Have you suffered from the broadband blues?

Yes, more time than I care to remember. If you’d like to make a change, please sign my petition to abolish the minimum term contracts with Internet Service Providers. Thanks!

For all the tales of woe I wonder how many times we pick up our keyboards to write a tale of a hard working BT OpenReach engineer who solved my woeful BB.

I signed up with EE for 34MBit down estimated Fibre 38MBit service. Was 18MBit when the router was plugged in and the 10 day settling in period began. It slowly dropped to 16MBit and then 15MBit.

I phoned EE Customer services where we went through the normal steps of checking the connection, router set up, this was not the fault so escalated to Tier 2.

Next day Tier 2 rang to say that line tests and further investigation at the exchange had not revealed the problem. A BT OpenReach engineer was booked for the next day. NEXT DAY!

Matt arrived, was courteous, polite, listened to the problem, asked about the house wiring our needs etc.

He investigated house wiring, the drop line from the pole in the roof, the master socket. All to no avail.

He plugged in an oscillator and went to the cabinet, 700metres away, he then traced the wiring back and ascertained we had a 40MBit service in the pavement manhole cover but only 25Mbit at the house.

He replaced the connections on top of the telegraph pole, laid a new route for the drop cable, wired it very neatly down the wall (quietly, so my one year old baby son could do his afternoon sleep) and then brought the wire into my study and terminated it with a new master socket thus eliminating all the faulty wiring. He worked cleanly and methodically explaining as he went what was going on.

I now have a synch rate of 39.97MBit to the Exchange and a true 37.52MBit at the PC. EE estimated 2 days ago that the maximum on the line as was would be 27MBit…..

Sometimes it is not the ISP’s fault or even BT OpenReach, just a house built and wired in 1974, connected to a telegraph pole when we did not have Fibre Broadband when Spur Wiring seemed like a great idea…..

Thank you OpenReach for going the extra mile for me. I immediately placed an order for the 80MBit product since I now have such a clean line!

My broadband was switching itself on and off for no apparent reason. When I reported it, BT checked the line and said they had found an ‘instability’ on the line. It will be tomorrow evening before it will be repaired. This has gone on for about three weeks altogether

We have had to deal with a BT shambles too.
We requested a new line on the 10th January for our newly built property. The line has finally been installed today – still no broadband. I am only able to respond now by dangling my mobile phone out the window!
Customer service has been appalling – I have been consistently told the delay is because of flooding elsewhere, despite the fact that numerous engineers who have visited the site indicated that the pole was”full” needing replacement. We only established this information by actively approaching them ourselves.
Escalation of the complaint was laughable. Numerous phone calls with promises of updates never materialised.One customer service person indicated that he didn’t even have a boss to escalate complaints!
The executive complaints department has been more helpful but I only managed to get hold of their email through another seriously disgruntled customer! The order was still not expedited despite the “executive” complaints department being involved
Absolutely shambolic!

My broadband link constantly drops out every so often and even after spending hours on the phone to Virgin, they can not seem to cure the problem. Also I was without email for 4 days this week due to a server fault somewhere out on the network.

I think I commented before about the BT shambles we had, after getting them to move a physical line to facilitate building work outside our house, 2-3 years ago. We had to pay quite steeply for the privilege, but it was necessary to give builders access to the wall. The move led to, among other things, slower broadband. After that, there were interminable calls to Indian call centres, threats of charging us another £129 or so for a fault in “our equipment” etc, and no resolution.

It was all sorted in the end by Which? Legal Services, with advice on direct emails to the then CEO of BT. It turned out BT had an “executive-level complaints department” or similar, one of them phoned me back and exchanged various emails which included his department name, then sent an experienced engineer to troubleshoot the problem which had been introduced when the competent-looking but outsourced engineer moved the line a few feet from one outside wall to the wall next to it.

At the moment, broadband is working though not really “state-of-the-art”. I’d really like to be able to unbundle broadband service from voice, TV and all the other call-plan rubbish they want to sell you, but without having to pay BT or others a fortune to install a separate physical line. Then, you might be able to switch broadband service among different suppliers (though our exchange only hosts 2 or 3 – Ofcom say this is “competitive” but I don’t believe them). At the moment my broadband comes from TalkTalk, who are just as useless as BT when other problems arise, eg billing, but usually seem to be able to continue to provide my service, which they purchased from Tiscali who bought it from Pipex.

