BT Broadband in UK - any help, please ?

[OFSO]

I had big problems here with my Spanish ISP which is owned by British Telecom. Finally sent registered letters to CEO of BT in the United Kingdom. Never had a reply but their threats to take me to court for only giving six months notice that I was cancelling the contract with them ceased immediately.

(I was cancelling the contract because I was switching to WiMax - I live 15kms from the mast and get first rate broadband over the microwave link. Can't think for the life of me why other countries don't use WiMax. Very useful when the phone lines come down in the winter's snow).

[M.Mouse]

However, if you look at other aspects of ISP operations, such as Customer Service, dealing with BT's far-east callcentres is like pulling your hair out, in comparison to dealing with ISPs who have reasonably on the ball people sitting in the UK.

While acknowledging the fact that the majority of Indian call centre operatives are as much use as a chocolate fire guard (with a few exceptions) I must say that Opal's (Talk, Talk) UK call centre operatives took incompetency to new levels.

I could write a full page on the saga I endured. Apart from the technical issue of my service dropping from a consistent and acceptable 4+ Mbps for no apparent reason also during the takeover by Opal of Nildram they managed to somehow corrupt my 8 year standing credit card payment details resulting in a call from them asking me to log on and re-enter the correct data. I kept the caller on the line while I attempted to do so because I had been unable to log in because my password and username were no longer accepted after the takeover and I tried again while he waited. Then he tried to log in and couldn't! He said he would raise the issue with technical support and asked me to try again in a day or two. I did manage to log in several days later and went to change/update/correct my credit card details to be directed to a page telling me I couldn't do this online and needed to call Opal by telephone!

I could not be arsed to waste hours of my life listening to their abominable hold music with the incessant reminder that my call was important to them! I figured they would ring me again to straighten out the payment problem.

Next I receive a threatening letter from a debt collection agency. I put pen to paper and sent a missive to the CEO by recorded letter. Telling them I would be delighted to attend County Court to tell the judge what a bunch of incompetent idiots they were.

Two weeks later I received a call from a charming lady from the 'escalations department' or some such department. The outcome was that they wrote off the debt. In the meantime I had transferred to BT Infinity. I never did receive a MAC code from Opal but for several months I did receive several calls from Opal asking if I would like to upgrade my service! They seemed unaware that I had left.

Funny thing is my old Nildram e-mail address continues to function nearly a year later.

I have left out the saga of my two months of trying to get them to fix my staggeringly awful broadband.

I think the major problem whether it is BT or any other massive operation is that when an organisation becomes so large individual accountability becomes lost, vast ranks of poorly paid and ill-trained people read scripts and if a problem is more difficult or unusual than the run of the mill it is very difficult to get the problem brought to the attention of someone with the ability and the authority to sort it.

[mixture]

I think the major problem whether it is BT or any other massive operation is that when an organisation becomes so large individual accountability becomes lost, vast ranks of poorly paid and ill-trained people read scripts and if a problem is more difficult or unusual than the run of the mill it is very difficult to get the problem brought to the attention of someone with the ability and the authority to sort it.

I think that summarises things nicely in a nutshell, and the above applies irrespective of industry too (large airlines etc.).

[Phalconphixer]

OFSO said...I had big problems here with my Spanish ISP which is owned by British Telecom.

Same here so I guess we are talking Telefonica. When we first moved out here to rural Andalucia back in 2006 Telefonica's idea if ADSL was 256Kbps down 25kbps up... little better than dial-up. Two years or so passed and T'fonica upgraded our system to 1Mbps and almost immediately to a new 3Mbps / 320kbps system. All was well for about a year and then as more villagers bought computers and demanded internet access the system slowly went downhill. Couple that with the fact that about 18 months ago T'fonica farmed out their repair and maintenance contracts to a company called ITETE.
Since then the whole ADSL system has gone to ratsh*t.
I have been calling T'fonicas Tech help line on average about once a month for eighteen months now to complain about decaying ADSL speeds; my contracted 3Mpbs / 320Kbps service normally returns speeds of around 2.5M /270K and this is acceptable for our normal use. However we can only ever get this for around 3 weeks at a time; normally the download rate decays to around 650K although the upload rate remains fairly constant.

So as regular as clockwork I call them to report the new fault, they come out to the switching centre in the village, do their repair thing and go away and all is well again for about three weeks then it all starts again.

Lately however its the other way around... on the whole our download speed varies with the time of day and hence system loading but is generally >1M, it's the upload speeds that have decayed; typically down to <10k. I called them on 4th Oct and was advised that there was a general problem for our village that was being attended to; sure enough speeds increased after 24hrs but within a couple of days things were just as bad as ever. So I called them again... my original incident report had been closed. This time I used their online tech. chatline; agent said he would check the line from his location, he did so and returned a no fault found diagnosis; he suggested I use the T'fonica (Movistar) speedtester so I did and sure enough got 2.7M / 270K result. I thanked him for tweaking whatever he had tweaked and signed off... 15 minutes later just as bad again 2.5 / 0 (zero). Since then its been the same story every day; downloads are time of day and traffic dependent but uploads are all over the place varying between 0 and no better than 90k.

I should point out that we have 3 computers all cable connected to the router, we don't use the wifi facility. All three computers show the same results when I use either speedtest.net or movistars own dedicated speed tester.

I sent their tech line an email last night (again) outlining the recurrence of the problem and got a reply this morning... my email has been forwarded on the tecnicos...

I have serious doubts about the capabilities of ITETE (Granada) engineers; a search on the internet provided an insight from a former engineer of theirs which is far from good.

Like OFSO I am seriously considering an email to the CEO of BT...

But as in so many rural areas of Spain, T'fonica are the only game in town... its pointless changing our ISP because others piggyback onto the same crappy infrastructure. Cable and or Fibre optic isn't going to happen in my lifetime at this location. Wimax is not an option we don't have line of sight to a mast and satellite is just way to expensive, is capped for traffic and has a most unfair Fair Usage Policy.

Why the hell they cant get their act together and sort it once and for all? What really gets to me is the fact that if we lived in one of the main cities we could have 20 or 30M fibreoptics for the same price we are paying...

pp

[Hussar 54]

Many Thanks to everyone for their help, advice and explanations....

I see that the daughter is not alone in having Broadband problems caused not by the provider, but by the infrastructure....

And special thanks to Mixture for the pm....The daughter will contact BT directly using the address provided....

Meanwhile, still varying between 125kbps and 250 kbps this weekend.....It really pees us off that this is from the same company who advertise speeds up to 20mbps...I wonder who and how many people really do get 20mbps ?