Why does moving a broadband connection take so long?

October 19, 2012 by John McGarvey

Like many freelancers, I spend much of my time working from home. My broadband connection isn't just a convenient way to book cinema tickets and look at pictures of cats. It's absolutely vital for my work.

Using your home as your workplace adds an extra dimension to any house move. And I've moved twice in the last year: once through choice and once due to circumstances beyond my control.

I've got the art of moving down to a fine art, except for one thing: getting my broadband transferred in good time. As far as I can tell, that's impossible.

Why does it take so long?

It seems that no matter how far in advance of the move I contact my broadband provider, it's impossible for them to move the connection from one address to another in a timely manner. I don't mind going without for a few days, but when I moved last year I had to manage without a connection for just under a month.

If they deliver as promised this time, the gap will be about three weeks. Between now and then I'm burning through data on a mobile broadband dongle and regularly decamping to local cafes with free Wi-Fi. Thankfully I live somewhere with a strong 3G signal and plenty of nearby wireless hotspots. I know many people won't be nearly so lucky.

I've had several excuses from my internet service provider. Last time it was an engineer shortage. This time something went wrong with the order, so they had to put it through twice.

Sorry, but that's just not good enough.

This is Digital Britain

At this point, let me remind you that apparently we live in Digital Britain. We have a mobile workforce, we're flexible and we're connected wherever we go.

So why on earth does it take so long to achieve something as simple as moving a broadband connection from one address to another?

My new house has an active phone line, with a dial tone and everything. It's not like they need to come and run a new line from here to the local telephone exchange.

Broadband companies, you need to catch up. Because as the number of people who run a business from home grows, I can't be the only one getting frustrated.

What happened when you moved your broadband connection to a new address? Was it a disaster, or did it go well? Let me know in the comments.

(Image of telephone lines: Flickr user Robb North.)

Posted in The internet | 3 comments

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I'm just in the prosess of moving, so I thought I would find out how to go about telling them I'm moving, and then I read the page on EE and there it says, minimum time to move your broadband, 20 days, WHAT??? it only took a week to set it up in the first place, and that included waiting for the wifi box to arrive, why does it take so long, I do everything online including home shopping, I will be lost without it, it's gonna cost me as well.

Fri, 03/10/2014 - 22:04 — Anonymous

I moved house in Cornwall in October, it took three months to get connected at my new home. After countless phone calls to the ISP they blamed it on technical infrastructure problems with phone lines etc, when the engineer eventually arrived he said it was lack of engineers in the ground.

Sun, 26/01/2014 - 09:43 — Anonymous

I would love to know exactly what is involved in transferring a Broadband connection from one line to another. A few years ago I lived in a block of flats. Due to flood damage from bad weather, we were relocated to a new flat in the same building.

The exact same building.

Time it took BT to sort out my Broadband connection? Six weeks.

I was given the same excuses you were plus a couple of unlikely sounding ones, such as it's flat out impossible to reroute a connection through the same building and "We thought it was a mistake because who changes address in the same building?"

Needless to say we're not with BT any more ;-)

Sat, 20/10/2012 - 08:55 — nickrapson

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Why does moving a broadband connection take so long?