I'm back! Jeez, that was a long break. o.O

I have just one thing to say…BT suck

Allow me to explain just how much BT suck;

BT _finally_ sort out my phone line on the 20th March (ordered at the beginning of March) and it eventually appears in Eclipse Internet's phone number list on the 26th March so I can order broadband for it.

I ordered a broadband package from Eclipse Internet on Friday the 26th March at ~6pm and all their connection related work is done through the night and finished by ~7:30am Saturday (very impressed by this!). BT gives the end of the week (March 30th) as the activation date which is fair enough (if that date had actually been met) since work has to be done in the exchange for the broadband connection.

Friday the 30th March arrives and the connection doesn't work. Since I've waited until 7:30pm (since activation can happen as late as that) I can now no longer phone Eclipse to see if the problem is with them or BT (their customer support is Mon – Fri and not as late as 7:30pm).

Come Monday I phone Eclipse, all my connection stuff is fine their end so the lady I'm talking to at Eclipse phones BT to see what the problem is (BT have contacted neither me nor Eclipse to explain why they’ve missed their activation deadline). BT tells her I'm not connected because there is a problem with a port at the exchange my phone line is connected to and they can't sort it until April 18th. She apologises profusely (even though it's not Eclipse's fault) and asks me to phone back on the 18th if it's still not sorted and they'll chase it up with BT.

The 18th comes and goes; the internet connection still doesn't work. I decide to give it until the 20th to call Eclipse again since I have a conference all day on the 19th and who knows? Maybe BT found the problem on the 18th but needed a part so it couldn’t be fixed until the 19th or 20th? No such luck, it still doesn't work on the morning of the 20th so I call Eclipse back. The lady on the phone looks over my account notes, the operative I spoke too ~18 days ago has already phoned back on the 19th to see if BT had fixed the problem (again, great service from Eclipse!).

BT told her that they can't fix the problem remotely so they'll have to send an engineer to the exchange. I'm sorry, but it took 18 days to work out an engineer needed to be sent out?! BT then said the engineer would be going to the exchange on the 27th so I couldn’t do much more than wait…again. The lady on the phone from Eclipse is very apologetic about the ridiculous amount of time I've had to wait (again, not Eclipse's fault, they're apologising when it’s BTs problem). All she can suggest is calling back on the 27th if it's still not sorted.

The 27th comes and (somewhat unsurprisingly at this point) it still doesn't work. As requested I phone Eclipse and they talk to BT again. BT tell them that the port [the problem item at the exchange] was 'more broken than we expected' and have said they can't fix it until at least May 4th now!

May 4th comes and it doesn't work but it's half working (sort of). My ADSL modem now says it's achieving line sync with Eclipse though their systems say it isn't! Check all my setup options on Friday and they're fine so I phone Eclipse technical support. They run a line test and it says things should be working, I can connect with the bt_user@startup_domain account but not my Eclipse account. It's…huge surprise here…a BT problem! So they log it with BT and (somewhat surprisingly) they actually sort it out that day (they of course don't tell me or Eclipse this, I just happen to notice that AVG Free suddenly starts downloading an update off of the internet).

So, got some mail and stuff to catch up on but it looks like I'm properly back now. :)