If my internet connection was a person, I would have gone beyond
the “having a stern word” moment and would be dragging them down the stairs
into the garden and kicking the shit out of them.
Most of us have something in life that makes us want to
unfold a set of collapsible steps, climb on them and scream to anyone who
pauses to listen. My subject of choice would be the internet at my house, with
BT being a close second and Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs racing home into
third place.
Aside from my Ban Ploughing Campaign which would enable me
and wet-dishcloth-horse to roam the countryside all year round, I’m going to
start a “Stop Exploiting People in Rural Areas by charging them for a Broadband
Service which is Frankly Not Fit for Purpose” Campaign. I know it would be a
fairly long hashtag but I’m certain I would get one hell of a following.
Paying £20 a month for the privilege of clicking on the
Google Chrome icon on my laptop and the Amazon Firestick starting to buffer has
always grated on me. How is that fair? How can they expect me to pay the same
as someone who has a 17 Mb/s download speed? My landlady has a beautiful holiday
house and the only complaint that she ever receives from her guests is that the
mobile phone signal is patchy and the broadband is slow. To be fair, if you
come on holiday to rural Northumberland, you would think there may be one or
two things to do to distract you from the vague mobile phone reception and
sloth-like internet speed. And I would like to remind these people that the
speed they are experiencing in the posh holiday house is as fast as lightning
in comparison to what I experience every day.
The issue at my home is that we are at the very end of the line
at the furthest away point from the telephone exchange. Tractor-Driving-Brother
has the same problem. He lives a mile south of me and is at the very end of the
line from a different exchange. This drives (no pun intended)
Tractor-Driving-Brother luminous with rage because the high speed Optic Fibre
cable is under the ground less than 6 feet from his house and yet he has no
access to it.
In previous years and on numerous occasions, I have argued my
case with BT as to why I should pay £20 a month for an internet connection that
runs so slowly. But unfortunately all of the call handlers at BT must be
brainwashed with the same stupid terminology. I have lost count of the times I
have been promised “speeds up to 17Mb/s” which is about as probable as Ryanair
winning World’s Best Airline at the 2017 World Airline Awards. I also used to
laugh down the telephone when BT rang me to ask if I would like to buy BT
vision or super fast broadband and took great delight in telling them my
internet speed was 2 Mb/s. They usually backtracked fairly sharply after that,
when it dawned on them that the commission cupboard at the Jodhpurs household
was well and truly bare.
The last time I tried to get BT to agree to a discount, the idiot
gentleman that I was speaking to informed me that the charge for the internet
was not based on the amount of internet that I was using, the charge was
actually for the speed that my property was receiving. I stabbed several razor
sharp pins into my BT Advisor Voo Doo Doll and through gritted my teeth asked
him how he felt it was ethically correct to charge me for a service that I
could not use to the full, because the speed that I was paying for could not be
met? He then reassured me that BT provided the most excellent service for their
customers because they get internet priority over other internet providers’ customers.
As I knew this was a lie so enormous that it had it’s own HR department, crèche
and underground parking; I hung up and rang Sky to see if they would mind
providing me with an equally shit internet connection, but at a fraction of the
price. Sky was delighted to accept my custom and I asked if they could add a
note to my account that simply said “This woman hates BT”.
When we are trying to browse the web, pages with lots of
photographs take over a decade to load. You might as well click on what you want
to look at and then clean the bathroom while you wait for them to appear in
their entirety. In a nutshell, my internet has always been inadequate but
lately it has reached absolutely calamitous proportions and I have had to
contact my provider a couple of times to see what could be done about it.
Initially Sky told me there was nothing they could do and
despite running speed check after speed check they were adamant that my
interweb was running to the best of its scrawny ability and sent an Openreach
engineer. This gentleman telephoned at 8 o’clock the next day and despite
Britney (Not her real name) telling him that she was alone in the house and
that her Mum and Dad wouldn’t be back until after 10 o’clock, we had his coffee
made and he was set to work by 8.20am. He managed to contain his exasperation
at the line being Fibre and he explained that Fibre only works if you are
within 1800 metres of the cabinet and we are actually 2300 metres from the
cabinet.
He managed to get a reading of 2 Mb/s, shook his head,
sucked his teeth and probably silently thanked God that he lived in Newcastle . By the time
the second engineer from Openreach came a week later, the internet was crawling
so slowly along the line that he couldn’t get a speed reading at all. I sipped
my coffee and raised my eyebrows to this piece of information, I would have
laughed but was worried that he would think I was deranged.
In truth of course, I’m so prepared for the Openreach
engineer telling me that my broadband is rubbish; that his words are literally
like water running from a duck’s back. And the Openreach lads are brilliant.
They have even written on my account for any internet supplier to see that
Fibre Broadband is unsuitable for this property. This means that I can cancel
my contract with Sky as they are not providing me with the minimum 2 Mb/s that
they promised me.
I rang them and when they said that they couldn’t downgrade
me to an ADSL line, they offered me a deal. £10 a month for the broadband, a
discount on my line rental and call charges and no termination fees should I
find a free internet service with anyone else and wish to move.
And I accepted it; because I hate BT more than I hate my
weak, wounded and pathetic internet connection and the people at Sky are nice.
And I hate BT.
