How long does it take to get phone, cable and internet set up?

My husband is trying to get phone service, internet and cable set up in our new home ( my son and I will arrive on Tuesday) but the phone/ internet company told him they don't have anyone available until the 25th of January. I am not sure what company he spoke with but a month seems like a long time to me. When DH told me this this morning I was almost in tears because the thought of my son and I not being able to communicate with  family and friends at the beginning, is painful plus I want to start looking for a job ASAP.

Is this the normal waiting time to get the service set up? I am not even there yet and I am already stressing out about this.

25th of January seems like a long time.  I'm sure there will be issues with the Christmas & New Year holidays, but still.  For comparison, Plus.net took 6 days to set up our phone, and about 3 weeks to set up broadband.  (We get TV through Freeview over the air, so that was ready when we moved in.)

From my understanding, it only goes quickly if you already have a phone line set up. It took me over a month to get internet and phone in my flat because BT couldn't send someone out to connect my phone line for weeks. If it's the engineer that's putting the date of Jan 25th, just call every day and ask if they have any earlier appointments. Someone might cancel at some point and free up a slot for you.

Things take longer here, unfortunately. We're moving house, and my DH phoned last week. He said that if the house had already had a BT line in, it would've been done. But, because the previous tenants had a company called Sky, we have to wait till 29th of December for everything to get put in. That's also the day my Dad will be home in the States from the Middle East, and the first time we'll be able to Skype/ see each other since I left last July. Luckily, we won't shut off our internet service here at his parents' house until after everything set in our new place.

I used to be married to someone who owns a telecoms company, so unfortunately I know more about this than I'd like to....

4 weeks is pretty standard for phone installation if there is no active phone line in the property.  I've just moved house and requested phone and broadband installation on the 13th of November.  The VERY earliest installation I could get was 13 December (and this was after pulling strings with someone I know at the service provider!!)  since the phone line into the house wasn't active and they had to get an openreach engineer to activate it at the exchange.  Otherwise I was looking at 6 January!

If there's already an active line into the property it can happen much quicker, but you'd be lucky to get anything faster than two weeks in that case.

Don't forget you lose an entire week due to Christmas/New Year when NO ONE is going to be doing installations like this.

It's horrible to be without "modern technology" for so long.  Maybe look into getting a pay as you go wireless 3G connection in the short term?  It saved my sanity....

Hiya

As already explained, things take longer here in terms of the red tape and behind the scenes messing about and longer still if there's no current physical line to the property etc. It's well known and although things have improved, it's still quite slow overall and bit of a running joke with anyone involved in the industry as well as consumers.

As mentioned, get yourself a pay as you go 3G modem connection from the likes of the 3 USB dongle which will allow you to at least connect to the web as soon as you get here and let you surf and send emails etc. If you are in a very strong signal area, you 'might' get away with Skype video !

As there's a choice of internet service providers as well as the Virgin Media cable option, you will need to decide what's best for you and take it from there.

Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!

Thanks for all the replies and advice. It is dissapointing but at least I now know that this is just the way it works there and will try to deal with it.

I've just moved house and requested phone and broadband installation on the 13th of November.  The VERY earliest installation I could get was 13 December (and this was after pulling strings with someone I know at the service provider!!)  since the phone line into the house wasn't active and they had to get an openreach engineer to activate it at the exchange.  Otherwise I was looking at 6 January!

Wow, that is a very long wait! Glad you got it installed sooner. We are also moving to a house with no active phone line, I guess that is why we will have to wait longer.

I really like the 3G wireless modem idea. I know my son will be very happy to get online. Should I get that here in the US or once we arrive? do you guys know where I can get one?

Thanks!

We moved into a new flat back in October and got Virgin Media services - it was really simple and quick to do actually .

The flat was already set up for Virgin Media because previous tenants had used their services before so I just had to arrange for someone to come round with the TV box and modem and set up the phone line.

On October 8th, I tried to book an appointment on the website and the earliest date they had on there was the 21st, which was too late as I was starting my new job on the 18th and wouldn't be around in the daytime. So instead I called them and said I was only available on either the 14th or 15th October. They said that was fine and set me up with an appointment on the 14th .

So, I moved into the flat on the morning of the 14th and 4 hours later, I had TV and internet installed and working . The phone line was a little trickier though as it wasn't set up properly and we couldn't use the phone for another week, but apart from that, we only had to wait a few days for our services.

Ugh, maybe I just have very bad luck...but unless the internet was already set up, it has taken no less than five weeks...most three months!!! 

I really like the 3G wireless modem idea. I know my son will be very happy to get online. Should I get that here in the US or once we arrive? do you guys know where I can get one?

I'd wait until you get here.  As was said earlier, 3 does a pay as you go one, and so does Orange.  We've got Orange cell phones, so we went with their mobile internet, and it was pretty good. 

FYI, cell companies here can be weird about credit checks; you might need to have your UK partner do the application in their name.

We tried to go with TalkTalk when we moved into our new house...this was the same company the previous owners used...the line was active and everything was already set-up.  They actually ran a test on the line while we were on the phone with them (at our old house) and said everything was good.  They told us it would be 3 weeks to turn it on (which quite literally just meant pushing some buttons on a computer - I did this for 3 years).

After 5 weeks of calling 2-3 times a week to check on why our service wasn't on yet, we finally found out that the order had never been put into the computer.  To top things off, we couldn't even cancel the order because it wasn't in the system.

Apparently this was an unusual circumstance because we were switching our service from AOL to TalkTalk...which are actually the same company.  So because they had to switch our service within the same company, it caused all kinds of drama.

We called BT (which would thought was going to be a million times more expensive but ended up costing only £6/month more) and they had our phone on in 72hrs and internet in 3 days. 

We both have cellphones and 3 different dongles so we weren't without service but it was a PITA.

At our old house, the line wasn't physically connected and that took 3 weeks (through BT).

It only too about 2 weeks to get everything set up. Luckily we were just carrying over the service from Virgin that the previous tenant had already been receiving, so the lines and connections were all they. They just needed to reinstall all of the equipment and set up our accounts.