I am sorry but regardless of which price you pay your service will be exactly the same.

October 14th

I got this letter from BT:

Renewing your BT Total Broadband offer When you signed up for your offer from BT, we promised we'd write to let you know when your contract is up for renewal, and explain what you should do next. Your 12 months renewable offer for BT Total Broadband Option 3 means you're getting GBP3 off your GBP22.99 Total Broadband. This ends on 22 Nov 2010, we'll renew it automatically for another 12 months starting from the day after 22 Nov 2010 unless we hear from you by calling 0800 783 2365. If you'd still like the discount If you're happy with the offer, you don't need to do anything. We'll automatically renew your contract for another 12 months and nothing will change. You'll keep getting the same discount. Just pay your BT bill as usual. You ll see how much you re saving in the Broadband section on your next bill (or the one after that). It ll also be on your e-bill. Please remember, if you renew your contract but you later decide to end your contract within the 12 month minimum term, you will be subject to early termination charges. These can be found at www.bt.com/termcharges If you don t want the discount anymore If you want to cancel your current contract (and stop getting the discount) call us on 0800 783 2365 before the contract ends on 22 Nov 2010. You'll still get BT Total Broadband, but you will no longer benefit from the discount. If you've called us already, please ignore this letter. Thanks for being with BT.

Very strange. Does nobody proof-read this stuff?

In unrelated BT news, I had cause to send them this slightly cross technical support ticket:

Earlier today I mistyped a URL and found that rather than an error page I was redirected to "BT Web Address Help". My first problem with this is that it replaced the URL in my address bar, preventing me from immediately correcting my typing error. After investigating further I found a bigger problem: this webpage carries the HTTP 200 "OK" response code, so my browser had no idea the website was not real. Presumably you did this to prevent it from replacing your ads with its own, but the HTTP error codes exist for good reason. Had you made this change while I was doing API development then I could have ended up downloading hundreds of copies of your "Web Address Help" landing page. This, I posit, is not "help". This is a hindrance. I appreciate that most customers probably don't use their web connection for anything so advanced, but other software they use probably does, and if it gets BT Web Address Help instead of a DNS error then it will behave unpredictably. What you have done, by activating this non-standard behaviour without asking my permission, is to fundamentally change the nature of your service: you have ceased to be an Internet Service Provider and have become more like the AOL of old: an internet-based entertainment delivery service that wraps its users in cotton wool -- which is very safe but makes it difficult to get anything much done. If I am to use your broadband service with confidence that it will always behave as I expect and as the standard protocols dictate that it must then I will need your full assurance that nothing like this will ever be allowed to happen again. I have provided my mobile phone number as you made 'contact number' a required field and the telephone you supplied for my landline does not work. However, I would much rather you respond by email.

October 17th

Dear Dr Taylor, Thank you for your recent email regarding the mistyped URL that you entered. I am sorry for any confusion caused of the page you were redirected to. At the end of August BT launched BT Webaddress Help which is designed to reroute customers if a wrong URL has been entered. BT Webaddress Help will then route customers to another page with the best matching results of what you were originally looking for. For further information or to opt out of the service please visit http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14244/kw/web%20address%20help/c/346,402,4389 Yours sincerely Conan BT Digital Care

