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Author Topic: BT Stay or Bust?  (Read 3999 times)

kieran0065

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BT Stay or Bust?
« on: August 06, 2018, 09:47:50 AM »

So i have been with BT for around 6-7 months now, and its been endless problems... When i first moved into my house, there had been a disruption in the line once before and OR had patched the line and put it in a waterproof box, which by the time i had moved into the place it had fallen off the wall, cracked because of the sun, and it had started to snow and it got inside the box and was clearly messing with things, so i contacted BT... and it took over a week of calls to get them to understand my issue and to send a engineer to my home, and i got that fixed...

Now a new problem a few months later came up, speeds dropped, and line became unstable. This time BT's support was superb, they found an issue on their network and 2 days later i had an engineer on my doorstep. He tested things and noticed something very strange, my line was in great condition, absolutely no noise but my speeds where 20mbps slower then what they should've been so he went to the streetcab, and found the connection i was on was faulty and replaced it, BOOM i went from low 50mbps to almost full package speeds... and it had been great for months.

Now im once again at a headache with BT... i had power issues in my home, which caused the main breaker to keep flipping and causing everything to go off. This issue has been resolved. But in wake of that, my line rate had gone from 72mbps to 60mbps (Attainable rate has stayed around 76mbps) and then this morning my line drops on its own and now my snr has gone upto 7.8db from 5.9db. and now my speeds are at 53mbps. I did yesterday try and contact BT but both times i was talking to their support agents both times the live chat was disconnected by them leaving the chat... So today after the line re-sync, i contacted them again... It was hopeless, the support person said they would be back in 5mins after doing checks. And they came back 10mins later saying nothing could be done because i didn't have the Hub 6 installed, and they told me that installing the Hub 6 would FIX EVERYTHING... which is obviously wouldn't... and didn't...
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so now im in this position... what am i going to do... their support staff have absolutely no clue what their saying... but i have the feeling that if i try and move to another provider their going to slap a bloody termination fee on me, and that'll just put me in an even worse financial position then what i am in already... But if i had the option to move provider who should i go with? I have heard good things about a ISP called Zen and they are apparently in my area, however i have noticed their a little more expensive. But if someone can point me in a good direction that'll be great :)
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parkdale

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2018, 11:26:59 AM »

Hi Kieran, because of your power cuts it appears that the DLM has put you on a lower download speed (banded), I know this can be a little frustrating, but you will have to bare with it until it decides that things are 'normal' again.
Give it a couple of weeks(or more) for things to resolve them selves.
I am not so impressed by the BT call center staff being a bit lax in their dealings with you, not really on.... You could email the BT CEO to say how lovely and helpful his call center staff are..... not :'(

On a positive note as you Snr has moved up to 7.8 from 5.9 this is where your extra speed will come from..
Like you I seem to have regular bouts of line mischief, but a quick call to my provider will normally get this put right... in some cases 3 month!! but I got what I wanted :)
I'm with John Lewis broadband  who sub their services from Plusnet (who are owned by BT!)

Foot note:-  As your in contract I would stay with BT , don't jump ship until they offer to let you go ;D, just keep at them until they give in..
« Last Edit: August 06, 2018, 11:29:43 AM by parkdale »
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kieran0065

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2018, 11:38:29 AM »

It wasn't their Call center's its from their Live chat support, which im guessing is in the same place tbh... yesterday i got a call from them after i had gone to sleep... later in the day i answered the voicemail and the person on the other side was inaudible, there was extreme noise, sounded like they had a fan blowing over their phone the whole time...

What i was more annoyed about yesterday BEFORE the chats got ended by their staff, i was told that my DLM and SNRM would not be able to be reset until there are no disconnections, and i dont plan on having anymore power cuts... but im pretty sure the person just didn't know what they where talking about as when i had an engineer here before, they reset my DLM before leaving and i saw an instant jump in sync once the line re-synced.... again more scriptic crap from their support people... :@

As to the leaving the contract, yeah im not gonna jump ship while they have me in their money grabbing hands, im not going to give them the justification to extract anymore money out of me then they have already.

Thanks for the reply :)
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parkdale

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2018, 12:24:10 PM »

Getting problems 'Escalated' to high level support staff is the hardest part...
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j0hn

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #4 on: August 06, 2018, 01:17:33 PM »

I don't see how it can be BT's fault that you have had multiple power cuts causing the line to be banded.


