BT Internet Blues

[Farfrae]

Just read your blog, very interesting. How much did your antenna cost?
We've been waiting over 12months to get a phone line connected from bt and still waiting, have been billed every month for it aswell even though we have nothing, we do get refunded each time after a 20min phone call then nxt month same again. Bt and open reach are a complete shower of sh!t.
We've looked into an external antenna but the company want 800 to supply and install but we still need a mobile phone provider/ contract on top of that so starts to get expensive. Currently have a mobile dongle but its not very realiable

Aerial is about £125, router £50 - 80 and if you can use a Three phone sim currently £10 a month for the first 6 months and £20 for the next 18 on a 24 month contract unlimited data

Current Speedtest this morning (I used to struggle to get 1 Mb/s on the copper landline)

 

[Andy Nash]

I agree that BT and specifically openreach, are a disgrace to this country.
When I have calmed down a bit more I’m going to take it up with Ofcom and/or Watchdog because I don’t think anyone should have to go through the sh!t we have done with them.

Briefly, years of pathetic speed (0.4mb), frequent outages and culminating in no service at all for a month with I think 12 engineer visits.
None of the engineers knew anything about the fault or cared that much.
One told me it wasn’t really his job anyway... Didn’t like it when I asked him what his bloody job was then.
I tried to go with bt superfast. We have had fibre here for at least 3 years, but it was always “unavailable”.
. Why, I have no idea. We tried again last month and bingo! We signed up and the cloud phones arrived and we were waiting for the engineers to call to make the appointment to connect us.
Then came the call from India saying that “the service is unavailable at this address”. So that was that.
Now the bills have started coming!
In the meantime we found we could get Boundless superfast which is a microwave service I presume.
Inside a week 2 lads turned up, stuck a dish on the wall and wired the router up in an hour and we now have 30mb unlimited for half what we were paying bt.

I’d really like to see the franchise taken off them. Everything about their business structure is designed to make complaining pointless. If you do try to escalate a complaint you get directed to a call centre in India, where the folks there try to help but can’t because that’s not what Openreach want. Openreach don’t want to fix your fault because it means that they can no longer charge bt for call outs.
Openreach is part of bt but they have separate corporate structures as I understand it.
If you do dare to complain, you will get a text saying that the complaint is resolved, in a few days.
Finally, if you use the 0800800151 fault number a few times it strangely no longer works and you have to use a mobile to report it.

 

[yellow belly]

If it is a fault on the line keep calling them and make them come out to repair it. The cost of a new line is cheaper than more call outs
Water or damp in the junction box
Whic is not a problem for fibre
Eventually they will replace the cabling who’s for new cable is likely to be a fibre cable to the property
This is more reliable and a faster broadband

 

[jondear]

is 15 meg considered slow? mine is only around the 3 mark

I only manage 2at best can't play BBC iPlayer most days ?

 

[Paddington]

We struggled with 0.5Mb for years until talking to neighbours we found out they were getting a better service from BT. I spent an hour on the phone to India, they said they could not help as they did not recognise our phone number so was not a customer. I queried why in that case were BT taking £20 out of our bank account every month ? They had no record of this under my name or phone number, terribly sorry, could not help. Tried a different tack, if someone in India was taking money from our account, this was fraud and the Indian Fraud squad would need to be informed, could I have the call centre's chap address as no doubt the police would need to have a little chat with him ? We had recently seen Slumdog Millionaire about the friendliness of the Indian Police towards fraud suspects. Well, we were passed to his supervisor and their supervisor within a minute to a nice Australian lady, could she help ? Our account was quickly found from behind the filing cabinet, we had a cap on the speed which they would remove. Within five minutes our speed would go up to 2 Mb and monthly payments had been halved. I could have asked for more, but was taken back by the response. She recommended that we should contact BT every year to see if they could improve our deal. There are people at BT who can get things done, the problem is finding them.

 

[betternextyear]

I gave up on a phone line 2 years ago and now only have local wireless company ,Unitron,. £30 a month trouble free so far. No annoying scam phone calls either.

 

[Andy Nash]

I decided just keep calling them was the best strategy too.
The problems are the 20 mins it takes on the phone to report the fault and the time wasted to be around for the 6 hour time slot for the engineer to call. That’s if he does call. No tracking the engineer online like you can do with a parcel delivery.
I did this 12 times and on the 12th call I was getting ready to deck somebody which is no good. Plus you can only listen to somebody tell you that you’ll be charged £87 if the problem is with your equipment so many times.
All the while there is fibre on the poles outside!
The only satisfaction was waiting till three vans and a cherry picker turned up outside eventually, when I rang India and told them precisely what they could do with their broadband.
I didn’t know whether we could actually get another service at this point, so it was a gamble really.

 

[steveR]

I am the last house on the line 8km from the exchange and the only way to get a landline was to put 850m of underground in myself. Engineers always say they are amazed it works as well as it does and there's no way to get fibre. No mobile signal at the house either☹

Countryside living does have one or two drawbacks... Absolute drag for young people who cannot keep up with mates etc.

