A PORTLAND businessman who said his print company had lost thousands because of poor service from BT has had new equipment fitted.

Chris Smith, owner of Print Team (Dorset) Ltd on the Tradecroft industrial estate said he is angry that for the past two years his business has suffered because of a faulty service from BT Openreach.

He said: "There's no-one to contact there and we have suffered these outages - the majority lasting more than 48 hours - for over two years now. Just what you need when you want to grow your business.

"I'm disgusted with this lack of service and I think BT need exposing."

Now Mr Smith has taken steps to highlight the problem and written letters to South Dorset MP Jim Knight and Ofcom.

He said: "The real annoyance in all of this is that these faults repeatedly happen to a solitary broadband number and then afterwards we get what seems to be just silly excuses as to the causes of the faults and then it gets left.

"This is just a small business struggling to earn a crust and we don't have spare cash for a bigger or better service. I start work at 4am-5am and I arrive home late at night - and I really don't need this extra stress.

Mr Smith described his business as 50 per cent local and 50 per cent national but said even local clients relied on email to send material across.

He said: "We do everything online, place orders, make confirmations and look for rollers for the presses.

"This has cost us thousands over the years. I face the prospect of going to work tomorrow again with no Broadband service yet my staff and co-directors still need to be paid.

"How can one expect to run a business under these conditions?"

BT spokesman Jason Mann, said: "Of course we're sorry about the problems experienced by Mr Smith.

"We have dealt with six fault reports relating to this customer's broadband service since it was installed in July 2005 and on each occasion we responded promptly and often restored service within a day."

Mr Mann said the most recent fault was reported on March 20 and in order to prevent any further problems, BT provided a new line card in the exchange.

He said previously the engineers tried to reset the equipment and each time it seemed to work but now the number of incidents had taken them to the next stage and they had installed a new line card.