Dear Conan, Thankyou for your concern that I was confused by your "BT Web Address Help" system. I'm not sure why you thought I was confused, since I described in some technical detail the system you have implemented, the problems with it, and why I feel it is bad for your service, identity and the internet as a whole. In fact, so bewilderingly unhelpful was your "reply", and so obviously did it belie the fact that you didn't read my email, that had you taken less than three entire days to craft it then I would be totally convinced you were a stock-message-emailing robot, designed by BT to fob off the stupider members of your customer base without having to waste humans' time on them, and that the software engineers at BT had named you "Conan" rather than "Caretron 6000" in order to throw them off the scent. Possibly this is the case, and the three-day delay in replying is intended to enhance the otherwise rather tenuous illusion of your humanity, with no regard to the extra three days your smarter customers, whose questions exceed the ability of keyword-matching, must wait between initial contact and resolution. I suppose that's three days of extra money for you. Multiplied up by every customer you mess about I imagine that adds up to a rather tidy sum. So maybe you are a robot, and "Conan" is simply an acronym I haven't deciphered yet. I neither know nor care -- you may be a human, a robot, or a desk lamp, but you have been assigned to resolve my issue, so resolve it you must. After all, my continued use of your broadband service is the result not of loyalty or the belief that you represent the best value but simply inertia and a vague lack of inclination to shop around, and that inclination grows exponentially with every stupid bullshit email you attempt to brush me off with. I did visit the "opt-out" page you mentioned. This was linked to from the "Web Address Help" page I described in my previous email and you described in less detail in yours, and so I found this option almost immediately. This page informed me that it may take "a few minutes" to update my line. This was about four thousand minutes ago and HTTP requests that should yield a DNS error are still erroneously returning an HTTP 200 OK code, misleading software on my network into believing that any and all domains are valid. All DNS lookups I perform of domains that do not exist return "92.242.132.15" which presumably is the address of Web Address Help. I would say that four thousand is not "a few". I think it is at least "several" and probably even "many". Please fix my broadband line and assure me that in future this sort of meddling will be strictly opt-in. Andrew PS: I am sending this reply to general_tech_help@mailuk.custhelp.com; I've no idea who CustHelp.com are but it was set as the "reply-to" address in the email headers of the mail you sent me, so despite the "please do not reply to this email" warning, I'm forced to assume that a large telecomms company -- an ISP, no less -- would have chosen a "reply-to" address capable of receiving emails. In any case, no other means of reply seems available.

October 18th

Dear Dr Taylor, Thank you for your recent email regarding the reply you received from me. I am very sorry if you are not satisfied with my reply. Unfortunately only the first two lines of your original email reached me and given the limited information that I received I could only give you a general answer. I am sorry that you have not been able to opt out of the service and I have requested this to be done manually, please note that as this is done by a separate team it can take up to 7 days before this is completed. Conan BT Digital Care

Dear Conan, Thankyou for arranging to undo the pointless and irresponsible changes you made to my service in what was either a misguided attempt to mark out a USP in the heavily commoditised broadband market or a brazen attempt to shoehorn your own advertisements into a service I pay for, sometime in the next week or so or whenever you get around to it. However, this does not address my main concern, which is that since this change was made, I no longer feel I can trust your service. I always assumed that DNS lookups would generate true information as a matter of course, and that erroneous HTTP 200 "OK" status codes would only arise when a web server you have no control over was configured incorrectly. If these things are subject to change then nothing can be taken for granted. How do I know, when reading a webpage, that the URL is correct? You may have substituted the page you assumed I wanted, meaning that if I tweet the URL in my address bar it will only work for BT users. You may take to censoring the web or spellchecking and translating it on my behalf, preventing me from ever downloading source code. You may decide to forward all requests for the Daily Mail's website to that of the Guardian "for my own good" or apply "talk like a pirate day" to all incoming emails. My point is that I can't trust the responses I get from your servers to accurately reflect the Internet if — regardless of your motives — you have a history of doctoring them, and if you don't faithfully report the contents of the Internet then what exactly am I paying you for? Whenever you implement a non-standard behaviour it will have unintended consequences and therefore users MUST be made aware of it well in advance and it MUST be strictly opt-in. I did not realise that you had only two lines of my message to go on while formulating your response, and I would like to apologise for any existential crisis you may have experienced as a result of my assumption that you were an unfeeling, mechanical device. Let me assure you that to the best of my knowledge you are as human as I am. I appreciate that sending and receiving more than two lines of text in one go, much less designing a webform that alerts users to this limitation, is a mammoth task for anyone, especially a large company whose primary business is providing email and Internet service. If it helps, I could decrease the font size. I completely understand now why you sent a general reply. I myself am slightly hard of hearing and often catch only parts of people's speech and, like you, rather than ask them to repeat it I usually just guess what would be an appropriately vague response and really hope I don't accidentally say anything too racist. Nine times out of ten it seems to be okay. In fact I am thinking of channeling this talent into a career as a stage medium. Andrew

October 19th

Dear Dr Taylor, Thank you for your email and I have passed your comments on to the developers of WebAddress Help so that they can take your concerns onboard. BT’s WebAddress helps is designed to help customers who have incorrectly typed the web address they are trying to access. The software is meant to only redirect in the event that the web address is incorrect and not to divert customers to alternative sites if the one they are trying to access is correct. If you feel that you no longer wish to use BT’s DNS servers you can of course change to any third party. There are multiple DNS servers available and many of these are free of charge. Yours sincerely, Conan BT Digital Care