Quote
What i was more annoyed about yesterday BEFORE the chats got ended by their staff, i was told that my DLM and SNRM would not be able to be reset until there are no disconnections, and i dont plan on having anymore power cuts... but im pretty sure the person just didn't know what they where talking about as when i had an engineer here before

They are very correct. What would be the point in resetting the DLM if you are still having the problem. It will just get banded again. I would advise waiting till the power cuts have 100% stopped as the way DLM is designed it will just continue to lower the banding on the line of it continues to see disconnections.

Quote
And they came back 10mins later saying nothing could be done because i didn't have the Hub 6 installed, and they told me that installing the Hub 6 would FIX EVERYTHING... which is obviously wouldn't... and didn't...

Most large ISP's will insist on you using the modem they provided you with. There are good reasons for this too.
It really isn't hard to connect the BT Hub before calling them to keep them happy.

My advice is resolve your power issues, then go on the BT community forums and ask the mods to arrange a DLM reset.
They will absolutely not do this if they line is still showing multiple daily drops though.

It's not BT's fault, the DLM is unbiased and doesn't care which ISP you are with. It would have banded your line no matter what ISP you used.
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kieran0065

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #5 on: August 06, 2018, 01:40:39 PM »

Quote
I don't see how it can be BT's fault that you have had multiple power cuts causing the line to be banded.
Who said i was blaming BT for having powercuts?
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I would advise waiting till the power cuts have 100% stopped
Not sure if you read properly and im not having ago but i did say my power issue's where resolved "i had power issues in my home, which caused the main breaker to keep flipping and causing everything to go off. This issue has been resolved."

I did not know that the BT Community Forum's Moderators had the power to do this, i will look into this :) And my line wont have anymore drops(unless its a retraining), before the power issue i had over 3 months of uptime, the last time it came down was when i re-wired my house's stupidly placed Master Socket (by the front door where the closest socket is either in the kitchen or in the living room, over 4M away...) So the line is VERY stable on its own without any power issues.

Quote
It's not BT's fault, the DLM is unbiased and doesn't care which ISP you are with. It would have banded your line no matter what ISP you used.
I know its not BT's fault... i mean its not even their problem, their just the middleman... Changing ISP is not on the principle that the DLM will be different.... its on principle of the Company i'd go with will have competent support staff to assist its customers.
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Ronski

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #6 on: August 06, 2018, 04:00:51 PM »

Unless you move to a smaller ISP and therefore more expensive, support will not be great. Apparently A&A have the best support and will argue with OR/BTW to get faults fixed, but they are not cheap.
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Weaver

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #7 on: August 06, 2018, 06:06:23 PM »

Andrews and Arnold, aa.net.uk, whom I use, have a reputation for pushing BT hard to get things sorted out. All their staff are humans with names and really know their stuff, no morons with sheets of instructions to follow. They have a lot of very sexy features and you can examine, change and manage a lot of things yourself if you want to. There are cheaper ISPs, but having decent staff paid properly costs money. It will not cost you anything to talk to them and find out if they are right for you. See also reviews on ISPReview. You can talk to other AA customers in AA’s IRC chat room. I think Zen is a good ISP and I am told Idnet is good too, also heard good things about uno.
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Black Sheep

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #8 on: August 06, 2018, 07:36:41 PM »

In very simple terms ..... it depends on what you want to spend ??

I have had my FTTC circuit for years now, with nothing going wrong whatsoever. I have no idea what the savings would have been if I'd chosen TT as my ISP, over A&A ??*

Weaver quite rightly chooses A&A as he has a 7km D-side in the wilds of Scotland .... the percentage chances of him requiring assistance over a bog-standard terraced house in the centre of town, are greatly increased.

*I am an Openreach engineer with BT Retail as my ISP, and was just using the above as an example.  :)

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Weaver

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #9 on: August 07, 2018, 01:41:14 AM »

Black Sheep is quite correct. Everyone thinks that with AA it is all about support, but that is not it for me. That seems to be an assumption, I would not want to be without all of AA’s many facilities: IPv6 which used to be a luxury, static IP address blocks for free so no NAT, excellent email, reverse DNS, 4G, VoIP, CQM and the incredible clueless control panel, the ability to change everything yourself and launch tests yourself without having to even ask cust serv, the integration between router manufacturer and ISP so there the buck stops, IP link bonding so you can use multiple lines as if they were one, 3G failover, instant notifications when a line goes down, the fact that you know individual staff names so it has a human scale, so many other features that I cannot even remember all of them. I use absolutely every one of the bells and whistles and absolutely love knowing what is going on and feeling in control, as well as not being treated like a moron.

