It's somewhat of a negative double whammy for BTOpenworld today. Yet another report, this time by BBC News Online, has hit out at the ISP for a customer support problem that resulted in the wrong ADSL account being repeatedly cancelled:

We are out most of the Friday, but when the ADSL line is still not responding by that evening I ring Support once more - press 2, press ... you get the idea. This time, to my astonishment, I am told our account has been closed. The problem in Reading is a coincidence.

"I don't understand why they've done this," says Dave, the support man. "There's no explanation." I like Dave. It feels as though he is on our side. Unfortunately there's nothing he can do to help except to suggest we contact the Billing department on Saturday morning.

Adrian in Billing doesn't understand either and can only apologise. If we do want to have an ADSL line, he can put us through to Sales so we can order one. I embellish the phrase "you are joking" with strong language and end up apologising to him.

"What I can do is escalate this up to our Complaints team," he says. Someone will call me that day. But they do not.

To cut a long story short; he gets the ADSL line back, loses it, gets it back again, loses it and so on..

It turns out that the Easoms (spot the letter "m"), another family/person with a similar name, asked for their account to be cancelled. However the name of the person having all this trouble above is Eason.

For some reason BT only based a request for cancellation on somebody’s name, no cross checking with phone numbers and so forth? Those with similar surnames on BTO might want to be careful - full item is HERE.