My complaint regards BT’s abysmal response to my telephone and broadband problems, which began in late April when my phone started crackling and I could only use broadband occasionally.

The company sent an engineer at the end of June but he failed to fix it. Meanwhile, the crackling was so bad I could hardly use it – and messages left were indecipherable, leading me to exceed my limit on my mobile phone.

Finally, BT conceded that the fault was outside my home, and a month later arrived and in two hours fixed the problem. All of this was just under three months from start to finish.

Over those three months, I have paid BT £106 for my non-existent service. I expected to get that back, plus compensation for the inconvenience and stress. Instead, BT have offered a paltry £61 refund, which included £10 compensation. Can you advise? RP, Shrewsbury

You would think that in this competitive market, BT would be bending over backwards to make it up to you by quickly giving you a full refund for the period of the lost service – plus a free month, or similar, to make up for the inconvenience. However, this is BT we are dealing with, and even after we raised this with the company’s HQ, it was still rather hard work getting a proper refund.

BT blamed the delay in fixing the line on the fact that it had to “get permission from the council to control the traffic to work safely, and that the fault proved difficult to locate”. You say it took two hours to fix, rather contradicting this.

It has now agreed to pay you £101 – which is still less than you paid for the three months – though it will also be reimbursing you for the £12 cost of the calls the engineer had to make on your mobile to its call centre in India.

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