Anyone who's been on IRC recently will have heard part, or all of this story already, but just for the record, here's a literal account of my past few days as a British Telecom (Henceforth BT) user.

BT suspended my access on Saturday for not paying the bill. That's fine in principle, but the bill amounted to roughly £85 per month (That's roughly $150 per month) for a 2mbit line, which is very clearly throttled during afternoon hours. There also appear to be major line contention issues on top of this, as even HTTP speeds drop by about 70kb/s from hosts known not to be busy. When your download speed essentially can't break 230kb/s, 70kb/s is noticeable.

So there I am, stuck with no HTTP and no HTTPS, until I pay the bill. Ignoring the massive overcharging and the "Payment Processing Fee" (If it costs that much to charge me, stop doing it), this is reasonable. I call them, asking how much it would cost to reactive the broadband and whether a partial payment would be acceptable. The non-native English speaker (I don't have too much of an issue with this, but you might) on the other end told me that I needed to pay £105 of the bill to restore access. That's £30 per month, so that sounds about right. I pay them, not as the regular bill-payer, but as someone with the money to do so. I'm given a reference ID and told that I would have access restored in 24 to 48 hours. In the meantime, I've already worked out how their blocking works and have routed around it, so I'm fine besides the fact that I never truly trust an SSH tunnel with anything confidential, making browse-only Internet.

24 hours pass, 48 hours pass. The bill payer asks what's going on, and they deny all knowledge of anything besides the partial payment (I guess the law stops them from denying that one). We still have to pay £156, having previously paid £40 before this started.

"Okay, screw it", I say, and I elect to pay the whole bill, work out a repayment plan with my family, and off I go. I start up their web interface, get to the payment screen, and... Fail to pay?

"An error has occurred. Please contact the administrator" - Well, okay. Has my transaction been completed or not? Should I try again? Who is the administrator? Who do I ask about this? As a web developer, it generally follows that if I can't understand the situation, nobody can. If you disagree on this case, I'd love to know what you think the above error means.

Nothing happens after a few hours, so I try again. I get through the static content and then try to get to the login page for the ISP account. Suddenly and mysteriously, the dynamic page content flat-refuses to load in Opera. Note that since Opera doesn't support SOCKS proxies, I haven't got any such settings enabled at this point, so it simply cannot be an issue with this. At no point after this could I get the site to respond to me as an Opera user, though Firefox was fine. It also turns out that BT will not reset your session, you /have/ to try and make another outbound connection and go through the static pages again. This proves annoying after you've had to go through the process ten times.

Okay, so I can't pay through the web service, which is the only way you can get your access back "Instantly". Figuring that it's not going to be very quick if it never happens at all, I attempt to call BT customer support... Whoops! Looks like India's asleep for the night, being 1am and all. Eventually, after several tries, I get a reasonable-seeming guy on the other end, who - After failing to take the money from the card - Explains that it's being rejected due to a potential fraud marker on the bank's end. Fair enough, I don't keep a lot of money in that account, so someone's going to notice if I empty it for BT's coffers.

Unfortunately I can't blame BT for the following day's debacle with my bank, who failed three times to allow the transaction to go through after proving who I am, jumping through all the necessary hoops etc. Finally, after walking to my branch, calling them three times, and having more "special markers" placed on my account to allow the transaction, I manage to get the payment made. The "instant" activation was instant enough, as it worked by the time I finished the phone call, but after that amount of effort just to give them money, it should expect nothing less than for it to work retroactively by a day or so.

If you're a BT user, given that this has happened to me, I'd say there's a chance that it would happen to you. I'd seriously switch.

Since then, and continuing right now, BT have done something about this. In particular, they've made it worse.

So far since 1am, I have been given seven new IP addresses that I know about. It's 2:20am. This isn't just "A minor problem", this is the kind of abuse of service that British Telecom live for. If it's not disabling the DNS servers, or providing outages that last several hours, it's this constant disconnection to the point where you can't even use the Internet properly and just give up trying.

Just don't use British Telecom. Ever. Not even if they pay you for it, and sooner or later they're going to have to. It's not worth it. I'd have switched by now, but they're delaying giving me the information I need until my bill is paid. With one caveat - I haven't received my bill in the past month.

Switch for your health and safety, screaming at the top of your lungs is not healthy.

Since 4:30pm and perhaps before (I returned home at 4:30pm) I have been unable to sustain above 5kb/s from British Telecom. I have tried restarting the machine, I have tried restarting the router. I have tried replacing the router, and I have tried using other machines. If this doesn't convince people, I'm not sure what will. I've had to deal with about eight hours of downtime every week on top of this, and this doesn't include outages from British Telecom's DNS servers and caching proxies, which most certainly do go down.

I'm also curious as to why it takes 15 hopes just to get out of British Telecom's clutches, and only 2 hops to hit New York. from there. tracert available on request, but all it shows is what I just said. 15 hops just to have the audacity to go somewhere. Must be nice to have a real Internet connection.