Don't go with them they have the worst customer service in whole of history of Broadband/telephone providers. I have had problems with over a month and we have finally got it on TV. I have been speaking to a director from Watchdog BBC and it will be going on in september sometime.

I second the motion. A month after signing up we were still waiting for connection, could never get through on their 'customer service' number, and they never appeared to read e-mails.
We've gone with Pipex now, who connected us within a week and actually speak to us on the phone. However, apparently Bulldog are now trying to change our phone line over (about seven weeks after first contact), even though we cancelled with them. Having to talk to BT and Pipex to explain that we don't want to change our suppliers, no matter what Bulls*** may say :mad:

Post again near the time, and I'll be very interested in watching...

Try telewest I have had no trouble with them at all,very reasonable as far as price goes.:thumbsup:

Well said :clap: My Bulldog telephone and internet connection was supposedly activated on 4 August and i've had diddly squat work since then. No telephone line, no broadband, nowt.

Phoned them twice on 4th, once on 6th, twice on 8th, 4 times on 11th, once ont'12th, once 15th, and once today. If I call Customer services they tell me I need to contact Technical Support and if I call Technical Support they tell me to call customer Services. Eventually they agree that someone will call me back and do they heckers like.

I've tried being nice, i've tried being not-so nice, i've sent e.mails, i've complained to the complaints department. I've even asked for compensation for the head injury i've suffered from banging my head against a brick wall. Result? Absolutely bugger all.

They're crap and they know they are.:rant:

so signing up with them this morning was a big mistake for me then? :?

I dont really have much choice, everywhere else offers 12 month contracts, which I cant do seen as I wont be in my house for 12 months as I'm only in Manchester for a year and been here a month already... plus everywhere wants to impose stupid download limits... was looking at NTL but its 3Gb a month with their 1mb connection :? but stupidly low really, I did more than that on my 512kb connection in a week usually.

guess I'll have to wait and see if they actually sort things quick or not with me... if not I'll just cancel or get my credit card company to hassle them on my behalf for not prividing the service they said... unless they dont take out the £60 for connection to fit a new line till after its fitted... hmm... crap...

Xafier

Telewest does 9 month student contracts. You just need to ask them about it.

Telewest don't serve where I live in Manchester... only NTL, and as I said, they have 3Gb a month limits, if you want more you have to jump to their 2mb connection with a 30Gb a month limit for a LARGE price increase... hence why I finally chose bulldog :?

Originally posted by xafier
Telewest don't serve where I live in Manchester... only NTL, and as I said, they have 3Gb a month limits, if you want more you have to jump to their 2mb connection with a 30Gb a month limit for a LARGE price increase... hence why I finally chose bulldog :?

Gutted ;)

Big mistake signing up with them. Just keep watching Watchdog around the 12th of september. WQhen i was speaking to the directory he said he spoke to an internet jounalist and they say it is the worst case they have ever seen from and internet/telephone service provider.
people are without phone/internet from schotland to down south. people have lost their internet business and people with disabilities can't get help! it is their customer service that gets people wound up.

The only people at Bulldog who have an ounce of a clue what they are on about can be found on:

0207 1641000 - ask for Bulldog Complaints

Try Demon; I know they've got a 12 month contract but I have found them extremely reliable and they provide 2GB for £19.99 with unrestricted use.

dont touch bulldog unless you want a terrible service and a poor connection speed that is not all that they say it is. i went back to telewest

I'm with Virgin.net and they don't have a 12 month minimum period in their contract. :)

We've found Bulldog to be very good most of the time. Been with them since May and had just over one week when we had problems, but apart from for that they seem very good.

One of the best things about them are that every month they send us a bill with thanks for the last months bill payment which they claim to have received... even though they haven't taken any money off us since we joined! :thumbsup:

I shall stick with Telewest broadband. In fact I would recommend them to anyone who can get telewest. Blueyonder broadband has to be the best. They are very easy going, and helpful to the extreme, always pleasant when you have a problem - be it with your connection or with bill paying.

I really have no complaint with blueyonder broadband at all, and since other people have seen it they have also signed up. Worth every penny.

