BT Shocking Service

How poor are BT? Had an intermittent fault: my BT Broadband kept going down and coming back up 10-15 mins later. Finally lost patience and reported to BT. They sent an engineer out (who came within a couple of working days which was reasonable). He did the tests (during a time when it was up...) and found no issue so he agreed to report it to the back office Broadband team. That morning I got a text from BT saying "Good News - we've fixed your fault" (no other correspondence since the engineer said that the line ran clean). I was a bit cynical... Later that day, the line went dead again for around 5 mins... So I phoned BT again and told them. They said that they would have to send another engineer (apparently the first one didn't have all the skills required or something...) but if there was a fault in my network there would be a charge (understood and fair enough) but if the fault was in BT's network they would fix it (OK). However, if there was no fault found then they would still charge me. I objected to this last point vociferously and told the service rep that I would not accept that. She said that it was unlikely (on an intermittent fault - what planet do they live on?) and she couldn't go any further without my accepting that. So I told her that I wasn't prepared to would would tolerate the bad service until I could find a better provider. She helpfully agreed to raise a customer complaint on my behalf which I accepted. Within a couple of hours BT sent me a message saying that they had resolved the complaint and had closed it. Again, absolutely no communication with me (other than the message). Makes me wonder if BT have a "fault and complaint" resolving engine working in the back office ... or just some chap on a mission to hit Ofcom stats by closing them down and seeing if the customer can be bothered to raise it again... Would be nice if there was a decent alternative to BT that doesn't ride on OpenReach's copper...