Living in a small town with no cable, I’m too afraid to try to move from TalkTalk because of the difficulty of dealing with any of these low-cost “light-touch-regulated” operators. How do we get Virgin Media to install cable to more locations? I use them in a cabled house in a city nearby, and the performance there seems to be much better than anything BT can offer with “fibre to the cabinet” in our home area.

FWIW.

My service provider is Taltalk, but the cabling to the exchange is provided by BT. I live in a village which is some miles from the BT exchange. My daughter who lives in the Nottingham area is about half a mile from her local exchange but just at the end of her street is a large green BT cabinet with a label declaring that it is for “Broadband on your street”. I live in Wales and the other night the BBC Wales news reported that there has been a small take up for the BT fast broadband… chance would be a fine thing here!

I have just been converted from O2 to Sky Broadband.
The speed is now reminiscent of dial-up modem days.
The drop-out rate is unbelievable. Almost every time I advance a page, it defaults to a two minute “trying to connect” ritual, which is usually unsuccessful.
To add insult to injury, I hung on the help line for 15 minutes before being disconnected without talking to a live person.
I’m extremely disappointed.

Repeated calls to BT to complain my wireless Broadband connection kept dropping off, despite all blue light on. The only way to reinstate was to switch off the hub and reboot.
Lots of useless advice over emails.
Wrote to the CEO who arranged for an engineer.
Engineer called, changed a junction box but gave no reason.
Advised a fault on the line somewhere but not once did he look at the PC or see the symptoms, nor suggest changing the hub channels.
Fault persisted- contacted CEO again with FULL details, only to be asked on call back to explain the problem yet again with the excuse ” if we are to work together I need the info”
New engineer called- took one look at the symptoms and said Faulty HUB but advised he had to go through the check procedures and BT were not keen on changing hubs.
Hub changed -fault cleared.
Call from CEO office minion to check on satisfaction.
On question he advised he had no technical knowledge but purely Customer Service skills?
Initially claimed could that a months free broadband was his last offer and no way could he compensate for time and frustration
Eventually got 4 months free broadband + £8.

You have to stick in there

I had a crackle noise on my phone for two weeks. I rang Swalec Talk my phone supplier to check the line. The first time they reported no problem. I rang again a week later again no problem was found but a very sympathetic lady said she could arrange for an engineer to come the next day although there would be a charge of over £100. I agreed and the fault was found on the pole out side my house. The wire was broken and the rain was getting in. I was not charged and I was very impressed by the service. My broadband is now fine and I am able to have a conversation on the phone.

Talktalk have sent out engineers eight times over the last two years and on each occasion those engineers say the problem could have been resolved by the call centre. Waste of my time and Talktalk’s money. The issue has arisen again and again they insist on sending out an Engineer. We will see what happens this time.
Recently I reported slow speeds and the operative said nothing could bedone. After a battle to speak to the next level the issue was resolved. This agent said only his level had the resources to fix this problem and the first line knew nothing of what could be done. Absolutely crazy.

I live 5 miles from a major city but might as well be in the Outer Hebrides. We are served by copper wire which goes through overgrown hedges which have stretched and damaged the line. This is all in plain sight! I and the two other houses served by this line have off and on phone connection and slow and intermittant broadband. We have gone through TalkTalk’s fault procedures – in my case three times – which is like entering a Groundhog Day-like loop. When we finally get Open Reach to attend they fiddle with something, give up and go away promising further action – which does not happen. I too have given up, abandoned my landline and use my mobile phone and a satellite connection for broadband which costs £50 per month. The others are persevering but we are not hopeful. The truly appalling thing about this service is that there is no way to get hold of BT/Open Reach. You have to go through the ‘provider’ whose fault service seems specifically designed to prevent any progress if the fault lies with BT.

