[jambutty]

I don’t use any of the services that have been increased.

My last quarterly my bill was £104.93. It would have even lower but for a few phone calls to my daughter in Spain. Now that she has Internet access there will be no more calls. I avoid, as much as possible, from making phone calls to mobile numbers.

I’m on Option 1 where the line rental is £31.30 + VAT per quarter. This gives me free phone calls at weekends to land lines anywhere in the UK except numbers starting with 02, 03, Scilly Isles and NI, I think. This may not include Hull, I don’t know.

I’m also on Option 1 for broadband where the quarterly fee is £35.72 + VAT. My broadband speed is up to 8MB but in reality hovers around the 5MB mark. I’m also allowed 6GB bandwidth. Not that I use anywhere near that much.

I have two beefs against BT. I used to be on Option 2, which I chose after using their calculation method of which Option to take when I first signed up to BT Internet. My input was pretty accurate yet it was recommended that I go for Option 2. Then Option 1 was 5GB and Option 2 was 8GB.

If you go over your bandwidth usage for two consecutive months, as well as charging 30p per extra GB, they contact you to suggest that you should take up the next highest option. The suggestion is more of an order. Nothing wrong in that but the other side of the coin is that they should also do the same if your usage is below your allowance and suggest that you take up the next lowest option. But they don’t. And to make matters worse the bill does not show bandwidth usage nor does my account page on-line. It took several phone calls from me to get them to reveal what my bandwidth usage had been since the beginning but BT would only reveal the last six months. It turned out that my usage was less than 5GB per month. It took several phone calls because I kept getting cut off after asking the question or they sent me to another department, who surprise, surprise told me that I had been directed to the wrong department. The upshot is that BT put me on Option 1 and I got a decent reduction for the next six months as compensation. It pays to complain.

But there is still no way of finding out your bandwidth usage without ringing them and asking. That discussion is ongoing with BT soon to be Ofcom if BT doesn’t put bandwidth usage on the on-line account page and bill.

My other beef is this £4.50 (no VAT) bill processing charge. It used to be a bill reduction for people who pay by DD and no paper bill. But now it is an addition to the bill for those who DO NOT opt for DD and no paper bill. Ofcom don’t seem to be interested in this rip off.

I have a third and long standing complaint against BT. That is paying to rent the service and then having to pay extra to actually use it. That is the biggest rip off of all. I mean if you rent a house you don’t pay extra to actually live in it, do you? You don’t rent a washing machine or TV and then pay extra when you use it. You don’t rent an allotment from the Council and then get charged extra for every spud or flower that you grow.

However that issue has been addressed in part with free UK calls at weekends or weekends and evenings on Option 2.

All that apart I have no complaints about BT’s service. I haven’t had an outage in either the phone service or Internet connection for at least 8 years.

BT Internet allows you to have up to 5 different email addresses and you get 15MB of free web space with each email address. But you cannot link the web spaces together to make a total of 75MB.