Dragon

We have Bulldog connected to the shop where I work. It took 3 month to be connected, the internet disconects every 3mins and the phones don't work right, people phone up but they can't hear us or it just cuts off, and lots of noise on the line. It's just a wast of time having it.

umm Trevor, thats not really Bulldogs fault, they still go through BT's exchanges and stuff, Bulldog dont exactly lay the copper between your work and themselves... you should get in touch with bulldog... or just tell BT you think there is something wrong with the hard line between the exchange and your property, its still their responsability I think

My dad got the bulldog 8mb/s adsl service. It's been up now (at 6.5mb/s admittedly) for about 5 weeks, no problems. One outage was fixed by resetting the router/ta.

And no need (yet) to use technical support.

It seems, however, that a great number of their customers are not so fortunate.

Originally posted by xafier
umm Trevor, thats not really Bulldogs fault, they still go through BT's exchanges and stuff, Bulldog dont exactly lay the copper between your work and themselves... you should get in touch with bulldog... or just tell BT you think there is something wrong with the hard line between the exchange and your property, its still their responsability I think

It has nothing to do with BT as Bulldog takeover the whole telephone exchange. When it was a BT line it was perfect, so these nothing wrong with the copper. We called Bulldog and after waiting a few weeks they told us there was a fault, but it's still the same 2 weeks later. We have lost a lot of business.

Originally posted by Trever
It has nothing to do with BT as Bulldog takeover the whole telephone exchange.

It could still be a BT problem though.

After we had been with Bulldog for a while the line suddenly went dead for a week. Bulldog had to get a BT engineer to check the line on the street. It turned out that BT had "accidentally" disconnected our line while working on a neighbour's line. Coincidentally, we got a letter from BT around that time trying to get us to rejoin them. :confused:

Pipex don't force you to a 12 month contract as long as you don't take their free equipment. If you leave within the 12months and have taken the free equipment, they charge you £54 for the modem.

We're with them, and I've actually got two houses with pipex in. There's no download limits, and they're pretty good at forgetting to cap your connection, so I've got a 2mb connection for 1mb in both the houses.... for only £23.44 a month.

It's a bargain! :)

Update... tried my phone yesterday and:o got a dialing tone. Whey-hey... they've sorted it out at last me thinks. I tried to make a call and hear a voice saying "welcome to Bulldog - dial 150 to activate your line". So I dial 150 and wait patiently for 30mins to get through to someone that asks me my reference number then asks how she can help me... I tell her i'm calling to activate my line and i'm promptly cut off.

Not to be outdone, I ring 150 again and wait another 30 mins to eventually get through to Johnny Foreigner who whose grasp of English is not quite strong enough to enable me to get my message accross. By separating my syllables I get him to understand I want my line activating and I get a response along the lines of "there is being a problem with your line today and I am not being able to activate it". I try giving the poor fella some :rant: but it's no good he can't understand me.

I'm not giving up though... gonna have another go today. Oh, and i've taken your lead MarkB and passed on my experiences to Watchdog.

Looks like the wheels are in motion.

"C&W faces inquiry into Bulldog’s broadband pedigree"

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,16849-1742925,00.html

Bulldog still haven't taken any money our of my bank account since we joined them in May although they send me a receipt thanking me for the payment every month.

Then last week I got an email off them apologising for taking August's bill out of my account twice, and saying they would refund it by Tuesday. So on Tuesday I check my bank account, and they have gone and deposited over £130 for me! :thumbsup:

Can I spend it, or will I have to give it back if they ask for it back? :confused:

Originally posted by Patchy
Bulldog still haven't taken any money our of my bank account since we joined them in May although they send me a receipt thanking me for the payment every month.

Then last week I got an email off them apologising for taking August's bill out of my account twice, and saying they would refund it by Tuesday. So on Tuesday I check my bank account, and they have gone and deposited over £130 for me! :thumbsup:

Can I spend it, or will I have to give it back if they ask for it back? :confused:

If you know it's in there, and don't do anything about it, then legally it's stealing.