I have to agree with everyone who has said that one of the real problems is the inability of consumers to deal directly with the people who can actually rectify technical problems, combined with people at the ISP who seem to be tasked with making it as difficult at possible to get those technical people involved and addressing the problem. When you finally see an Open Reach engineer they’re competent and friendly and cannot understand why you had to wait weeks because they have plenty of capacity in their team.

It’s a system which clearly isn’t working, but because it is hundreds of different consumers who each suffer in a different way that point isn’t recognised or addressed.

In rural Dorset we can only expect a download speed of around 7Mbps but when we moved just 30 yards across the road ours dropped off to about 0.5Mbps. Having tried everything that Which Computing’s help line advised to no effect I called BT but found myself in an “over an hour ” queue. Rang off and tried again saying I wanted to cancel my Broadband; this time I went straight through! After 40 minutes of various tests I was told that a fault on the line had been detected, which would be sorted out in 48 hours; the girl also said she would ring me in a given 15 minute slot the next day. That call never came and after 48 hours there was no improvement. Again I called to cancel and again got through straight away. After another 50 minutes during which the same set of tests were done I was again told a fault had been detected which would be sorted within 48 hours. I was also given a fault reference number. Yet again there was no improvement so I went through the same procedure and yet again the BT assistant wanted to go through a series of tests; I rejected this and insisted an engineer should visit. An appointment was made for two days hence having been advised that it would cost me £129.99 if the fault was at my end.
However, surprise, surprise, the very next day I was rung to say that the engineers had found a fault at the exchange and it would be dealt with by 8.00pm the following day. And it was!!
Now I have a regular download speed above 6.5Mbps but it drops off to less than 2.00Mbps between 9.00 and 10.00pm each evening so it is still not possible to watch BBC IPlayer or BT Sport at prime time.

I think that the price paid for the internet service should be related to the download speed. At least then those of us with speeds of less than 2MB would have some form of compensation in the form of lower costs

I suffer from the slowest broadband speed in our entire street (about 1.2 – 1.3 megabytes) typically less than half what neighbours can achieve. I have complained endlessly to BT and a series of engineers have visited but have never done more than restore a basic service when it dies altogether. I am convinced the problem lies in our copper wire connection to the street cabinet, but BT are not willing to repair or replace it. Presumably even moving to another service provide wil not fix this. Is there anything I can do?
In despair!
(P.S. We still have no date for the upgrading of our exchange to Infinity.)

When high speed fibre became available at higher price, wired version became slower. Obviously tey want me to pat more.

I would rather have a slow but utterly stable connexion than a faster but intermittent one. In fact, I have both, in two different locations.

One is in a “remote rural” location in Perthshire, which provides about 0.5 Mb/s download speed with almost never a hiccup. Useless for streaming, TV etc and there is no prospect of our little exchange the other side of the glen being upgraded to fibre within the next several years. However, it is almost always on.

The other location is a stone’s throw from the centre of Glasgow, where there is still only copper wire although, download speeds sometimes reach about 10 Mb/s. However, the service drops out several times a day, an issue which has been mentioned above. Drop-outs do not not really receive sufficient prominence in general assessments of services based on speed, etc.

I have had endless conversations with BT’s Indian call centres, the first stage seemingly always to try to claim that my contract has expired and then, after endless contortions, on two occasions finally offering to send a new router, as the original one was a very early model with a history of overheating and other problems. Having even been browbeaten into taking out a new contract, as my old one was of a type now being phased out, and the two new routers having never materialised, I bought one on eBay for 99p and it is working much better. However, the drop-outs, although very much reduced, still occur quite frequently. I used to log them, and have scores of pages full of dates and times, although have now given up in the hope that central Glasgow must surely have fibre access before too long. So much for all of the TV advertising, which would have been better spent on that.

I live in a Cornish village 3 miles from the nearest town. Broadband is very slow and, recently, when the phone line went dead, the BT engineer who came to fix it told me that the phone line was alloy, not copper, and was installed early ’80’s, when copper was expensive. The alloy is prone to corrosion, and should be replaced. I had high hopes that this would be fibre-optic in a short time, but nothing has been done, although much of Cornwall has gone fibre. Not this small village, however, with little industrial poke.

