Sorry to say but the only telco I have ever had big problems with was BT, most of them can be annoying but BT takes the biscuit so I'm not looking forward to them running EE.
O2 customers had a lucky escape. Back in the late-nineties, I was a customer of
BT Cellnet, before BT spun it off as O2, to raise a few shekels. Not the best experience for many of us.
BT Cellnet had just launched a novel tariff which initially attracted me. Offering "unlimited" calls to one geographical number, for a fixed monthly fee of £15 in addition to other call charges.
However, it soon became clear that BT's definition of "unlimited" was very different to the customers' definition, and indeed very different to the common meaning of the word.
Just two or three months into this novel deal and BT were imposing tight limits on the number of calls you could actually make for free.
BT Cellnet customers found that their "free" calls were suddenly being barred with mysterious "network error" messages on the phone. BT initially denied that it was placing any limits; instead offering spurious technical explanations for why those calls were not getting through. Cock-up rather than conspiracy, or so it claimed.
However, as more and more customers reported problems,
BT Cellnet eventually had to admit the truth. It was indeed unilaterally reneging on the "unlimited" aspect of the deal. Unfortunately, except for those free calls, the
BT Cellnet tariff was otherwise very expensive, and had nothing else to commend it.
Punters, including me, weren't at all happy. We set up a web forum to discuss strategy. The national press picked up on the scandal. With the
Sunday Times covering it, as did a
Watchdog-style consumer programme on ITV. Yours truly was invited to be interviewed for TV, but stage fright won the day.
In any case,
Great Aunt Beatty refused to budge. Intransigence is, after all, her middle name.
What really piqued my curiosity with this particular tariff was the possibility of using it for
Call-Bridging...
Take two POTS lines in a consumer premises; and take one PCI telephony card with two FXO ports. With suitably configured PC telephony software (e.g.
Asterisk) it should be possible to make unlimited mobile calls for free, or very low cost, to anywhere in the world. (Recall, this was still a few years before VOIP calling had come of age)
The mobile user would simply dial into the inbound FXO port (for free), and enter on his mobile keypad (generating mid-call DTMF tones) the number he wished to call. The telephony software would then interpret those DTMF tones, and place an outbound call on the second FXO port, before bridging those two circuits - inbound and outbound. Sadly I never got to test this out as
BT Cellnet blocked the cellphone altogether (and subsequent replacements!) and told me NEVER to call them again.
And that, dear kitizens, is my rather short-lived yet deeply unsatisfactory experience with
British Telecom and its mobile phone services. Once bitten, twice shy! 8)