[UK] British Telecom suck
Community Forums/General Help/[UK] British Telecom suck
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| I've lived in this house for two and a half years now, and always had around 6.5Mbps download speeds. In the last five weeks or so, that's dropped to exactly 2Mbps. Every speed test I do comes to at least 1.97Mbps, often 1.99Mbps. I'm not over the usage limit, BT claim they are not restricting my speed, but I beg to differ. I have had heated email exchanges with their so-called Customer Service people in Delhi or wherever the hell they are, and got absolutely nowhere. They repeatedly tell me to check things in their copy/pasted emails that I have told them I've already done. Eventually I got them to escalate the matter, and immediately (literally, it was about a minute from getting the fault log email when I checked it) the problem was flagged as "fixed". The only option I had available to to "accept as fixed". But it isn't! I've now had to start ALL OVER AGAIN, only this time I've gone through their complaints procedure and threatened to take my business elsewhere. I thought that was getting a result when they offered to send a BT Broadband engineer out to check things over. What they DIDN'T tell me (and I just found this out today), is that they are planning on charging my £99+VAT for their engineer's little jaunt to my house! They tried that before at a previous address, and sent THREE engineers as I KNEW there was a line fault, but the first two didn't do their job right and couldn't find a problem. The third engineer sorted it in 20 minutes but they still tried charging me for the first two callouts! I am absolutely pig bloody sick of BT, and I've just this second emailed them to request a MAC code. They don't give a toss about their customers, and I'll be buggered if I'm going to keep paying them over £40 a month when they've effectively cut my service to 30% of what it was little more than a month ago, and are plotting to charge me another £120+ for THEM to fix it. I'm looking at going to either Sky or O2 for broadband and phone/line rental, and BT can kiss my rosy red arse. No provider on this planet can possibly do a worse job than British Telecom (which in my opinion should be called India Telecom, since what's where 90% of their staff live). Any recommendations for phone/broadband? |
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| I'm in a strop now. Meant to post this in General Help. :/ |
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| I am moving to O2 in the next couple of weeks. Good reviews and comparatively cheap. I can definitely tell you not to consider TalkTalk, because I had much the same experience with them as you've just had with BT. |
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| TalkTalk? Avoid it! go for O2 for broadband :) Last edited 2012 |
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| My countrymen need bredbands bolaget! http://www.bredbandsbolaget.se/bredband/snabbarebredband/index.html (for :- to £ divide price by roughly 10 but the pound is on the more powerful side..... and no it is not shared) Unfortunately until one of our governments in power actually grow a pair on the state of our nation's infrastructure you are all stuck with talk-talk, o2, BT etc... Last edited 2012 |
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| Eventually I got them to escalate the matter All broadband providers do this "escalate" thing, what a load of tosh... When I lived at my first house, I had Tiscali in and they did it too, I had a right barney with one of their tech support fellas, speaking to foreign geezers, who couldnt understand me, sprouting the same old check list shenanigans... Over a week I had no broadband, given the same old "wait 24 hours" bull, nowt... Then one of them said "We will escalate your problem"... Then I blew up... I was like "ESCALATE... ESCALATE... I've got no bloody broadband man, I've had none for a week, and your trying to soften it up by saying your going to escalate my problem... I have a problem, it's not bloody working, you've had all week, I couldnt give a shit about your buzz word bollocks, honestly, if you dont get it back on within 24 hours, I'll conclude that your company is a pile of bollocks and I'll just go somewhere else"... Then hung up... Suffice to say, it never got fixed, I got my Mac code, moved to (funnily enough) BT, took a few days to get connected... And never had a problem at all! TalkTalk? Oh, and them... 7 times I tried to pay a bill with my card, 7 times the (again) foreign fella on the other end couldnt understand me, Laura tried 3 times and failed, I hung up, rang their customer support, asked for cancellations, a English voice popped on the line, I said I wanted to cancel, he went "Oh, why?"... Both barrels!!! :D A few months later I was just coming out of my front door, there was a bridle path that ran along the front of the houses, and as soon as I stepped out, a bloke appeared with a Talk Talk ID thing around his neck, he went "Hi, may I ask who your broadband provider is?", I went "If you think I'm going to go with your lot you've got another thing coming, your rubbish"... He was like "Oh, have you been with us before?", I was "Aye, and I'll never go back to you again", I explained why... Language barrier, if I cannot pay my bill, well, what can I do, I hated the fact that call centres got shipped abroad, not in a racist issue, on the simple fact it's a sodding nightmare ringing the places and talking to someone who doesnt understand you... To my amazement, this Talk Talk rep give me the biggest racist rant I'd ever heard... Proper BNP slaver... I was shocked, and just walked away in disbelief... Still cannot believe it now!!! Dabz |
