We decided to switch over to BT Ireland/EsatBT recently to try to minimise costs during the startup of the new venture. I know they are infamous for their incompetent billing but the value really is very good - The Total Talk + 3Mbs Broadband package blows Eircom out of the water.

But it looks like the billing department are not the only ones who need some training in BT. You cannot sign-up to their service online using either Firefox or IE7. Now I wouldn’t mind if the difficulty was in some security area but the problems occur on a trivial form asking you for your phone number! It’s utterly ridiculous in 2006 that a company offering internet access cannot figure out how to present a web-form correctly to every browser ever released back to Mosaic 2.0 in 1994. It really does not instill confidence that they have the vaguest clue about technology or standards.

So I found a machine that was on IE6 and signed up. They switched us over to their broadband service whilst I was away without letting us know. When I got back, we had DSL sync but no broadband. I assumed I just need to change some settings on the router so I did a dial-up connection in order to browse their support site. It had all the information I needed but of course it didn’t work.

I rang customer support and was genuinely impressed by the call-back service and the knowledge of the people I talked to - they clearly were not reading from a script. It turns out they needed to enable the username and password I had registered with. They do this by mailing someone else in the company - ah cmon, this is as bad as Eircom where one group emails all the new account registrations to another group who then re-key all the details in by hand.

I was told to wait an hour and all would be well. It wasn’t. I rang again and they sorted me out instantly. Not only is the information on the support web-site completely wrong (it is user@btbb not user@IOLBB) but it must be in lowercase not uppercase. Now for the best bit - the support engineer stated that the person who did the web-site has walked and no-one knows how to update it. I hope he was joking.

The good? Internet access is now screaming along and has worked without a glitch since we were enabled. The phone account will not be switched over for another week. I’ll report on how that goes (and how billing goes) when that happens.

On a related note, are Imagine the only provider of broadband who cannot support service to a house with Eircom Phonewatch? I’m trying to get someone else set-up with broadband in Wexford and I don’t want to waste time going through the motions with providers who only ask that question at the end.

[tags]Esat, EsatBT, BT, BT Ireland, Total Talk[/tags]