Cheers. I'm trialing 4G with Three at the moment. Best speed is from O2, followed by EE with Three as slowest and cheapest. I was hoping not to ditch the landline primarily because there's really no accountability for mobile data, for example no speed estimate or assurance of any sort, and probably no way they would attend a mast fault purely based on one end user report in any case. So I wanted to have something like a year on 4G before burning my bridges.
FTTPoD is theoretically available, but came back as no bid unless I paid £250 for a survey. I was only asking for a laugh really, it was highly unlikely to affordable. I wanted to see if it came out higher than the £26,000 that someone on Think Broadband was quoted.
Moving the cable is an interesting idea, but not trivial. It's around 200 metres of 50 pair armoured cable directly buried in the verge alongside the public road. There's a pole at one end effectively at the corner of the field that the electric fence surrounds. I guess the option is worth following up the idea. The contradiction we face is that it's only us complaining, but BT is saying the fault "will" or "would" effect everyone. They're not actually saying it "is" affecting anyone else. So it may end up with one part of BT saying "we're not moving that cable just for one customer" at the same time as they're also saying there's nothing wrong with our service because this an issue affecting everyone.
Yeah but as you have discovered how much does this limited accountability on VDSL give you, you have ended up with a deadlock. The handoff speed is openreach saying we will look into it, but there is no guarantee that anything would be fixed. Ultimately consumer xDSL is a "best efforts" service and the cost pressures put on openreach by the regulator is leading to situations that you have found yourself in.
From what you have described 200m in a verge (not even a duct), I dont consider an overly hard task for a large telco company, depending on how much effort is required to get the machinery and people in place to do the work (roadworks approval needed on busy road?). The issue is tho is openreach are on such tight cost controls with an emphasis on low quality low cost, then they will very aggressively reject doing any of this type of work.
Also they cannot prove its only affecting you, a silent customer doesnt necessarily not have a problem, different customers have different tolerance levels, and of course even if someone else has complained it may have been misdiagnosed or not gone far enough up the support chain to be registered as the same problem, so I think the response from BT is nonsense.
e.g. in my ADSL days BT would often respond I was the only complaining customer until one day they decided to admit it was a problem known on the E side for over 3 years but because of the road it went under there was zero chance of remedial work been carried out, so they knew about the problem for 3 years yet were initially claiming I was the only complainant. It was AAISP that dragged this information out of them.
I agree it will be a very tough ask to get openreach to reroute the cable, I think they should do it, but they probably wont. Hence me suggesting taking your hard earned money away from them and moving to alternative tech. Also with the mobile companies they cannot brush you off as easily as VDSL isp's in my view, as you dont have this silly middle man forced ofcom style arrangement removing accountability e.g. openreach has no accountability whatsoever with you as a consumer, they also still make revenue from you if you switch xDSL suppliers. As they the sole monopoly supplier at the top of the chain. With the mobile companies its not quite like that (resellers excluded).
I have used the following types of broadband.
In order from worst to best reliability for downtime.
ADSL
VDSL
Cable
3G
4G
I have yet to have a noticeable outage on 4G at my home address although the service isnt used 24/7 like my fixed broadband tho.
However when it comes to performance consistency its perhaps more like this worse to best.
Cable
3G
4G
ADSL/VDSL tied.
There is variability on my 4G but the slowest I have seen it is still multiple 10s of mbits/sec. But I am using EE. However I do also have a giffgaff sim (O2), so may do some testing on that for curiosity. Three seem the only mobile telco at the moment interested in competing with fixed line broadband on 4G, I think if you not in the middle of a big city they worth a shot.