Worse still if as I have had, my daughter working from Home because of some appointments over a 2-3 day period up here, and struggling to get online properly. Happily, this is less of an issue nowadays... she's not up much, AND the BBis fast enough for her needs

 

[Scribus]

Plenty of woes in Ireland to. Utterly crap service is part of the great internet of everything it appears, it's simply daylight robbery dressed up as something cutting edge, the whole web experience is turning into a total bollux to my mind. But hey ho, the gormless cheerleaders of anything techno will soon be lifting their knuckles from the floor to shake in my direction while uttering the usual gibberish about it always being the users fault because he doesn't understand or hasn't read the manual etc etc.

 

[Paddington]

Talking to BT in India I was once told that 1Mb is perfectly OK for home use and that anything faster required me to get a new PC. Apparently if I mentioned Raj from BT in PC World they would give me a good deal.....

 

[steveR]

Plenty of woes in Ireland to. Utterly crap service is part of the great internet of everything it appears, it's simply daylight robbery dressed up as something cutting edge, the whole web experience is turning into a total bollux to my mind. But hey ho, the gormless cheerleaders of anything techno will soon be lifting their knuckles from the floor to shake in my direction while uttering the usual gibberish about it always being the users fault because he doesn't understand or hasn't read the manual etc etc.

Sis was well hacked off with the wired experience in the wilds of Co Galway 2-3 years ago and went to a local airband outfit and while hardly earth shattering, it works!! I think contention rates are an issue, but they were still improving it last time I was over

 

[Will Blackburn]

We have Voneus, pretty good until trees block the transmitter

 

[steveR]

We have Voneus, pretty good until trees block the transmitter
View attachment 849599

Chainsaw for Xmas??

 

[Will Blackburn]

Chainsaw for Xmas??

Not my garden or even farm, the guy who has the communications hub has got some conifers that need attending to.

 

[H200GT]

I feel your pain, we had a 4 year battle with BT, and had an engineer visit every 2 weeks one year. We were on first name terms with all the local engineers. We couldn’t change provider as no one else will serve our postcode as there is “no room in the exchange for other providers equipment” so can only have BT. Doubt it would have made any difference anyhow, they would still be using the openreach network.

Finally we got FTTP, opted for the 50Mbs, but for an exra charge can get 100Mbs, best internet in wales now!!

 

[feilding]

When I need to call BT for anything I always ask what part of the country are they, there accent always matches the answer ,either Scotland or Liverpool or northern Ireland. And never had problem with them, repairs within 6 hrs as per contract which I've just renewed, and a drop of 30%.from old contact. Broadband and line and free calls for the first hour of any call landline or mobile. So I can't complain.

 

[DaveGrohl]

When I need to call BT for anything I always ask what part of the country are they, there accent always matches the answer ,either Scotland or Liverpool or northern Ireland. And never had problem with them, repairs within 6 hrs as per contract which I've just renewed, and a drop of 30%.from old contact. Broadband and line and free calls for the first hour of any call landline or mobile. So I can't complain.

Are you the CEO?

 

[feilding]

Are you the CEO?

Not yet.
I'm only saying I've never had problems with BT, and what some people I know who are not on BT their charges are a lot more than I pay.

 

[Patrick JE]

If you can get a 4g signal use that instead. I'm 8 miles from a mast down a narrow valley in Wales only copper wire here. Fitted an aerial and SIM router myself and now get 50-70 Mb/s down for £20 a month unlimited, rock solid connection even in bad weather. Full details on my blog here.

Did near enough this a couple of years ago, Solwise external omni antenna plugged in to a router with EE sim, homeplugs to move it round the house, £28/month for 100gb which we never manage to use up.
BT offered "up to 1mb/s" for £22/month errr, no thanks.

 

[Big Blue Yonder]

I have a year to go on a BT High speed ( not) broadband contract. We never get more than 15 meg and drops out regularly, several times a day.
Multiple engineer visits have solved nothing other than to confirm the internal ( our ) equipment is not at fault.
Anyone found a way to get out of the contract which is costing me the earth for a hopeless service, need to go wireless here to get a reliable service, so not BT.
Please don’t ask what I’m paying, I’m easily embarrassed ?

You can get out of a BT contract but BT make it difficult.
First off check your acceptance (contract) letter and see what speed you are being offered if you get below this you can get out easily. In my case the letter stated 1mb and we could only get 0.5mb. However while the letter they sent me said 1mb the one they had on their computer said 0.5mb max speed so what BT are looking at may be different to what you have! One scanned letter to BT and it was cancelled that day. However they could not see a problem with only getting 0.5mb. My neighbour had slightly higher speed 1.2mb but it kept dropping out He kept a log of every incident, screen shots of low speeds and did this for a month. After much arguing he was stating that it was bad for his business he got his MP involved and again BT released him from his contract although he had made himself ill trying to deal with BT. If you can get beyond the indian call centre they had a call centre in UK that deals with problems.
Like other replies we went with a 4g broadband and went from 0.5mb to 70mb and have never looked back