv companies are granted service monopolies by local municipalities in exchange for kick-backs.

"Yeuck." applies here as well.

The kickbacks in this part of the country take the form of the cable company providing free channels for the local government to broadcast on.

Move to Hull, where Kingston Telecommunications is and has always been PRIVATE.
But what's this? Who ate all the pies?

Er, no, actually. At the start of the 20th century telephone services in Hull (like in most of the rest of the country) were established by the local council. In the rest of the country, these were gradually handed over to the Post Office (where they eventually became part of BT). Hull was the only place in the country where this never happened, and the telephone company there (which became Kingston Communications PLC in 1987) remained 100% owned by the council until 1999, when a majority stake was floated on the stockmarket. Prior to that the company was entirely government owned, but owned by a different level of government to that which owned BT. I believe that the Hull Council still retains a significant stake, so it is more state owned than elsewhere at this point.

I'm stuck in Seattle with the hegemony (for want of a better word) of MDM - a nightmare. The phone service is ok, but the broadband speeds are a joke. In London I had a rock steady 22MB connection over ADSL2 via UK online over my BT Line (only reason to have BT IMO) - in Seattle I'm back down to a highly unreliable 4MB on a good day.

The cable service is dreadful and their HD PVR services are a joke.

If the bundle wasn't such a low cost I'd not have bothered.

I had more problems with Telewest (as it was) and their service when I lived in Bath than I have ever had with BT. But I'll conceed that that is purely anecdotal.

That's cool Michael.Thanks for setting me straight.