Classic British Flight Sim

For the past fortnight I have endured intermittent broadband connection from BT Internet. Four telephone calls to India were needed before a BTOpenworld Engineer arrived from a town 4.5NM from where I am sitting! He spent 2.5 hrs here testing everything at my home having aready checked my telephone line/broadband connection at the local exchange 1.0NM from here. He could offer no explanation or advice on this unsatisfactory service. I am sure he gave the problem his best shot. Today we were unable to obtain a broad band connerction until 20:00 Hrs!

Has anyone suffered similar problems recently using the above ISP?

It appears that BTInternet is a separate company to BTOpenworld the former now being a customer of the latter. It seems almost impossible to find out what is actually happening in BT Broadband.

I used to, till I moved to someone else.

A few years back when I was getting just 2MB broadband it dropped to less than 100kb I contacted their Indian customer support who asked if he could connect to my PC to check things on the router, he did and proceeded to tell me I was getting 4GB, he was of course looking at the maximum line speed not the actual speed. He even ran a BT speed checker that gave him a ~100kb result and he still ignored it. I told him I had run a speed check on Speedtest.net to which he said he had never heard of it (only one of the most popular online speed check sites in the world) I showed him it and he thought it was full of advert which it isn't and thought it was dodgy. To say I called him some names relating to his educational background and life experience might have been an understatement and I left BT that week to Pipex. I had my full service back.

I'm now with o2 (cheaper deal as I have an o2 mobile). £12.50 per month for 12 months, but I got the first 6 months free, up to 10-12GB line speed, I get 9GB as I'm quite close to the exhange and unlimited monthly bandwidth. And I'm not a new customer, I renegotiated a new deal when the last 12month contract was up.

Shop around.

I don't use BT but I have been getting intermittent connections especially in the early evening for some week

Ever since the last major round of windows updates it seems.

Hi James..

I've used BT as an ISP for years and have had only 2 outages in that time.. both short. Whatever is happening to you is NOT BT-wide

ATB
DaveB

Not used them James, despite their trying it on.

However, I lost my broadband some time back, my ISP is Demon, and after two weeks of buggering about a BT engineer came along, tested y gear and found nowt wrong.

Then departed to the exchange, called me to try again, and hey presto - contact.

When I queried his as to the problem he calmly announced that BT had rebuilt my circuit remotely.

Problems tend to arise in my neck of the woods when BT engineers have been buggering about with boxes round the village.

Hope you are soon sorted mate.

Graham

As Graham says, the only outages I have with Demon is when BT (Open Reach) start buggering about with the telephone system.

I don't think it's an ISP issue...

I've only just got reconnected after no BB for a few weeks..I have an Orange package, BB and phone, they kindly gave me a cheap wireless dongle till the landline was sorted. BT came and installed a new master socket, that worked...for a few hours

BB is now running but I've noticed how many BT vans are around and how many poles and junction boxes are being worked on in this neck of the woods (ex-Royal Corps of Signals, I see these things, taps side of nose emoticon )

Like Victorian sewers, perhaps ye old GPO lines are falling apart

Derek

edit:Click

I've had major BT internet problems over the past two months or so, with download speeds dropping to below 1Mb/s. Pressing the reset button on the back of the router ( or Home Hub, as BT calls it ) usually provided a fix for a few days till the speeds went into decline again. Eventually, I was down to little better than dial-up speeds, and no amount of resetting was helping. So, I rang India.

We went through the usual procedure of testing the line, which showed no problem, then running BT Speedtester, which most certainly did. The line was reset ( don't know what they mean by that ) and I was asked to wait 10 days till things settled down. After 6 days I was back to under 1Mb/sec and now the occasional complete cut-off.

They then sent me a new router ( the latest version that they supply to all new customers ), reset the line once more and we sat and waited. On the first day, no great improvement, but when I got home on the second day, I saw one of the indicator lights on the router winking amber, then scarlet, before returning to its normal blue. I fired up the computer, went to Speedtester and I was bang up to speed again. This was Tuesday of this week, and I've been running Speedtester every couple of hours when I'm at home. My connection is rock steady, just below 6Mb/second.

BT's call centre has, on this occasion, performed very well indeed. They even knew when the new router had been delivered to my home, and gave me a couple of hours to set it up before calling me to see how I was getting on. They called me last night again by arrangement to check up, and have scheduled another call next week. By the way it seems that after I had contacted them a few times, my phone call automatically went straight to a supervisor by the name of Monica, who had the power to send me that new router.

Cant say for certain what ultimately fixed it, because the new router initially had little effect...it was only after coming home and seeing that amber indicator lamp return to normal blue, that things suddenly improved. Perhaps my circuit was 'rebuilt remotely' too. Anyway, time will tell.

I've been with BT for many years, first dialup and then broadband. Overall just one major problem which India sorted out online.

Not sure what advantage changing to another ISP would produce - the copper wires from the exchange to here belong to BT so they would be involved whichever company was billing me. No cable options here even though Virgin is available to houses 20 yards aware - major dispute between the house builder and the predecessor to Virgin at the time which was later sorted for subsequent phases.

As to the influx of BT vans in various areas, this may be related to the roll out of BT Infinity (http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/c ... icId=29017).

There are new green cabinets being installed near us and en route to the exchange. Pleased about that because Infinity is supposed to be available here end of December. Quite surprised since this small town is surrounded by green fields and 10 miles from a major population (Nottingham). But of course all thi s fiddling could mean problems over the next few months.

I'm with Virgin media and recently got upgraded to their 50MB service (only because the company are paying) In general its not bad, but the best provider I've had over the years was O2. Virgin media are horrific with the service going up and down like a lady of the evenings underware, although to be fair, since I've gone to the 50MB service I haven't had a problem. O2 don't use BT equipment in the exchanges so at the time I was with them I was getting 4MB more than my neighbour next door who was on BT. He then switched to someone else, but they were still using BT's kit so he didn't get any change in performance. BT infinity looks like a good service, but like VM its crippled with bandwidth management, but still looks much better than it was.