It took BT 2 months to install a new broadband connection after we moved house. There were countless problems, ranging from inadvertently connecting us to someone else’s landline, postponed engineer visits, countless calls to get wifi working, and then to top it all, a bill for landline and calls that we didn’t have or use! It was refunded after a twitter complaint but all in all a horrendous experience.

BT Infinity is not fit for the purpose as far as I’m concerned. Was drawn by the lure of faster speeds, but found yes although we were receiving a 70 meg connection we couldn’t stream anything online without buffering, latency was very high (no use for online gaming) and the line going completely dead for broadband every couple of weeks.
No fault according to BT executive level complaints even though the line was dead???
This is when BT tell you lies lies and more lies, the line was monitored for 2 weeks of which BT saw no disconnections, hmmmm there was one because we had a power cut?
Then the phone issues started with bad weather couldn’t hear anyone and constant NO LINE. The problem was intermittent between phone and broadband.
Open Reach sent out again no fault found even though the line was noisy, Open Reach assigned a case handler to the fault and we got 2 engineers together.
This engineer found a fault and then the Broadband would not re-sync. At last someone saw the problem, sorted the line out but now we can only get 40 meg download and they wont do anything and the phone line still bad.
We have moved to Sky Fibre and there were issues in activation due to a fault found on the exchange equipment, low and behold now quiet phone and touch wood not one broadband disconnection but still only 40 meg which is enough for me.
On talking to a friend who I haven’t seen for a couple of years confirms what I though as his BT Infinity line was the same always going down and constant engineers.
20th century broadband in the UK, I don’t think so yet

We have been without BT broadband for 8+ weeks now. The latest update is that they will be checking on the progress at the local cabinet again around mid-June. (Original connection date was 4th April, then 8th May). We have barely any phone reception and no 3G so we are pretty much cut off once we get home in the evening. We live in a busy village on a large estate 8 miles outside of the main town. My parents live along the road and they have broadband but apparently BT have not provided enough capacity in the local cabinet to include us, despite the fact that our house dates back to the 1950s. I am tearing my hair out, they have got us over a barrel as we have no-one else to turn to. Even if we cancel who’s to say that another provider will have any capacity in this local cabinet? I’m tired of their apologies and the varied excuses about copper piping not having arrived yet etc etc. They were perfectly happy to take my £30 connection fee though and advertise that BT Infinity is available in my postcode area.

How can it be an exchange or line problem if moving the PC from the router changes things?

It is obviously a wireless issue.

I moved to my new address on 1st of august and today is the 16th of august I still don’t have broadband connection and mg phone lune is dead. I have raised so many complaints with BT and no one is willing to take ownership or giving me honest answers when this will be sorted I’m so furious and unhappy with the service I’m receiving from BT team. Their complaint team doesn’t have no time scale to resolve complains from customers. This had cause me do much distress and hassle spending everyday hours try and get the answer from BT when my internet and phone line will be connected.

I have suffered constant drop outs from BT Infinity 2 for seven weeks.
BT have no clue as to what is wrong.
Cable from cab to house is aluminum which is about fort years old and not designed for Broadband never mind Infinity.
Even when working relatively well speeds are no where near estimates.
Told upload would be between 6-7.9Mbps but told by engineer line only supports 2Mbps upload, they know the true speeds but lie to get you to sign up.
Britain used to lead the way in infrastructure but are now so far behind we will never catch up, whole phone/broadband network needs replaced right into customers properties along with new exchanges.

I have been trying to set up broadband for a friend since January 27 of this year. I have spoken to date to no less than 37 BT representatives both in this country and India. We have had the broadband working for less than 3 days in that time and that was because one of BT reps gave us someone else’s ID, in fact we could peruse all of their personal details and more. We have been told it’s a line fault, a junction box fault, a software fault and now we have been told that the line is still tagged from a previous provider and because the provider as changed hands that the line is also slammed. (whatever that might mean) I have cancelled on behalf of my friend who incidentally is over 80 years of age and I have to break the news to her that good old BT can not get her on line despite the promises that have been broken and she we probably have to pay £60 to set up another line. Progress bring it on.