Originally posted by Hook
If you know it's in there, and don't do anything about it, then legally it's stealing.

How about if I make sure it doesn't remain in there then? ;)

This is my bulldog story. It's long.

I'm caught in a Kafkaesque situation with Bulldog. They didn't collect their monthly fee from my bank account (which they are supposed to do every month) for three months. Then I get a bill for three months plus, which is more than I can pay. I go on line to look at a breakdown of the bill. This service is not working. I ring the "customer service" department. Can't get through. I e-mail the "customer service", I get no reply. After a week or so, I'm getting madder and madder at not being able to get any contact from these people. That's why "customer service" is in inverted commas. They don't provide any. I then receive a reply by e-mail telling me they are unable to help (funny, I thought, considering that was the e-mail address for the customer service department) and telling me to ring the customer service. Considering that I had told them in my e-mail that I was e-mailing because I was unable to get through to the customer service department, I'm bemused, not to mention fed up. I keep ringing and ringing the customer service department, and one fine day, to my surprise, I get through. I ask why my money wasn't collected for three months. I can't tell you that. Why is my bill so much higher than normal. I can't tell you that. I find their head office address and fire off an angry letter by post.

The point is, you see, I just can't afford to pay that much in one go. I'm widowed with an expensive teenager and on income support. I can only just about maintain the cost of broadband/freephone calls to local and national numbers. I do this so that he and I can be on the net at the same time, the phone is not tied up while you're on the net, and he can make all the calls he wants to his pals without me ending up with a giant phone bill. It has happened before. I have to plan my expenditure pretty damned carefully, because I find it difficult to make ends meet.

About a week later I get a phone call from the head office apologising for the situation and explaining that they were changing their bank account, and that's why they hadn't collected their money. I explain my situation, and that I can't afford to pay that amount all in one go. The lady is very nice and offers to arrange a payment plan and I am mollified to a certain extent.

A day or so later, I want to use the phone, but a recorded voice tells me "No outgoing calls allowed from this phone". Bemused, I ring "customer service" and after several frustrating attempts -wonder of wonders - I manage to get through. I can't seem to make any phone calls, I say. That's because you haven't paid your bill, he says, you'll have to ring billing. I go through the whole boring, frustrating sequence again of trying to get through to billing and explain that I had complained to their head office and had been offered a payment plan to sort this out. Would you like to make a payment now, he says. I pay one third and he tells me my phone will be back on within 24 hours. 24 hours elapses and it's still not back on. I ring again. Oh sorry, it's not 24 hours, it's 48. I try to restrain myself. When 48 hours elapses and it's still not back on, I ring again. No, it's not 24 hours, not 48 hours, but until you've paid the bill in full, they say. I ask why no-one had thought to tell me this in any of my other conversations with them and why I had been given a different answer from each person I had spoken to. I explain that the lady from head office had told me she would arrange a payment plan. Yes, but you won't get your phone on until the bill is paid off completely. She didn't tell me that. I feel that I'm going round in circles here. I can't seem to make any headway. They neglect to take my money for three months, putting me in financial jeopardy, and I end up with no phone. They made me wait three months before collecting the money, why can't they wait three months before I give it to them. If they had taken their money monthly, as per their contact, this wouldn't have happened. The money would have been there to pay them. Not only that, they'll still be charging me for the unlimited phone calls, even though I'm not getting them. I tell the person that I'm talking to that I'm totally fed up with with their "service" or lack of it, and I would like to cancel my contract with them. Ah, well you'll have to speak to cancellations then. I try, and - predictably - I can't get through.

By this time, I'm so mad. Kafka - or maybe Brazil spring to mind. Escher perhaps - like those people walking around on staircases that don't make sense and go round and round in circles. I want to scream. Instead I fire off another angry letter to head office, detailing my complaints and frustrations and demanding that they acknowledge receipt of my intention to cancel my contract with them immediately. Unsurprisingly, I get no reply, until yesterday (two weeks later) by e-mail telling me to ring BT to get my number transferred back to them. I ring BT. They tell me they can't do anything until they are contacted by Bulldog. Impasse again. Two or more weeks without a telephone. Total frustration. Not only that, I got a phone call from Bulldog today asking for their money.

