mtbc | Telephone companies

As well as changing bank I also have half an eye on changing telephone company. It is annoying to have returned to the UK and to have to have a landline at all for the first time in many years: in the US we were not dependent on telephone company copper for our connectivity but now we pay line rental again.

We are with the Phone Co-op. I like to be sent my bills instead of having to log in to some website to see them. They managed to send me February's and May's but neither of the intervening bills and in my subsequent interaction with them they show no interest in looking into what happened. I thus have no faith that I will reliably receive further bills. I have not noticed anything else oddly missing from my e-mail so I don't think that my spam filtering is overeager. For now I have instead switched to paper billing at an extra £1.90 a time that will keep reminding me to move to a different company.

Separately from e-mail going missing altogether, The Phone Co-op blame the coming General Data Protection Regulation for their switching to not sending me detailed bills at all, just a total, with the detail available only through their website. I find this claim implausible. Though, many of the e-mails that they do send are really rather broken. Over recent months I have noticed that they like to accompany a HTML part with an essentially empty text/plain; charset=utf-8 part. What the point of that is I have no idea.

I briefly tested Hive Telecom's pre-sales customer service and that went well. I would simply go with Zen but, at least last I asked, they require direct debit. If it weren't for ADSL I would drop the landline altogether as we did in Ohio back in 2004.