useless bt broadband

[nc7503]

as the title suggests does anyone else on the forum use bt broadband? i switched to it in november,its been a massive let down.ive spent countless nights on the phone to them complaining,to be fair it does go lightning fast after ive moaned,but two days later its like im on dial up:aargh4:
im tied into an 18month contract and i want to get out of it as i feel its not doing what it says on the tin?
anyone got any ideas??

[STEWY L]

as the title suggests does anyone else on the forum use bt broadband? i switched to it in november,its been a massive let down.ive spent countless nights on the phone to them complaining,to be fair it does go lightning fast after ive moaned,but two days later its like im on dial up:aargh4:
im tied into an 18month contract and i want to get out of it as i feel its not doing what it says on the tin?
anyone got any ideas??
i'm on "talk talk", just broadband & phone, dirt cheap, around £17-£18 pr mth.
fast enough to watch the football on those "other"sites
free facebook of course,(i believe those on mobiles have to pay for facebook?)
please forgive my ignorance on this sort of stuff, i'm 57yrs young
and started school BEFORE BALL POINT PENS, we had INK WELLS!!!!.
regards,
stewy.:beerchug:

[nc7503]

i'm on "talk talk", just broadband & phone, dirt cheap, around £17-£18 pr mth.
fast enough to watch the football on those "other"sites
free facebook of course,(i believe those on mobiles have to pay for facebook?)
please forgive my ignorance on this sort of stuff, i'm 57yrs young
and started school BEFORE BALL POINT PENS, we had INK WELLS!!!!.
regards,
stewy.:beerchug:
thats shocking what your paying im paying £47 a month for evening and weekend calls and ulimited broadband.i feel like bt have pulled my pants down even more now:o

[A4 Lad]

I pay £45/month which includes phone line rental,sky talk ( free weekend & evening calls ) unlimited broadband and Sky+HD ( no movies or sports package )

[Guest 2]

My BT broadband is rubbish, always slows to a crawl and keeps dropping off connection :(

And who the heck is A4 lad?!?! ;)

[STEWY L]

thats shocking what your paying im paying £47 a month for evening and weekend calls and ulimited broadband.i feel like bt have pulled my pants down even more now:o
just pulled last months bill,
i'm slightly wrong, but not much!
broadband----17feb-16mar-11--------£0.00
Essentials(was my talktalk)--17feb-16mar-11------£6.99
Line rental-----17feb-16mar-11---------------------£12.30
phone usage £1-19p
paper bill charge----------------------------£1-48p
Total usage--£21.96p
we have free phone use after 6pm,and weekends, but are charged before that, but as we work fulltime we are not at home to use the phone very often.
regards,
stewy.:beerchug:

[turbine2]

Qucik question, when you complain do you complain to the technical support guys or to the complaints team.
If the technical support guys it's worth trying the complaints team. If it's the complaints team ask them about escelating the problem. Write to them with deatils (when, speeds, actions taken). Give them a reasonable time to fix the problem (say 14 days) and advise them that if it is not fixed you'll be taking matters further, which may include the termination of the contract due to their inability to provide a servicable service.
If they still don't fix it, take the action to move elsewhere and give them reasons why. They may push back but stand firm with them.
It may get you nowhere but I'm willing to bet once you threaten to leave an engineer will turn up and mysyeriously fix what's wrong.
Good luck.

[Sam]

Go here; http://speedtest.net and here http://pingtest.net

Post up your line stats from a few readings taken at different times of the day.

Is your exchanged unbundled?

[Hex69]

just pulled last months bill,
i'm slightly wrong, but not much!
broadband----17feb-16mar-11--------£0.00
Essentials(was my talktalk)--17feb-16mar-11------£6.99
Line rental-----17feb-16mar-11---------------------£12.30
phone usage £1-19p
paper bill charge----------------------------£1-48p
Total usage--£21.96p
we have free phone use after 6pm,and weekends, but are charged before that, but as we work fulltime we are not at home to use the phone very often.
regards,
stewy.:beerchug:

I pay, £12 pm for BB and unlimited landline calls with VirginMedia plus line rental on top, which isn't too bad.

[nc7503]

Qucik question, when you complain do you complain to the technical support guys or to the complaints team.
If the technical support guys it's worth trying the complaints team. If it's the complaints team ask them about escelating the problem. Write to them with deatils (when, speeds, actions taken). Give them a reasonable time to fix the problem (say 14 days) and advise them that if it is not fixed you'll be taking matters further, which may include the termination of the contract due to their inability to provide a servicable service.
If they still don't fix it, take the action to move elsewhere and give them reasons why. They may push back but stand firm with them.
It may get you nowhere but I'm willing to bet once you threaten to leave an engineer will turn up and mysyeriously fix what's wrong.
Good luck.

i always speak to the tech guys, who you can just about understand english:zx11: i was on the phone to them for 40minutes the other night.he ended up remote controlling my laptop from his end changing all the settings etc,to be fair it was great for two days now its pants again


my download is 10.82mb/s and upload is 0.91mb/s ping 26

[Sam]

If you can post the graphics you're presented with at the end of the tests it'd help a bit.

Those figures suggest nothing is wrong at all however BT are well known for throttling and/or traffic shaping.

What are you doing when your connection appears to slow down and at what time of the day and so on?

[nc7503]

hi sam

i cant post up the results the laptop is getting long in the tooth (4 years now) daytime is average anytime after 6 is usually when it goes crapola big time.im usually either on here autotrader,youtube etc etc,i was on 02 before and never had any problem with it at all, speed always seemed constant:confused:

[Sam]

I'm posting from a 7 year old PC, man up :)

After 6 is when the general "working" population go online.