It took a great deal of restraint on my part not to shout and swear. I told them that since they took 3 months to collect their money, I wasn't going to pay them for 3 months, and I wanted to be disconnected from their service without further delay. I got a bland, meaningless apology, which means absolutely nothing, but no action. Meanwhile, I'm still without a phone and don't seem to be able to get any sense out of these people and I'm held hostage by them. I won't even go on about the incredible number out outages that are always taking place. When you ring "customer service" they just don't answer the phone, or you keep getting cut off.

Avoid Bulldog like the plague. They couldn't organise a P*** up in a brewery.

I thought this was quite an interesting artcle http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/30/bulldog_airbrush_logo/

ridban

I've been using Homecall for nearly a year now. Never had a single problem.

I'm on NTL £17.99 for unlimited 1Meg

Is this the same Bulldog that is owned by Cable & Wireless?

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1719909,00.html

I'm on tiscali £14.99 1meg unlimited, tis a good price and never had any problems with it.

I was going to get Bulldog, glad I didn't now. :o

I am really shocked by the stories i hear about bulldog. Even my friend tried to stop me going with them again telling me about all the complaints.

My history with bulldog has been the best of any isp (freeserve,bt,worldonline/screaming.net). I have been with them 3 times in total, once at my parents and twice in this house (lost phone etc THANKS BT) and now on 2mb although i did see if i could get 8mb which i cant being too far from exchange although hoping for more in near future.

Their customer service can be a little drone like (mainly their offshore center) and their technical team were very fast and efficient both times i called them.

I dont think bulldog are any worse than any other isp out there and while i think this 8mb roleout has been a bit of a logistical nightmare for them the teething problems seem to be sorting themselves out now. Alot of these problems have been caused by poor information being given to new users.

The friend who was telling me not to join bulldog has now signed up with them and while he had the usual offshore headache others have complained about is much happier with the connection and the level of service than with pipex (a company others praise) as they were charging him 44.99 for a 24.99 service.

So you see they are all good and bad when it comes to the crunch and if one treats you like crap move to another and dont look back. You will either have a good or bad experience with any isp so good look with your hunts for connectivity but from this user THANKYOU BULLDOG :)

We have Bulldog connected to the shop where I work. It took 3 month to be connected, the internet disconects every 3mins and the phones don't work right, people phone up but they can't hear us or it just cuts off, and lots of noise on the line. It's just a wast of time having it.

Thats a filtering problem, and in no way elated to the broadband provider. If you try swapping microfilters, and see if this works, if it deosnt, get Bulldog to report a fault to BT Wholesale.

Bulldog are indeed Owned by C&W but they are planning to sell this off in the near future.

Bulldogs billing system is still Microsoft Access, with updates coming once a day from Head Office, which users have to ensure they download. This may well explain the billing anomalies.

BG customer services i believe is in India, however Tech support, and Business Faults are in the UK.

I've been with Bulldog for 2 years now and on 8meg for about 8 months

As for customer services.. Yes they are bad but if you have a good look round at ISP customer services, Who has got a good one? I see people from all the big companies having a moan about them.

In the 2 years my line has gone down for about 2 hrs which I don't think is bad at all.

As for the remarks on speed. I think some of you guys need to do a bit of reading up on how your ADSL speed can be affected by distance from the exchange, line quality, extensions in your home etc etc to name a few. I live in S5 and I was on 8 meg but I found the line dropping off when I checked my router logs so I contacted tech services and within one hour we had tested and set the line at a steady 6 meg which is fine for me.This is why ALL BT line isp's use the "up to" bit in their advertising.

I'm not trying to say that Bulldog are perfect as they are far from it but I also feel that credit is due to them for a good service to me over the past 2 years.

