A journey to DSL hell

It didn't sound like the world's toughest assignment: One, blag a free DSL connection. Two, put the world on voicemail. Three, gambol unrestrained across the wide-open spaces of the world wide web.

But getting ADSL from BT - not even some reseller or a company grappling with local loop unbundling - wasn't easy.

Over a month after I first requested it, a charming gentleman from BT knocked on my door. We'll call him Pete. He was an hour early, before I had a chance to make the house fit for visitors.

All the same, he dealt with the prospect of working in a room strewn with a stranger's dirty clothes with consummate tact. It takes a lot to shock a doctor, they say, and I'm sure the same also applies to a telecoms engineer.

So, it was all looking suspiciously good. A bit of cable gets pinned to the wall, a scary-looking blue-green DSL modem gets plugged into my USB port. A bit of software gets installed swiftly and painlessly. And it looks like it's all going to work very smoothly.

Then the problems start - Pete puts in a bit more cable, and starts getting error messages. The computer on the other end of the line wouldn't talk to us.

It's the cue for a long discussion on his mobile with BT's helpline - well over an hour. Next time you spend half an hour listening to BT hold muzak, take comfort from the fact that BT's own field engineers seem to spend three hours a day with the same irritating tunes in their ears.

Half an hour of hold music later, I can't help overhearing him say: "It would be this one that went wrong. I spoke to the boss this morning. He said we really had to make this one work."

Slap on the wrist for the naughty PR. This was meant to be a trial of the same service they give everyone, not a special tidied up version for Her Majesty's press corps.

Still, the demo demon was in sparkling form, and nothing would make it work. Two new modems, four reboots and 90 minutes on the phone to the support team, and still the host computer didn't want to know.

Pete seemed to know the answer. "It's a problem with the line card in the local exchange," he said.

Following further procedures, it took another half an hour to get through to HQ and get a decision to fix the line card. It would take a couple of days, they said. Yet this, sadly, was just the start of the problems.

Pete could have fixed the line card himself but regulations don't allow it - BT would have to pay him more if they trusted him to do that.

He said no other visit would be needed. However, someone scheduled for another engineer to come round the following week. He came, tested the line, and still got that pesky Error 650.

Apparently, the line card hadn't been fixed. So I had to take another morning away from the job I love so dearly and still I had no large calibre data cannon pointing at my bedroom.

From there, it was straight to the ninth circle of customer service hell to be suspended upside down in a block of frozen hold music for two weeks. Calls left on my mobile's voice mail, calls on my answerphone, calls from me to call centre staff who didn't know what was going on, and even a couple of attempts to schedule another unnecessary visit from an engineer.

I put my foot down - no more visits until the line card is changed. Two weeks later it started working without warning. I came home one day to find the Error 650 had gone. They carried on trying to send an engineer round for the next two weeks, but I told them everything was fine.

Now, I first sent a request to BT's PR representatives to install this on the 31 July. The first day I logged on was 25 September, nearly two months later. An end to the world wide wait I'm afraid to say it ain't.

I happened to be interviewing BTopenworld's CEO Andy Green halfway through this installation saga. He had to admit customer service for DSL installations is below par. Up to 20 per cent don't work first time, he said, and they are struggling to do better.

I'd go further than that. It's monstrously, outrageously, shockingly disorganised.

If your installation doesn't work, you have a direct ticket to the customer service torture chamber of your worst nightmares, never to escape until your body is broken and your spirit is crushed.

So will Britain be the G7's broadband leader by 2005? Of course we will. Just a few days after Jeffrey Archer becomes Emperor of China.