My 93-year-old mother is in a care home in Truro. Two weeks ago, I was talking to her on the phone when I got cut off. I phoned back and was informed that BT was working on the line. The care home’s landlines are still not working and the manager tells me that it is almost impossible to get hold of anyone from BT. The lack of service has effectively isolated the residents. My mother suffers from dementia and the telephone is her lifeline.
RA, Eauze, France
Your mother’s care home has 21 residents and all have been cut off. The manager told me problems began when BT installed a new telephone system as part of a local upgrade. Two days later it failed. BT provided a temporary line to the office, but residents have had to share a single handset to make or receive calls and attempts to get BT to address the problem have gone unheeded.
It turns out that Openreach, the BT arm that looks after telecoms infrastructure, did not have the address for the care home, which has been a BT customer for more than 30 years, and could not therefore action BT’s request to repair the fault. It appears to have occurred to no one to fill in the blank and thus the situation might have continued if you hadn’t invoked the press. A technician was dispatched the day after I contacted BT’s media team. The lines are now restored and a credit has been applied to each account. BT apologised, via me, for the “inconvenience”.
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