Is this how taking over a line is supposed to work?

[#1]

So, we've recently moved house and just before we completed the purchase, the previous owners phoned BT to cancel their account. All normal, as you'd expect.

But this has apparently now resulted in BT putting a "cease" on the line, which takes 30 days to activate meaning that the line is blocked - I can't request it be taken over for 30 days, and then of course it'll be at least 10 days after that for any takeover to go through.

Is this normal? Surely when you move in somewhere, you expect to be able to have a working phone line you can start to use?

The only other way I can see this being resolved is if you move out of a property, and just "hope" that new people take it over. Otherwise, you end up blocking the line if you cancel. Seems a bit ridiculous....

[#2]

Hi @markellison,

But this has apparently now resulted in BT putting a "cease" on the line, which takes 30 days to activate meaning that the line is blocked - I can't request it be taken over for 30 days, and then of course it'll be at least 10 days after that for any takeover to go through.

The cease could either be just a cease in line with the previous tenants requesting to cancel their service, or it could be connected to them moving services to a new address.

The leadtime on this would be related to either their move date and the leadtimes involved, or the current providers notice period for this.

The 10 working days you've mentioned would be related to taking over an active service, as this is the minimum amount of notice required to be given to the losing provider when taking over a service. If the services are ceased, it should take 1-2 working days to restart the phone line followed by a minimum 4 working days for ADSL or 5 working days (Subject to engineer availability) for FTTC (Granted this isn't far off the 10 working days).

Providing their is more than the minimum 10 working day notice period for a takeover, if their is a cease on the line, we should be able to place our orders to match up with the cease date.

A working line take over is essentially made up of a cease of the current service, and a provide of our service. If there's already a cease in place ahead of the minimum lead time this ultimately just means half of what makes up a working line takeover is already in place.

Although if we placed an order before the losing provider placed their cease, they'd need to cancel our order to place their cease order on the line. Generally (Judging from experience) at this point the cease that gets placed is not in excess of the 10 working days required for us to replace our order to match up with the existing cease.

Having said this, I think I have spotted the cause of the problems on the initial few orders we placed.

It appears a telephone number was provided on your account, which I can only assume is the telephone number currently in service at the address? The orders we've been placing have been rejected stating that the losing providers customer has not requested to move the service to us.

Unfortunately we're a few hours past attempting to place an order to match up with the cease date on the line at the new property, however I see we've placed and order to install a new line due to our initial attempts to take over the current line failing and that this new line install is actually expected to be completed prior to the cease date on the line at the new address, so hopefully you won't be waiting as long as initially expected.

Apologies if this rambles a bit, but hopefully it gives some insight in to the ordering processing in situations like this.