Hi Conan, Thankyou for passing my comments to the BT Web Address Help team, however my problem is not with the service itself but the fact that it was applied to my line without my consent or even knowledge. This means that even when you have deactivated BT Web Address Help on my line, I can never be sure you haven't quietly activated some other well-intentioned kludge. I appreciate that I could protect myself from false DNS information by switching to third party DNS. That thought had occurred to me, but your next misguided attempt to help me might be to tinker with some other aspect of my service, say, trying to correct bad HTML code on the fly as you transmit it to my computer, or disabling my phone between midnight and six to stop people waking me up. I guess my point is that I can only protect myself from these changes by switching to a "third-party" phone and broadband provider, such as Virgin Media. Andrew

Dear Dr Taylor, I am very sorry that you are not happy with the service. BT may makes changes to the services provided as stated in the terms and conditions of your service. Under the terms of your service if you believe that these changes are to your material disadvantage you can request to cancel your contract. If you are requesting to move to another provider for your broadband service please contact the customer options team on 0800 800 030 option 1. They will then provide you with your MAC code so that you can seamlessly transfer to another broadband provider. If you want to move your phone line as well you need to contact the provider you want to move to directly, who will then start the process of moving your service. Once again I am very sorry that you are unhappy with the changes that BT has made to your service however I can do nothing further for you. I have advised how you can opt out of the service and advised that there are other DNS providers available. I have also referred your comments to the developers. Yours sincerely, Conan BT Digital Care

October 21st

Hi Conan, Try to understand where I'm coming from here: I do not consider that you made a change to your service that I didn't like. I consider that you broke my service. If that's allowed then you've got some pretty broad terms of service. Might I wake up tomorrow to find you've become a grocery delivery firm and have delivered three bags of potatoes instead of my broadband? Your engineers deliberately programmed your DNS servers to send out false information. I don't know what else to call that but sabotage. I don't know whether you simply didn't realise that this would cause problems for anyone doing anything more advanced than browsing webpages or if you reasoned that most people aren't and those that are can just take one for the team, but in either case at least some warning would have been nice. Given the circumstances I don't think an apology and a refund would be unreasonable. At the very least, some kind of assurance that you won't deliberately lie to my computer in the future seems in order, and if you can't give me that assurance then what the hell am I paying you for? Andrew

October 22nd

Dear Mr Taylor, Thank you for your email reply about the new BT Web Address Help Tool. I called you this afternoon, I am sorry I missed you. I am very sorry to learn that you are not happy with the introducion of the new BT Web Address Help Tool. I can understand that some of our customers will not be happy with the introduction of this tool which is why any feedback on this service is passed to the web design team so that they are aware. Please be assured Conan has sent a request to the necessary team to ensure that you are manually opted out of this service which unfortunately can take up to 7 days. Once again I am sorry you are unhappy but please be assure your feedback has been taken on board. Thank you for contacting BT. Yours sincerely Deirdre BT Digital Care Advisor

October 25th

Hi Deirdre, I am sorry I was out when you phoned my flat. I was at work, which to be fair you had no way of knowing given that all you know about me is that I pay a sizeable monthly fee for phone and internet connection. I had asked you not to phone me, or if you must phone then to do so on my mobile, but since the phone you sent me doesn't work anyway I guess it doesn't make much difference. I assume this string of errors was made by your increasingly broken email support system which has by now stripped out every piece of metadata I provided you with as well as 90% of my original complaint. Your engineers have now managed to reverse the damage to my service, but I am still puzzled as to why it was done in the first place. I consider the provision of accurate DNS information to be one of the jobs of an Internet Service Provider — that is, one of the things I pay you this monthly fee to do. I would like to know if BT considers the provision of accurate DNS information to be one of the jobs of an Internet Service Provider. If so, then BT Web Address Help denied your customers that service and you owe them an apology and a refund. If not, then perhaps you should make this clearer, since I don't think that was an unreasonable assumption to make — and I'd like to know what other fundamental parts of internet connections you don't feel obliged to provide so that I can reassess whether or not the monthly fee is worth it for those parts of an internet connection you feel you can be bothered to reliably supply. I don't think I'm asking for much here. I am merely asking you to clarify exactly what services you do and do not provide, since apparently my rash initial assumption that "BT Total Broadband" was in some way a complete and accurate internet connection were somewhat wide of the mark. Thanks, Andrew

