Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => ISPs => Topic started by: sotonsam on May 02, 2018, 09:15:00 PM
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Does anyone on here have any experience of BT Business?
Someone I know has been offered the 'Premium Infinity for Business, inc. 4G Assure and Landline' for £45 p/m at their office (believe it or not, but they have no internet at the mo)- but I can only give him my view on my residential Infinity.
I'm struggling to see the benefit to be honest (apart from 1 static IP, and the 4G...which seems a bit of a gimmick if I'm honest…!!!!), I'm tempted to just recommend a standard FTTC residential provider...but before I go back I wanted to check to see peoples experiences, and if there really is a genuine reason to plump for business over residential for an SME setup. (given that they’ll be using exactly the same local loop and cab as if they were on residential…)
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I was with BT Business, their service was fine but support wasn't the best in the world by any means even though it was based in the UK. I remember also receiving paper bills (not paperless) back then, must be several years ago now. I switched to Zen Internet for a while and then finally now AAISP. Wouldn't blink again, AAISP have been superb. Even today they've reset DLM on my first FTTC line (I have two FTTC lines with them, bonded). BT Business charge extras for IP addresses or even a single static IP, most ISP's do not. You may be better off finding another ISP like Zen or AAISP or something.
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Cheers.
I did actually mention Zen to him, they seem to get decent reviews. AAISP seem a bit pricey though (even for just home)....but I guess you pay for what you get!
Are they the 'BE Unlimited' style provider of today?
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Don't know about other ISPs, but business use is against the T&Cs of BT residential.
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AA is pricey for a good reason, they are just stunning. And very good for business users.
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Cheers.
I did actually mention Zen to him, they seem to get decent reviews. AAISP seem a bit pricey though (even for just home)....but I guess you pay for what you get!
Are they the 'BE Unlimited' style provider of today?
Regarding the 'BE Unlimited' comparison, I would say yes. The control panel is functional and insightful (e.g. CQM graph, line test, PPP kill or such other functionality within it). You get what you pay for. I was with Zen who failed to send out an SFI engineer last year when I had issues with my line at an old address. I ordered a second line from AAISP and still had problems on that line, Shaun got on to the case immediately and four SFI engineers later (three of which were escalated, one commented that my provider must know someone in a high place at Openreach haha) the problem I was having somewhat improved and was much more under control, within a span of about two weeks I think. No charges for any of the SFI engineers and excellent customer service overall!
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I would suggest that as a business they perhaps might not want to solely be thinking about shaving off a pound or so of cost to get a worse service. AA have a fast network. That might or might not matter. Businesses do often care a lot about downtime. What happens when things go wrong - it's then you need someone to really fight BT for you.
AA can set you up with 4G failover and / or multiple dsl lines for reliability. That might be worth something depending on the business needs for reliability.
It is very comforting knowing where the buck stops too.
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I had BT Business for a while.
Never again, BT Business were unbelievably incompetent, totally screwing up their instructions to OR.
By far the worst ISP I have ever encountered.
They appear to be a franchise operation, so their behaviour may vary across the country.
I switched to Plusnet Business and had mixed feelings about them.
I switched both my home and remote lines to A&A at the turn of the year, and am delighted with them.
Usually problem free.
I can remember just one day recently when there were brief periods of inaccessibility, which I assume were due to minor glitches with the new TT network.
In my opinion A&A are considerably better than Be were.
A&A allowances go further than you might think as:
* Half your unused monthly allowance is carried forward.
* Uploads are free.
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Thanks for the info. I understand there are t&c's against running business on residential, so I'll make that clear to him.
I will recommend AA - and that's also someone I'm keen to look at myself in a year when my BT contract is up. I loved my time with BE, even though it was only standard ADSL2. Having a techy ISP and support who understand what you need and what you're asking for is priceless.
I bet AA will be one of the first ISP's to offer DLM changing on their control panel whenever that's released. I remember with BE, you could go onto your control panel and change anything.... latency type, line profile type. Being able to test your line out yourself, at your own leisure, was brill.
Am I right in thinking that the people behind Hyperoptic are former ‘BE’ folk? I’d be all over that myself if they did single residential dwellings…!
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Iirc AA used to resell BE lines, btw.
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Quick question about AA.
So, if you go with Home:200gb....and hit that limit, can you then purchase the 'blocks' I've read about?
If not, what's the process once you hit 200gb? I'm sure they don't cut you off, so it's probably pretty likley they throttle your service down to the low mb's....maybe.
