BT rebuilds its Highway after traffic delays

BT is preparing to overhaul its Highway range of ISDN services, after finding itself unable to cope with initial customer orders following last September's launch, writes Andrew Craig.

The telco says it has improved customer service and support operations for Highway, to prevent a repeat of the lengthy delays some customers faced last year.

'After we launched it in October, we scaled back advertising because there were longer delays than we would have liked,' said a BT spokeswoman.

Delays were caused because installation of Highway requires a survey to check the distance between customer premises and the local exchange, as well as the technical suitability of the local exchange.

The customer helpdesk operation also experienced problems, says BT.

Highway's sales team, engineers and helpdesk staff were often not receiving the same customer information.

BT says customer support has been improved, more engineers have been assigned to Highway, and the computer system has been reinforced to speed up the survey procedure.

Advertising for the service, which was withdrawn because of the problems late last year, will restart this spring, BT said.

BT claims to have signed up to 30,000 customers for its residential Home Highway service and the Business Highway service for small businesses.

The greatest demand has been for Home Highway, but BT declined to say how many customers it has for the business service.

Highway gave a new lease of life to BT's ISDN products, offering customers either one 128kbps digital line or two 64kbps digital lines.

While Highway remains popular, BT is unlikely to roll out an even faster service using asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) technology in the near future.

BT has conducted ADSL trials for the past couple of years, but there is still no commercial rollout. BT said the remarketing of Highway has no bearing on its ADSL plans.

'They're not linked, they target different markets,' said the spokeswoman.