News

"No dialtone? Then ring this number!" - BT

The angry calls which would be flooding into BT from its East London customers (currently without Internet or voice links) if they could ring home, will include several unrecorded screams of: "And just how am I supposed to do that?"

Very simply, say subscribers, the outage means their phone lines are not giving dialtone; but support pages give them a phone number to ring. "If I could ring, I would not need support!" shouted one NewsWireless reader with some heat. "I tried test calling my own phone number, and got 'busy' tone. So I got the mobile out to call them."

But of course, calling support doesn't get you connected to anything like a human.

And the automated response system, which you get if you use your mobile to call support, adds injury to insult.

"I rang, and got a cascade of menus," grumbled one ADSL subscriber in Tower Hamlets. "In the end, it put me through to a robot which said: "We will test your line now, please hold...' and I held. And after a minute, it came back and said..."

Leaving out the decorative expressions, our reader reports that the diagnostic is:

"We are unable to test your line, because it is 'BUSY' right now."

He tells us he knows that...