It sounds as though you're experiencing the slowdown BT made a point of saying doesn't exist in their recent advertisments.

Get yourself a Twitter (twitter.com) account (bear with me) and follow BTCare (https://twitter.com/btcare). Send them a message via Twitter saying you have serious slow down issues with your connection. Keep it short and simple.

They'll reply, usually within 24 hours, and will ask you to send them more details in a DM (direct message, bit like our Private Message system here) and you'll then receive, hopefully, direct communication via email/telephone from someone who is UK based and has a brain.

[SammoVWT]

BT carry high contention ratios, while the line speed may be what they say it is, it might be shared between 40-50 people per line if not more for example. So when everyones using it, it will slow down.

[Sam]

Any progress with this?

[nc7503]

have not had time this weekend will be getting in contact with bt tomorrow will post later the outcome,im struggling even to get on the forum at the moment:aargh4:

[nc7503]

ive been told that there are 'issues' in the area where i am, to be honest when i went out this morning there was a bt openreach van at the end of the road, they said that they had done a line test and that it was low.and that the problem would be fixed by tonight,ive told them that if i have to ring again to complain i want my mac code and they can more or less shove there service.to which he replied ok sir!!!
god i wish id stayed with 02 fast and reliable:o

[Hex69]

ive been told that there are 'issues' in the area where i am, to be honest when i went out this morning there was a bt openreach van at the end of the road, they said that they had done a line test and that it was low.and that the problem would be fixed by tonight,ive told them that if i have to ring again to complain i want my mac code and they can more or less shove there service.to which he replied ok sir!!!
god i wish id stayed with 02 fast and reliable:o

The problem isn't necessarily with the ISP however. BT Openreach is the infrastructure are of BT which handles the network of either copper wires or fibre from the exchange to your house. If there is an issue with it you'll have poor service no matter who your ISP is, as the other ISPs all use the same network and basically rent bandwidth from BT.

The only way round it is to move to either cable or mobile broadband, but these are very often not available in some areas.

[Guest 2]

Go here; http://speedtest.net and here http://pingtest.net

Thought I'd post my test results ..

@1.50pm
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1225936941.png

Im supposed to be on a 8MB connection and got a F!

http://www.pingtest.net/result/37824933.png

Oh well, least I got a B for line quality!

I think I can truly say that my connection is pants! Even 3G on the mobile is quicker!

[SammoVWT]

Just a point, have you checked for malware/trojans/rootkits? My pc got infected and I had similar problems with my virgin broadband. Especially to the point of dropping off.

Use comodo internet security, peerblock is also handy to have. It stops nasty traffic, firewall and antivirus - free and pretty awesome. Not had a tresspass since from the OH missclicking things :approve:

Check your router for serious flashing activity with your pc booted up and you not doing anything on it. If its transmitting like mad, you have an infection

Some rootkits are very hard to remove, and need some specialist tools. I can give you some pointers if it turns out to be that

[langb20]

I am on O2 broadband and it's pretty good, my computer had mcaffee antivirus, but they did an autorenewal trick on me for £52! the cheek of it, so I got that refunded and only then did they offer me a 'special' price of £24.99. Told them to get stuffed.
So without protection my 4 yr old laptop would snuff it pretty soon so I got AVG software, did an initial scan on the computer and it found a trojan or two - now I'm happy to report the whole thing, computer and internet works a million times better :beerchug:

[langb20]

I have just had some junk snail-mail on BT broadband package including the weekend calls and 'BT Vision' I hear this is crap too. it's a bundle at £20 per month, O2 have just increased their monthly broadband from £13.50 to £20! hell of a steep rise! ultimately in west wales we are limited by the distance to the exchange so it's never going to be mega fast unfortunately :-(

Also, just remembered after i wrote above, you can get AVG free from download.com. what i did then was to click on a free link and got the AVG premium (normally £25) by following a further link to another site - e.g. sign up to something or other, turned out I needed some new printer ink so got a bargain there and the AVG got upgraded at the same time. mcaffee can stay well and truly stuffed in future ;-)

some people may also upgrade their browser to firefox or whatever it's called, as internet explorer can be temperamental sometimes, may speed things up a bit?

[Guest 2]

Ive had AVG internet security on my laptops from day one. Never had a virus and always scan for spyware,rootkits etc.

After I took that test I noticed some workers working at a cabinet so maybe they were to blame for the drop in speed?

It has improved but its still nowhere near to the speed that it should be.

Would my router be an influence to speed?

[turbine2]

Some routers are better than others at dealing with noisier lines but it's not usually by much (it's usually that they're better at keeping the line up when the noise level is marginal).

If they've been working in the cab it's entirely possible that they've moved the wires in there around a bit which means there's a bit more noise introduced to your line, hence the drop in speed.

[symun]

I was on BT for a year, the slowest broadband i have ever had. I was on 1.1mb as stated in the router settings for nearly 7 months, he highest i ever had was 3.4mb.
Whenever i complained it was the same excuse, my exchange was to far away and copper wires an stuff.
As soon as the year was up i went back to virgin media.
I now have a HD V+ box with large bundle, usual phone package and unlimited 10mb broadband all for £30....
I can download albums in 2 minutes and films in sometimes less than 10 minutes.
And soon the swansea area will be able to get 100mb.......

[SammoVWT]

Of course we only download films to replace damage dvd's ;)

BT always cram about 1000 people onto 1 exchange, so everone has a minute amount of bandwidth between them

[symun]

Of course, i wouldnt dream of infringing any copyright laws................

[Bizmo]

Used to have BT -- they were a pain in the backside, all about virgin 50mb cable now :)