Today is a special anniversary, it marks exactly two months of trying to join PlusNet and almost three months of trying to leave BT. You may be wondering what gift I received on this wondrous occasion? I received the gift of the notification that, while trying to push though the order with BT for the umpteenth time, PlusNet had been informed that my MAC had expired. I would therefore have to get another one before anything could be “progressed”. So now I have the joy of begging and pleading with BT all over again in a vain attempt to extract another MAC only to wind up stuck in the same quagmire for goodness knows how long…..Yay! That’s at least another couple of weeks worth of phone calls to BT to look forward to, I am naturally overjoyed at the prospect. Not to mention I’m currently wasting my lunch hour blogging about it.

Having done a little digging I’m not convinced that BT are right, I don’t think I do need another MAC. Bearing in mind that MAC’s expire after 30 days BT should have known this was an issue for more than a month by this point in time. I thought to myself: Aren’t Ofcom regulations supposed to prevent this sort of thing? Ofcom’s Codes of Practice do in-fact indicate that I as long as I provided a MAC to my new supplier within the validity period (which I did), then the “Communications Provider” is required to “proceed with the migration”:

A1.16 Where a Customer provides a MAC within its validity period, together with a request to effect a transfer of the Broadband Service to the Communications Provider, the Communications Provider shall proceed with the migration and inform the Customer of the Default Migration Date.

My question now is who can I contact to get BT whipped into following the rules and sorting this mess out? Given that Ofcom don’t “investigate individual cases”.

Update 22-03-2013: So BT are insisting I do need a new MAC. The reason given is that this is now a new order, because BT took it upon themselves to cancel the previous one. I am still very much of the opinion this should be BT’s problem not mine, though it looks like I have no choice but to jump through the hoops again. Guess I’ll be spending my weekend compiling a list of complaints to send to Ofcom and whoever else I can find that will listen.