Perhaps someone should do a tour of all the various facilities, but only if people would be interested. I am notorious for promoting AA anyway, but out of a genuine desire to offer people an alternative which might help them when they sound frustrated or which might tickle their techie tast buds. AA is absolutely hopeless at advertising or marketing and even this existing user finds it hard to find things some how as some information is not well linked to on their website.

Multi-line bonding is where it all started out. I can no longer put up with 2.5 Mbps ADSL2, especially the upstream, that is not enough for a business. The local incredibly unreliable long range wireless wan service with zero guarantees of throughput is not remotely an option either. There were very few who offer a service that delivers this fully , without qualifications and in both directions. I tried Zen and AA and AA won. I don't think Zen offered multi-line bonding.
« Last Edit: August 07, 2018, 03:14:56 AM by Weaver »
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kitz

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #10 on: August 07, 2018, 02:17:00 AM »

Quote
if i try and move to another provider their going to slap a bloody termination fee on me, and that'll just put me in an even worse financial position then what i am in already

BT are set to raise their prices next month.   This could give you a get out of jail card free card if you are wishing to change providers.

OFCOM rules state that if an ISP increases their monthly subscription then they have to give you at least a months notice and must allow you to exit without penalty if you disagree with the increase.

Quote
I have heard good things about a ISP called Zen

If by 'in your area' you mean they have their own network (LLU), then swapping to them should cause a DLM reset.

Something to be aware of with a DLM reset*, although it should clear any capping, it will go into the default profile...  which now starts off as the line being interleaves (which may cost you a bit of speed).   Once DLM sees the line is stable then it should automatically remove the interleaving.


*That is any DLM reset - be in done by BT as a request to Openreach or for a change of provider.
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Weaver

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #11 on: August 07, 2018, 03:12:00 AM »

To add to what my good friend Black Sheep said, you are not me and I am not you, our priorities are different and the value we place on things is not all the same. A lot of us could spend our money on things other than ISPs too. So you know your needs and feelings about things.
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kieran0065

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #12 on: August 07, 2018, 08:50:20 AM »

Thanks for all the great reply's! I did look at AA, and noticed they dont quite have a Unlimited Plan, and currently their cap is at 2TB (an offer right now) but looking at my router stats, i can easily blow right though that in a month... In June of this year, from my router stats i had a total bandwidth usage of: 2,839.90 GB. So almost 3TB of data... Something which im afraid that if i was to go with something like that im constantly going to be checking how much data i have left... I'm Quite the heavy internet user, i watch alot of streaming services, and i also myself stream to twitch, and in June i uploaded over 700GB of data which half of that could be to twitch alone... And looking at the package i would go for, it would cost me £60 a month, and yeah thats way too much for me right now... But there's always hope.

Thanks for all the reply's though :)
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johnson

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #13 on: August 07, 2018, 09:08:24 AM »

i had power issues in my home, which caused the main breaker to keep flipping and causing everything to go off. This issue has been resolved.

Can I ask how long it has been since you solved your power issues?
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Weaver

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Re: BT Stay or Bust?
« Reply #14 on: August 07, 2018, 09:55:01 AM »

AA may just not be right for you, every is different. Maybe take a look at Zen, IdNet and Uno?

AA charges me for what I use, and I have absolutely no cap at all. I just get billed for what I use, without limit. I have an overnight deal with downloads at £3.90 per TB, but they do not advertise things very well. Uploads are free. You would have to talk to sales and tell them exactly what you want and make them do the work in working it out for you. That is how they remain really fast, by not giving most people (apart from some very expensive business deals iirc) completely all-you-can-eat-for-free deals. They are absolutely determined not to become overloaded and become the bottleneck, that is their attitude.

A lot of people think that AA has caps, but that is just because they do not advertise the full range of options properly.

Another thing - what about a UPS to protect your modem from Part II: The wrath of BT DLM ?
« Last Edit: August 07, 2018, 09:59:19 AM by Weaver »
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