Dear Mr Taylor, Thank you for your email reply. I am sorry for calling you on 22/10 when clearly you preferred a written reply. Once again I am sorry that you are unhappy with the introduction of the Web Address Help tool but must advise that as previously advised you are being manually removed from this service. I appreciate that you are upset over the introduction of this tool and your feedback has now been forward to the tools designers to show that not all of our customers want or appreciate its introduction. In reply to your question what exactly your broadband offers you. I can confirm that you pay for an internet connection that offers you unlimited monthly usage and unlimited Wifi access via BT Fon/Openzone. In addition to this you receive 11 email addresses, Net Protect Plus security and free broadband talk. This is the limit as to what BT offer on this plan. Any other services included as part of this package include the BT Web Address Tool for online assistance. You are currently in contract for this option and are in receipt of a special offer of £19.99 per month which is £5 off the advertised charge. This offer will end on 22/11/10 for you. I trust that my response will assist you further with your query. Thank you for contacting BT. Yours sincerely Deirdre BT Digital Care Advisor

Hi Deirdre, Thankyou for clarifying the range of additional wifi, security and email services you bundle with your internet package, but what I am asking you is what BT understands by the term "an internet connection". It was, until the introduction of BT Web Address Help, my understanding that this included full and accurate DNS information. I am also confused by your statement regarding my bill. You sent me a letter about a week ago, saying (if memory serves) that my monthly fee of £19.99 (excluding the phone line I never use but you insist I also buy) represents a mere three pound discount, and that while my contract expires in November offer is open beyond then as long as I agree to use the service for another full year, although that may prove tricky since last time I tried to update the Direct Debit settings on your website that didn't work either. At least, I assume that's what the letter meant. It was poorly punctuated and had a rather confusing section about what to do "if you don't want the discount any more", so I assume that declining the offer must bring some benefit and this is the only one I can infer. Andrew

Dear Mr Taylor, Thank you for your email reply. Once again I am sorry for any confusion over what you are paying for and receiving as part of your broadband. To clarify once again for you, the Web Address Help Tool was applied as a value added service which if unwanted customers could opt out off. Your personal feedback on this matter has been received. BT will not be offering any further advice for you on this matter as both I an Conan have explained the situation for you. In regards to your contract, as explained your special offer of £22.99 with a further £3 off ends in November. If you do not wish to continue with BT for a further 12 months on this plan then the price will rise to £24.99 which is the advertised price for your plan. If you wish to retain this plan or cancel your service you will need to speak to our customer options team on 0800 800 030 choosing option 1 who will be more than happy to assist you. I trust that my response will assist you further with your query. Thank you for contacting BT. Yours sincerely Deirdre BT Digital Care Advisor

Hi Deirdre, I now understand that the advertised price of your service is £24.99, and that I am paying "£22.99 with a £3 discount" meaning I actually pay £19.99, and that the £3 discount, as well as the special £2 discounted price from which it is taken, both expire in November. This is beginning to resemble an obtuse pseudo-mathematical puzzle about an unscrupulous waiter and a missing pound. In any case, we have established that should I wish to use your service for another year, this will cost me near-as-dammit £300 plus line rental, a fact that I wasn't clearly told and would never have suspected had you not broken my DNS service last month or had I sent fewer than nine emails in response to this breakage. I'm starting to wonder if you have increased my bill to punish me for pestering you for technical support. I presume that you would have dismissed any complaint about this increase by reference to your "terms of service" which appear to be designed to remove any rights your customers might feel they have. In any case, in order to know whether or not this is a good offer, I need to know what the service actually is, so I ask again, does BT consider that complete and accurate DNS information is part of "an internet connection"? I am not asking for further technical support here. I am merely asking you to clarify what service you are suddenly charging me an extra £60 for over the course of next year. I had assumed your service included DNS and now I have no idea what it is that you do. This information is absolutely critical to my purchasing decision. Thanks, Andrew

Dear Mr Taylor, Thank you for your email reply. I am sorry for any confusion caused. As I explained the advertised price of your Option 3 plan is £24.99. However, you are in receipt of a special offer of £22.99 which is £2 less than the advertised price, then on top of this you are receiving a further £3 discount leaving you paying £19.99 per month. This is £5 per month less than the advertised price which over 12 months equals £60. I am sorry but regardless of which price you pay your service will be exactly the same. If you would like to discuss this price further or your special offer then please contact our customer options team on the number provided in my previous email. I trust that my response will assist you further with your query. Thank you for contacting BT. Yours sincerely Deirdre BT Digital Care Advisor