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So, if you go with Home:200gb....and hit that limit, can you then purchase the 'blocks' I've read about?
If not, what's the process once you hit 200gb? I'm sure they don't cut you off, so it's probably pretty likley they throttle your service down to the low mb's....maybe.
I think you can choose - either the line will be throttled to a low speed until you top up manually, or you can configure an "auto top-up".
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sotonsam, don't know as I don't use that deal. AA sales will tell you, or ask anyone staff or customers on AA IRC channel or on twitter / sms / email.
I use the old units tariff, wherein I buy so many -pre-purchased download units each month and nothing happens if you use more then that, the excess just gets charged at a slightly higher rate. If I don't use all the units that I have purchased then the remainder gets carried over to the next month (with a limit of an extra 100% of the pre-purchase). It is extremely expensive if you use a lot in the daytime weekdays so not recommended unless you fit a certain pattern but if you do downloads in the time band 0200-0559 BST then it's incredible as it's charged at one ‘unit’ (£3.90) per TB download.
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Quick question about AA.
So, if you go with Home:200gb....and hit that limit, can you then purchase the 'blocks' I've read about?
If not, what's the process once you hit 200gb? I'm sure they don't cut you off, so it's probably pretty likley they throttle your service down to the low mb's....maybe.
https://support.aa.net.uk/Home::1 - This may help.
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I would support the idea to get a business connection rather than a residential one.
However, while there is no doubt that A&A is a very good ISP it charges a premium for its services and I do wonder if it might be overkill for a firm which doesn't even have an internet connection atm. I am assuming they won't be particularly demanding/technical users of any connection, though it obviously depends what they use it for.
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The thing is they've said to me that they want to pay for 'premium' - so who am I to argue with them! AAISP is what I think they'll go for.....I sent the guy the reviews from here and also ISPReview and as you know, they're all 5 stars pretty much.
and whilst researching up on them, I decided to go with them as well at Home on a second line whilst by BT contract winds down......! Will allow me to have a play with load ballancing and other policy based routing techniques from my Pfsense box.
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Intertesting thread.
We have 5 AAISP lines and after the last fiasco with the DDos ordered 5x Bt business lines with 4g Assure.
So far 2 are using BT full time with the others pending. All have elevated support for line faults as well. Over the years (10+) with AAISP we have put up with the excuses about blips and downtime which has caused major disruption to us! 4g Assure works well and if you failover to 4g frequently BT are on it! we have already had a line fault fixed automatically.
We do have a Zen ADSL line (30 day rolling contract) as a failover for a microwave link supplied managed office. This will be going soon when FTTP is installed. BT business will be getting the contract and not Zen or AAISP.
For info i use AAISP as my home connection with Vermin as backup.
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Fyi I use AA and have a Firebrick router that offers automatic switchover to 4G supported by AA.
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Just spotted this
Am I right in thinking that the people behind Hyperoptic are former ‘BE’ folk? I’d be all over that myself if they did single residential dwellings…!
Yes they are the same people who founded BE*.
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Oh and welcome to the forum, Clivers! :-)
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The problem with BE was their network, it was great whilst it was under utilised, sort of like how VM always was great in areas that have barely any customers.
When the network started getting loaded up and especially when O2 started using it, the cracks appeared, and they even got into a spot of legal bother when they started trying to apply a FUP on a service advertised as unlimited.
So I hope these guys learnt that lesson on the network build and scalability of network to handle customer growth.
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AA used to use BE lines too before they got wed to TalkTalk.
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I don't think you can any way compare BE to VM. Fair enough there was a period whereby some of the busier exchanges were waiting to be upgraded but at least they would do so within weeks/couple of months. As regards to the 'FUP' if memory serves me correct it was either 3 or 5 people who they warned and I can't recall them getting into legal bother over it. Especially when just about every other ISP was using much harsher CAP/FUPs. BE were extremely relaxed even at people downloading 100's of GB back in the days when that was a heck of a lot.
I think you will find that the vast majority of BE users were a happy bunch and most were sad to see them go. On the whole they were fair and their CS were excellent because the staff knew what they were talking about. There was an OFCOM report in iirc 2012 (just before Sky bought them out) and of all the ISPs BE's network performed the best with least slow downs during peak time.
>> So I hope these guys learnt that lesson on the network build and scalability of network to handle customer growth.
