turnkey said:
On the 500/1 system, there was a capped applied at a total of 6gb per 4 week period at which point the user's speed was slowed to 20KBytes/sec between 8am-11pm ... between 11pm-8am no caps were applied. Once 8gb in a 4 week period was exceed you were capped to 8KBytes per sec, again the cap was removed between 11pm-8am. In any 4 week period if you dropped back to the accepted levels the cap was removed.
Thanks for the fuller explanation of what the limits were... it's academic now but this is the third or fourth version I've heard of how it actually worked.
When these changes were first brought in a letter was sent to billing address notifying them of these changes and as per the terms and conditions you could cancel the contract at that point. Obviously it is unclear why you did not receive this letter (perhaps it is somewhere with your red reminder too!)
I do not believe a red reminder was sent out as the time between the original demand and the communication from CCS was too short. That is unless they sent the red reminder a week after the first bill.
BT's mail is the only mail that I am aware of that has gone missing to this address over the last three years - that makes it seem likely to me that they never sent it in the first place or it got "lost" before it left BT.
I cannot comment on the outages that you experienced without further details and copies of the logs at that point in time, to see why outages were occurring.
BT "investigated" at the time and decided my equipment must be faulty. They offered to come and look at it for a £150 call out charge. I declined. 4 weeks later it was "working" perfectly again with no action at my end. I suspect the problem was therefore not with my equipment.
However the downtimes were extensive (2 or 3 days at a time occasionally and at other times several hours at a time). Then suddenly it was working again. It continued to work fine for a few weeks after that during the run up to my cancellation. At the point of cancellation it was still working ok.
BT have now migrated across to IntelSat. The migration took approximately one month and all customers were contacted by telephone to arrange the best install date/time for them. The actual migration work at the customer's site took around 1-3 hours depending on the work that needed to be done to complete the migration.
I know. Despite not receiving previous important letters, three weeks or so after I cancelled my service and was disconnected they did send me a letter saying someone would soon be in touch to discuss when they could come round to change my system over.
All warranties for all hardware (which by the way is all brand new!) at the customer sites have been reset to one year.
How nice of them. Fortunately my current deals offer full warranties of all equipment for the lifetime of my contract with the service which is what I would hope for and expect with any serious business solution. When I asked about this the people I spoke with were incredulous that BT did not offer this. As far as I know they are the only company offering this type of solution who do not support the hardware beyond the equipments inherent 1 year warranty.
Also as the migration inevitably changed the IP addresses allocated to the customer, a portion of the DNS team were set aside for the express purpose of updating DNS records as quickly as possible to minimise any downtime for customers hosting (for example) their own SMTP server.
I wonder if they managed to get reverse DNS correct this time? That never worked for me and when I complained (as I was getting outgoing mail rejected and security problems connecting to some sites) I was told to fix it would costs thousands of pounds so that could not be provided as part of the service.
Anyone who has ever edited a DNS zone file will know what a heap of ******** that was but try as I might nobody at BT cared enough to do anything - they even told me if it was a big deal to me I should cancel the service since my needs are obviously beyond what they can provide.
I did argue that I didn't think the term "Internet Service" could be applied to a service which does not offer proper reverse DNS resolution... but that didn't seem to get me any further either.
Sigh!
As I said the £10 bill and legal threat seems a fitting end to a totally unsatisfactory experience which I hope to never repeat again.