BT only make a charge if there is a fault that is caused by a customers equipment and the customer insists on a callout.
As pipex asked BT to provide the engineer visit and no fault was found in any case there is no reason to charge the customer, i.e. you.
Or indeed occasionally when it's not the customers fault.
When my exchange finally got ADSL, I was itching to get connected. So I went with Zen, and was paying for 2Mbit. Eventually I was connected and my modem connected at 2272/288 with lots of SNR and not much attenuation (great). Except for when I actually tried to download anything, or run a speedtest, where the maximum I would ever get is 1Mbit (almost dead-on 1024k). I would get this at 10am. 6pm, 3am, it was completely consistent. With multiple computers, multiple OSes and multiple modems.
After prodding Zen, who couldn't see any fault on their end (which is correct, since the BT speedtest login and the BT speedtester did the same thing), they eventually got BTwholesale to ring me. Many times I asked whether it was an exchange fault or whether it was contention, where I was told "no". They couldn't find anything wrong either so they wanted a technician to come out and I agreed.
He came out, plugged in his modem and laptop, waited 15 minutes to boot, and he only checked to see if I was syncing at the right speed (yes) and that the BT test username worked (yes) and that he could stream a video using his test application (yes but that's not a scientific test). I got my laptop and modem out, logged in with the BT speedtest username, ran a BT speedtest, and got the blisteringly fast speed of 700Kbit. He didn't know what to say and left.
When the next phone bill came, I was charged the standard BT call out fee as if the fault was my own. And as if by magic, a month or so later, I was able to download at 2Mbit.
So sometimes it's not a customer fault, but the customer is still charged for it.
Shaun
