Telewest - switched internet/email, telephone and TV services to Telewest - ongoing hassles ensued

# 9 for May 30, 2003

Complaints.com received the following on May 29, 2003:

From: Jacques Pezier [Email User]

RE: Telewest - switched internet/email, telephone and TV services to Telewest - ongoing hassles ensued

Terrible service from Telewest

In the hope of rationalising our internet/email, telephone and TV needs, we decided to switch all my current services (BT, Sky, Homechoice) to Telewest. Their prices looked attractive and our house had already been wired for Telewest services when we bought it five years ago, so we expected the installation to be easy.

This was more than two months ago. The first visit to install the Telewest services took place on 29 March. Since then we have had repeated visits and about 20 hours spent on the telephone trying to sort out problems. To this date the telephone has not yet been transferred and we still have a few problems with internet and email services.

To go into the details of what went wrong would take far too long. It has been a combination of mistakes due primarily to poor planning. To summarise the main inconveniences we suffered:

1) We have been without internet/email access for ten days following the termination of our Homechoice contract (although we had planned for a one week overlap between the Homechoice and Telewest services). This has been a major inconvenience for both my wife and myself as we are both university professors and do a lot of work from home. In the end my wife insisted to keep Homechoice on her computer until such time as we can be reasonably confident that Telewest 1Meg broadband works properly.

2) It took two weeks to resolve interferences on the television service

3) Most importantly, twice Telewest have come to switch our telephone extensions to their service only to be told hours later that, for various reasons, BT would not port their number to Telewest. The first time there was a 13 days delay and Telewest agreed to switch back all our extensions to BT for that period. This time, Telewest have refused to switch back our extensions although BT say that they will not port their number to Telewest until June 5. We are therefore without extensions for 8 days minimum (who knows what will happen on the 5th!).

I was hoping that Telewest were able to provide a cheaper service because they were better organised than their competitors. As it appears now, the opposite is true, Telewest is going to have more costs and less revenues than its competitors. This can only spell takeover or bankruptcy in the end and , in the meantime, a poorer and poorer quality of service.

I regret my decision to have tried Telewest and will seek ways to get out of my 12 month contract for non-performance by Telewest.

J. Pezier

Purley, Surrey CR8 2JA