Hi Deirdre, I don't need any further clarification on the cost of your service, thankyou. My question pertains to the service itself. I am asking what BT understands by the term "an internet connection". I ask because I thought I could assume that every HTTP or DNS request I sent would get the same, standard response as it would from a cheaper Virgin Media or PlusNet broadband line (normal DNS propagation delays and restricted areas of your own website notwithstanding). That, to me, is what "an internet connection" is, but by that definition I didn't have an internet connection when BT Web Address Help was activated. I had a similar but distinct service that would, for most purposes, work as an internet connection at a pinch. I had the digital equivalent of Original Fish And Chip Shop Style Non Brewed Condiment. To reiterate, what does BT mean when it offers me "an internet connection"? Can you guarantee never to alter webpages as you transmit them to me? Can you promise not to block websites you deem unsafe or unsuitable? Do your "terms of service" allow you to cut off my broadband and provide internet access by mail or carrier pigeon? After all, the bandwidth of a pigeon is almost unlimited, but it's got a bit too high latency for instant messaging. Thanks, Andrew

October 28th

Hello Andrew, Thank you for your email. Further to our telephone conversation, please forward to me with the information you gave me on the telephone and I will forward it to our developers. I wish to assure you that we value all our customers feedback and I will make sure your concerns are sent to the relevant people in the developement department. Kind Regards, kevin, BT Digital Care THD Manager.

November 1st

Hi Kevin, We spoke on the phone last week and you asked me to put my objections to the manner in which BT implemented its Web Address Help tool into writing to forward to the developers. I have, but since BT have been messing me about in various ways and still expect me to provide them with feedback for free, I have elected to amuse myself by doing so in the form of a somewhat flippant allegory: Probably 90% of bacon is eaten in sandwich form, but some advanced bacon users wrap it around chicken and bake it in a white wine and cheese sauce. This is an accepted technique which I learned from a book, but when I implemented it it tasted awful and totally ruined my date. I asked the developers of the book about this, and they said that their techniques rely only on standard bacon, chicken, cheese and wine APIs and there shouldn't be a problem. I said there was, and they eventually relented and gave me a refund. I also warned all my friends not to buy their books in future. Later on I figured out that the food tasted bad because the bacon I'd used had a non-standard feature called "smoke". Obviously I felt bad for the book publishers, who had since gone out of business ard starved to death, but I was far too embarrassed to say anything. When I spoke to the bacon provider about this, they explained that the smoke feature was added to enhance the user experience of 90% of their customers. I said that was all well and good but their product was now incompatible with many applications of bacon and, therefore, was not fit for purpose and had been mis-sold. I asked if I could get a refund on at least the defective bacon and preferably the chicken, cheese and wine the smoke feature had ruined, but they said no, their terms of service allowed them to do this, and if I didn't like it then I could opt-out of smoke by filling in form 11.4/b and waiting two weeks. I did, but I also asked them to assure me that future non-standard bacon features such as breadcrumbs or streaks would be made strictly opt-in. They were unable to offer that assurance and suggested I use third-party bacon. I said that yes, that would solve it, but how did I know they wouldn't start adding chunks of pineapple to the cheese or bubbles of carbon dioxide to the wine? Then I've made two trips and my date still thinks I can't cook. They were unable to answer this satisfactorily and gave me a phone number where I could start shopping at the Sainsbury's next door. However, transferring my weekly shop to another grocery provider meant paying my a hefty cancellation fee, so I grudgingly held off until my contract expired. Unfortunately, before then I was making myself a sausage sandwich when the gas hob I was using ignited a nearby tea-towel. I smelt the smoke immediately, but I didn't realise anything was wrong because I assumed that it was a feature added to the sausages. I was a little cross that this had happened again, but I thought "oh, well, there's only a couple of months left before I can switch providers," and looked forward to seeing how it enhanced my sandwich experience. But the fire soon spread to the curtains and furniture, and then my flat burned down. Now I have nowhere to live, and if anything, my sandwich tasted too strongly of smoke. I hope this helps, Andrew

I never got a reply.

I did not renew our internet contract.