Letter: Villagers are in dire situation after telephone link severed

It took five days for BT to respond and then another three to get everyone re-connected.

We had an engineer in and out of the house all afternoon with his test equipment. He assured us that once it was fixed, it would be OK.

We had a phone service for about a week, until ours went down again on August 19 and is still down as I write. I have reported the fault again via the website and it was promised for yesterday. It is proving virtually impossible to get any more information out of them and they seem to take "great delight" in giving you the run around from one page to the next in the hope that you will give up in the end, which I have done.

I did manage to speak to someone (in Mumbai) using my neighbour's phone last week. Although very polite you get the impression that they are reading from a script and don't really care, especially when they get to the part when they say if the fault is found on your property it will cost you £125 plus VAT.

As they know the fault is external, I regard this is "threatening behaviour" so much so, that elderly and vulnerable people would have 40 fits on hearing this.

We live in a small community where the majority of us are retired or elderly and I dread to think what would happen if someone needed to call out the emergency services. A house could burn down or worse still someone could die. It is impossible to get a mobile telephone signal anywhere around here, contrary to what the majority of the population think, so the telephone network system is vitally important to us. Having said that, broadband speed here is very slow at 0.5M so most people have resorted to the SWS radio link.

Gone are the days when the telephone system was managed by the GPO and you could ring up and speak to an operator to get directions.

Customer care is none existent. Something needs to be done.

John Hall, Cefn Einion, near Colebatch