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[toulouse]

[/Rant On]

Is it just me or does BT need a Jolly Good Kick Up the A*se ?

My personal view is that the sooner all the infrastructure that they inherited from Mrs Thatcher et al,  is wrested from their control and given to someone who knows what to do with it all, the better. They have got to be one of the worst businesses in this country and are allowed to get away with MURDER.


[/Rant Off]

[roseway]

BT aren't to blame for everything that goes wrong. They're a commercial company trying to do their best for their shareholders, while having one hand tied behind their back by OFCOM. I'm not suggesting that they're perfect (far from it) but the regulatory framework in which they operate puts a big distortion into the market, and this is often not to the benefit of the users. The cable companies and LLU operators have been handed a big advantage in the market, so they can cherry-pick the most profitable places to offer their services, whereas BT have the USO for telephones, and a sort of moral USO for broadband services. In the same regulatory framework I doubt if any other owner could do any better.

[toulouse]

Thanks for that Eric. I'm very glad that you're not suggesting that BT are anywhere near perfect.

What you say about them trying to do their best for shareholders just about sums it up. They don't give a hoot about their customers do they.

And what pray is the purpose of the revised BT Performance Tester thingy when it reports that an acceptable speed result is anything between 600kbps and 7150kbps which is what I got over the weekend.

[kitz]

>> BT states that if I was getting 400kbps then they would deem that acceptable.

Thats always been the case - ADSL - Acceptable Speeds defined .

Well to put it more correctly.. its called contention - remember how they used to say 50:1 or 20:1.
This just puts some speeds into perspective..  and in actual fact are better than 50:1 which is what we are supposed to be paying for.

>> Why don't we say ok then,I find £2.99 a month acceptable for what I am receiving

In a way..  we have had it good.  What few people today dont realise is that adsl is a shared resource.. and its cheap because we share the costs and resources with others.

A dedicated 2Mb leased line is somewhere just shy of about £1000 per month.
A 622Mb ISP Central comes in at around 1.75 million pounds per annum!  This is even before you start thinking about the backhaul costs from the exchange.

To make adsl affordable to the masses, we share the amount of available bandwidth and the costs...  so what you pay is already divided up and the bandwidth expected to be shared with others.

Where it goes wrong is when too many users max out their lines 24/7...  or the ISP over-subscribes in order to cut costs.
 

[sevenlayermuddle]

Kitz, thanks for explaining that, it's clearly not as unreasonable as it may seem.

What I find annoying however, however, is that I think maybe ISPs (mine's demon, but I expect they all do it) use the BT worst-case contended scenario as a 'get out of jail' card, to duck the issue of poor performance. 

The last time I complained to demon about poor throughput, which looked very much like congestion or traffic shaping within Demon, they simply quoted Bt's 400kbps 'acceptable figure for the contended service'.

[roseway]

ISPs (mine's demon, but I expect they all do it) use the BT worst-case contended scenario as a 'get out of jail' card, to duck the issue of poor performance.

Yes, that can be extremely frustrating, but not all ISPs do that. There are good ones and bad ones, and I think we all have a pretty good idea which ones are the worst offenders...

[kitz]

Re-done the page with new info.

Thankyou to those whose screen caps I used