This is how I would rate them:

Line Quality And Speed Excelent Service
Tech Services Excelent Service (when you eventually get through)
Billing Ok but very random as to when they take the money
Line Connections I've never had a problem with them
Customer Services They have one?!?!?
Contacting them via Phone Get a flask of hot tea and wait
Contact via email Don't bother

My advice to anyone who's thinking of changing ISP's is to do a bit of homework before you buy. I also believe that it doesn't matter who you go with.. at some stage you WILL have reason to moan about them.

*problems with bulldog*..

to begin with, they advertised 8mbps without testing our line.. so we ended up paying 8mbps for 2.5.. which by the way took 4 weeks to install.

then, after using the 2.5 meg connection for a while, our internet and phones cut off... it didn't take a genius to guess that it was probably cut off due to a problem with a switch between bt and bulldog.

We called Bulldog, -currently the billpayer was the landlord, who wasn't contactable at the time, and the price was included in the rent- and they said, we couldn't report that the line was cut, because we weren't the billpayer.

now while you can understand thats a perfectly reasonable assumption that the billpayer will be around to report any problems, this wasn't the case for us. What stressed this as a stupid and inane point for them was that as soon as I called BT to ask if there was a problem with the line, they imediatly told us what the problem was, even though I wasn't a customer of there's..

So sadly, although Bulldog are the most attractive, there service is ****. and it isn't worth the grief, rather go with a compay with history, so at least there fault reporting might be run with some compitence (not slating the nice people on the phone but the management who are responsable for designing the system in the first place).

after about 5 phonecalls and emails (from the local library) our final soultion was inflamed shouting down the line untill we got transered to a supervisor for been a difficult customer, who had the power to skip the first stage of the idiotic system

while(billpayer==0){
input "are you the billpayer", q; if(q="y") then billpayer=1;
}

for you coders out there :p

im still thinking about trying bulldog
but ive heard good and bad
just like most isps tbh

ive been on pipex over a year now, mostly good

I'm with Virgin.net and they don't have a 12 month minimum period in their contract. :)

I second this - no contract with Virgin.

hi i am with bullshi* broadband i have been since january this year during my useless term with them i have had my internet connection allways drop out every day, every time i phone them they pass me through to different departments, you need to phone technical support then they say you need customer service, i live in s6 i was getting speeds of 6.9 Mbs then i was dropped to 5Mbps, then i had it dropped down to 2Mbps then down to 512Kbps, i had enough of these jokers, when they advertised their 16Mbps service i signed up for this, i was on this for all of 2 days as my connection kept dropping out every hour or so, so back on the phone i went to BULLSH*T (bulldog) they started the same again dropping speed's all the time, then they said it was down to my router so i went and bought a new router again the same then tey said it was still down to the router and the micro filters so again i changed the router again, also had to pull the front off the relephone socket for some strange reason. They dropped me down on to the 8Mbps service but still charging me for 16Mbps well they will be when they decide to start taking money out for the service, finally i was getting my full 8Mbps service but still dropping connection, up untill a few weeks ago i had got fed up of all this and have telephoned bt up to go with them, i thought everything was going to be fine then but oh no the bulldog curse starts again, i was supposed to be connected to bt as of yesterday the 27th september, today the 28th i am still with bulldog AAAHHHGGGHH i cant seem to get rid of the idiots, i was aslos having problems with my telephone service but im not even going to go into that.
finally anyone of thinking going with BULLS*IT BROADBAND i would say dont bother they havent got a clue, they dont speak english, you will be cursed by them.
i hope this has made you change your ming if you was thinking about joining them,

dave

I second this - no contract with Virgin.


again - NP with Virgin - £14.99 1 meg no contract - whatcould be easier????

Try telewest I have had no trouble with them at all,very reasonable as far as price goes.:thumbsup:


I have had nothing but greif off telewest now looking for decent broadband provider.

Bulldog have been great for me. Except once when i rang them and was on hold for 45 mins.

No download limits, £20 for 8mb and £10 for phone. I'm happy with that price and my line has been on and in use for the last 18 months with hardly a days rest.

Stay well clear of bulldog,they take money out of your bank account without authorisation,and when you cancel they still keep charging you,caused me nothing but problems,not getting a dime out of me.