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| Most of the time when they go into the 'check list' I normally say 'cant we just skip to the end of your script and its still not fixed' then they get rather sheepish and then send someone to fix it LOL :) |
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| I ditched BT years ago due to their escalating prices and stupid advanced billing. About 4 years ago I moved to Orange Broadband. I pay £22 a month which includes line rental + free UK calls 24/7 + 20mb unlimited broadband (yes unlimited as I negotiated past the 40gb fair usage bit). My speed is just over 19mb as I live 5 minutes from the exchange. |
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| Bear in mind that you'll still be having all the same problems when there's a line fault - except that it'll be even harder to prevent being charged incorrectly - if you change to any other provider than BT that still uses the BT line. As I'm sure you know, it all goes through BT OpenReach and I can tell you from experience, that BT OpenReach is by far the worst part of the company to deal with. Your actual provider will be bullied into blaming you and will do nothing to stand up for you against OR. If they're intentionally throttling you and there's no line fault, then you might well benefit from moving to another provider. I've never noticed any throttling on Sky. Are you in a cabled area? Virgin Media are typically considerably more expensive than most (all?) of the BT-powered services, but you do get what you paid for. If I had cable available, there's no one else I'd consider using. Last edited 2012 |
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| I am with Sky and have been with them for many years now. Initially with their old Netgear routers (wireless G) I had poor connections (around 1-3Mbps which varied from day to day). I thought I couldn't get better speeds than this since I am over 3 miles from the local exchange ... their help support is pretty helpful and went over my setup. They advised me to get a faceplate (I got this one) :- http://www.run-it-direct.co.uk/BTNTE5ADSLfaceplate.html I then enquired about their new Sagem wireless routers (these are much better than Netgear) and I also bought my own 300mbps wireless usb adapter and got rid of the crappy netgear one (which incidentally would disconnect once it got too hot). I now get a stable 6.5Mbps which is a hell of a lot improvement than the crappy speeds I was getting before. Oh remember if you talk to Sky support, you can ask them to boost your broadband speeds ... when you get broadband from them they limit the speed for everyone unless you ASK them to boost it ... they will retest the line and give you the fastest possible speed. |
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| Your not using one of those BT Home Hub efforts are you, they take your personal net bandwidth and pass if out as a public WIFI hotspot? |
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| Your not using one of those BT Home Hub efforts are you, they take your personal net bandwidth and pass if out as a public WIFI hotspot? Yes, and to be fair you can (and I have) disable that. |
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| Hmmm... I don't know then. I had a friend once who had great internet then one day it dropped dramatically. The cause was one I never had heard of before, simply put, a neighbour wanted internet connected to there house and instead of running a new line from the junction box, he simply did a digital split of my friends telephone line. This halved his bandwidth. |
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| Have you tried resetting your router? I'm pretty sure you probably have but I thought I'd mention it anyway. |
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| No provider on this planet can possibly do a worse job than British Telecom You haven't heard of Telstra have ya ;) |
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| @big10p - first thing I tried! @therevills - nope! But actually, Supanet were FAR worse than BT. |
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| Just got my MAC code through, and with it a "fantastic offer" to upgrade to BT Broadband Option 3 (i'm currently option 2), and get it for half the price i'm currently paying for option 2, and that will get me, and I quote "the same level of service". The level of service is why I asked for a MAC code! So, looking like O2. I was with them before and only left because they weren't a LLU operator on the new exchange when i moved house. Last edited 2012 |
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| Anybody heard of Xilo? |
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| Well... finally spoken to somebody with a jot of sense at BT, and they reset my IP Profile and my internet is back up to speed. Decided to take BT's offer after all, but I along with my acceptance email I've had a bloody good rant about the level of customer service I've received, and how the line reset should have been one of the first things they tried rather than sending me off-the-peg emails from the likes of Prasoon Das and Arajit Bag in Delhi, telling me to do all sorts of nonsense that never ever helps. |
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| off-the-peg emails from the likes of Prasoon Das and Arajit Bag in Delhi I know they are in Delhi and sound like they were born, raised there but you're in fact talking to Mike and Jack. Last edited 2012 |
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