BT's dial-up service on the mend

Getting better

By Tim Richardson, 26th January 2004

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

BT's dial-up service appears to be on the mend. It has been bugged by an intermittent network problem, causing frustration for thousands of customers.

The problems hit email and some Web access (including some secure areas such as banking sites) over the last week or so.

Updating The Register this afternoon, a BT spokesman told us: "From Saturday 02.00am, due to measures carried out by our technical staff, the problem being encountered by a small number of our narrowband customers stopped showing up on our network.

"We are continuing our efforts to ensure that all our customers receive the level of service they should come expect. We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused."

Obviously, we're all hoping that BT's dial-up service makes a full recovery. What's clear, though, is that BT has tested the patience of its customers, And it needs to improve its handling of such problems.

The following is typical of what readers have been telling us over the weekend: "The worst part of this experience is the way that BT is not responding. I have e-mailed their technical support department only get a message back saying to telephone them, but the telephone number that they are giving constantly rings out. I have had a totally unreliable connection for over a week now, and despite trying day and evening I can't contact their tech support department."

Elsewhere, the Guardian reports that despite blowing more than £5 million on plugging its new mobile phone operation, BT has signed up fewer than 20,000 punters.

BT announced in the summer that it had teamed up with T-Mobile to offer a new service aimed at families.

BT Mobile Home Plan is the telco's first major step back into the mobile mass market since it flogged its mobile arm MMO2 two years ago.

The monster telco said that it hoped to sign up a million punters by the end of 2005. ®