The problems started after they were bought out by Telefonica who had their own issues and BE were no longer at the cutting edge, they were slow to roll out phone packages and never really got off the ground with FTTC at a time when people were wanting it and the BE guys had little say about the network. So if they have learnt anything it may well be not to pass control over to a larger organisation who were more concerned about cheap dsl for O2 users.
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Ignition and a few others reported BE to the ASA, the ASA decided BE were in the wrong and were told to change their website, then not long after BE closed up as an isp and stopped trading.
There was performance complaints prior to the O2 takeover, typically outside of the london part fo the network where there was issues not been resolved, when O2 tookover they provided funding to upgrade the network and things temporarily improved, but then they started loading up the network and more cracks appeared, now you can say its O2's fault for not investing on enough upgrades thats true, but the bit I am pointing out i the BE network in place at the time was not really capable of hosting large numbers of customers.
BE if not taken over were not capable if I remember correctly of even considering rolling out FTTC, they simply didnt have the funds/means to upgrade their infrastructure to support it, and O2 were the only way they could even attempt it.
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True they advertised Unlimited and had a very vague FUP
“If it’s felt that any Be member’s Internet activities are so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected, Be may give the member generating the excessive web traffic a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, should the levels of activity not immediately decrease after the warning, Be may terminate that member’s services.”
TBH hidden FUPs were a bug bear of mine and they were far from the only ISP that did this which is why I wrote the following page here (https://kitz.co.uk/isp/unlimited_ISPs.htm) You can see they were from far the worst culprit and not the only ISP who had hidden FUPs. I'm not saying it was right - far from it and I'm glad that practice changed. It's just unfair to say that BE were the only ISP doing so, when generally speaking they were far more tolerant than most other ISPs.
They invoked their FUP to one person who had been downloading over 1TB per month in Feb 2013 which tbh must have taken some doing on an adsl2+ connection, which is what triggered the report to ASA. (link below*)
As I mentioned the original owners of BE had already sold out to Telefonica by this time and Telefonica were having their own financial issues and investment in the network started to slow. Sky announced they were taking over on 1st March 2013, so it seems odd that the first time they invoked the FUP was during the Sky negotiation period. If they'd have left it just another month it wouldn't have been their problem so unless they did it make their network look better prior to sale ive no idea. I left BE after they announced the Sky takeover.
* BE Broadband Face Unlimited Questions After User Cut Off for Overuse (https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/02/isp-be-broadband-face-unlimited-questions-after-user-cut-off-for-overuse.html)
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We will never know the full details because a lot of the information would be private commercial information.
But to me the fact that it was only a single user who was issued the notice, makes it worse, because it would indicate a single user was capable of causing visible contention on that particular exchange which in itself suggests the shared capacity was small, I remember reading on TBB that BE were commonly using 100mbit pipes in exchanges whilst their competitors like SKY and talktalk were using gigabit in the same exchanges. If this was true, no idea but I remember reading it.
Also perhaps when looking at the bigger picture, if a single user downloading 1TB was a problem, then how would they manage FTTC? as 1TB per month on a 80/20 connection isnt that extreme, it would perhaps explain why we never seen FTTC services on BE. On a 16mbit connection (quite high but not unrealistically high sync for adsl2+) if pushed 24/7 the line would be capable of downloading about 5TB so such a line would be about 20% utilised over the course of the month. If you selling an unlimited service and one guy using his line at say 20% capacity makes things fall over, then that is perhaps poor planning.
It doesnt add up tho, if we assume a 100mbit shared pipe at the exchange which was the problem, and we assume the 1TB was all around peak hours as well so worst time possible for BE, and we also assume a high sync speed of around 16mbit, that is still about 84mbit of unutilised bandwidth which suggests there was a lot of load from other users as well and just that one user just was an easy target to try and get a quick reduction of utilisation on the backhaul and wouldnt have resolved the congestion but just made it less serious. So my speculation is that this particular exchange was one with good sales for O2, and they got caught out by the upsurge in users so no upgrade was carried out, and with an upcoming sale to sky, there was very likely an investment freeze so no approved upgrades and as such the only resolution available to network staff to ease the congestion was to try and lower the load from existing users hence the FUP notice been sent out.
As to the close proximity of the march handover to sky and the FUP been issued, consider that BE network staff may not have been aware of the march date (communication issues) and the time for meetings etc. to approve the FUP action so basically lag, then it can explain why the notice was sent so close to the sky takeover.