Switching to BT

[ffutures]

Just began the process of switching my broadband to BT (from BE Unlimited, which is now part of Sky). I said I'd do this months ago but let it slip, but it turns out that I can get BT Infinity fibre broadband now, for about the same cost as the BE service, so it's definitely worth making the change.

Signing up to BT was easy. Disconnecting from BE was HARD. Firstly, Sky's call centre is logjammed, no point trying to call them at all. But I guessed that BE's centre is still up and running, and that proved to be the case. I then had to convince two people that (a) I wanted to change, (b) the reasons I wanted to change are that I don't want to do business with Sky and that I can get BT infinity now, and don't want to switch my phone line to Sky. They tried very hard to get me to stay with them, including offering me half price on the next year. But of course you are then stuck with Sky as your ISP and phone provider, and I really don't want to go that route. Eventually I convinced them that I do want to change, and that they must send me a MAC number to make the transition work. But it wasn't easy...

Hopefully this will all go easily at the start of October. If not, and I vanish off line for a few days, that will be why.

Update - got the MAC number and put it into BT's site, they're now able to make the swap a week or so earlier.

Comments

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

Good for you. Looks like any fibre providers won'd be in my part of the world until the middle of next year, so it looks as if I'll be moving to BT for ASDL and then seeing if I can upgrade.

No news from Sky yet when they're switching us off the BE network, though.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

My guess, they'll just rename it as Sky and degrade the service.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

I'm doing that myself at the moment. Been thinking of doing it for months but the clincher was the BT sports deal. I'd been subscribing to ESPN for the baseball but that's been sold to BT and where previously I could get ESPN through Sky, I'll now have to subscribe separately to BT, and that's free if you have BT broadband.

I'm currently with a company called Supanet, which was a package that came with a computer I bought about ten years ago. And it turned out to switch to BT I needed Supanet to give me a migration code. When I phoned Supanet, it turned out that they couldn't answer the argument that I was getting free BT sports by migrating and they said they'd e-mail me the code. But instead, they decided to phone me later with the code, usually at a time when I couldn't get to the phone and they didn't leave a message on my machine. It was two weeks before I happened to pick up the phone when they called and got the code.

BT send me my new hub through the post whilst I was on holiday, but fortunately it is a shape and size to fit in a letter box. The engineer was supposed to come and fit it Monday afternoon, but didn't turn up. Finally got an apologetic phone call Tuesday lunchtime to say there'd been a computer glitch and their engineers couldn't download their jobs for the day, and they re-arranged so the engineer should be coming this afternoon.

I can't sign up for BT sports until this is complete, so as long as it's done by the time of the baseball play-offs...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Hope it all goes smoothly. Seems stupid to phone it, since you need to enter it into BT's web site - pasting from an email is much simpler.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

If you mean the migration code, then not only did they have to read it to me over the phone, I had to then read it to BT in another phone call, and it was 18 characters long (including a '/').

It's set up now, and the guy didn't try to run an ethernet cable up from my phone socket to my desktop, so I'm running over the wi-fi now, and it seems to be working. But I'm having trouble reconnecting my home group so that I can read files on my desktop computer on my netbook.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's always a barrel of laughs.

You probably already know this, but check what the router is using as its IP address, subnet, and default gateway, then set everything else to the same subnet and the same IP address apart from the last number - e.g. if the router IP address is 192.168.1.250 the computers might be 192.168.1.252 and 192.168.1.255 etc. You might also need to set the name server to something other than the router's default gateway - 8.8.8.8 (Google) usually works well.

Or you may be able to get away with setting everything to find an IP address etc. automatically, but it's sometimes a bit iffy, especially with network printers.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Turned out to be easier than that. It was my Kaspersky firewall. Told the firewall that my BT hub was a trusted network, and it allowed me to read the files.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Right - didn't think of that one.