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Author Topic: BT Total Broadband  (Read 12191 times)

Dabber

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BT Total Broadband
« on: August 19, 2007, 12:45:17 PM »

Another new poster here. I've read a few threads re BT and having just migrated from Orange to BT (Option 3) and having numerous problems with speeds I thought this may interest a few BT users.

Having waited for the 10 day settling in period and also having Vision installed during this time, I was amazed to find my speed at less than 1.5mb. Contacting the Indian helpdesk was a nightmare. My slow speed was down intially to the CPU (it was running at 10% when running the speedtest). After convincing them they were talking thru their aris, it was then blamed on Vision being incompatible!!

After picking myself off the floor I had to explain that Vision was THEIR system and if it was imcompatible then they could take it out and then explain to Ofcom why they were marketing the product. The phone was then put down on me (NB I was never agressive all through the 2 hours on the phone). Anyway eventually someone who knew what they were talking about. Apparently my line was capped at 2 Mb. I explained that paying £22.99/month I expected at least double that speed. He agreed and requested the order Management team take the cap off and hey presto my speed is now around 5.5Mb.

Why the hell they put a cap on my line I don't know but if I hadn't asked them to remove it (and threaten to cancel the contract) I would still be running at a max of 2Mb. In fact at one stage my speed went down to was 138kbs for 2 days >:(

Mike
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Pwiggler

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #1 on: August 19, 2007, 12:53:56 PM »

hi mike and welcome to the forum

i'm on option 3 since jan this year and have had umpteem problems with bt.  not a capping problem but a throttling/shaping prob.  i argued with them for months actually telling the indian call centre what my problem was and how to fix it but none of the departments would admnit to traffic shaping.  eventually they updated their fair use policy and hey presto, they admitted it.

i wrote to them complaining bitterly about the bad service and what their policy was on lying to customers and eventually offered me $7.30 compensation !!!

i told them where to shove it but they still gave it me !!!

BT ey??

paul

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Paul

roseway

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #2 on: August 19, 2007, 01:17:18 PM »

Hi Mike and welcome.

I rather suspect that what actually happened is that your IP profile was stuck at 2 Mbps, rather than deliberate capping. This seems to be a rather common occurrence, and the help desk really ought to know about it. But we see so many messages from unhappy BT customers that I can only conclude that their help desk people get next to no training in doing anything other than reading the scripts.
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  Eric

kitz

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #3 on: August 19, 2007, 01:19:27 PM »

Hi and welcome :)
Could be numerous things going on here.

>> Apparently my line was capped at 2 Mb.

Wondering - what was your speed at Orange?  It could be possible that if you had a 2Mb fixed connection with them, then during migration your line could have come across as 2Mb and not been upgraded to MAXdsl. 

Your router should tell you your sync speed did you happen to notice what speed you were syncing to the exchange at?

Theres also the possibility that during the transfer you got whats known as a stuck 2Mb profile - which is quite common for some newly maxed lines.

As Pwiggler has also said - there have been problems with BT throttling connections during peak and traffic shaping which has effected all protocols...  running at 1.5Mb seems to be the "normal" peak time throttling.

>> In fact at one stage my speed went down to was 138kbs for 2 days

That could be a bad sync which affected your IP profile - which will limit your speeds for a few days until it adjusts.


[edit]
Sorry eric our posts crossed - see the stuck bRAS problem also occured to you.
Although BTr should be aware that such things can and do occur...  BT (and AOL) seem to be one of the ISPs whose help desks have little knowledge about it. :?
« Last Edit: August 19, 2007, 01:21:38 PM by kitz »
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Dabber

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2007, 02:13:29 PM »

Hi Kitz,

Looking at my router stats completely confused me. The downstream speeds were all over the place for the first few days (ranging from 2600 to 6500), but when the engineer came to install Vision, it shot up 8096 and stayed there for 24 hours and then dived to around 4000. I ran a few speed tests, including BT Speedtester and the speed tests were as alot lower (some below 1000), hence why I got onto BT.

With orange the speed was pretty constant around 1500 to 1800 when it worked. I used to have outages of 2 or 3 days at a time with Orange always blaming my wireless network hence me moving to a "better and more reliable ISP" - I am a sucker for punishment  ;) . Oh and believe me BT's helpdesk are IT gurus compared with Orange's helpdesk.

Mike
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roseway

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2007, 03:59:53 PM »

That does sound as though you were on a fixed 2 Mbps connection with Orange. Could you show us your router stats (particularly the attenuation and noise margin figures) as this may help us to  diagnose the problem.
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  Eric

Dabber

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2007, 04:26:40 PM »

Hi Eric,

The stats are:

Bandwidth (u/d):     448/8096 - this has changed again this afternoon as it was 448/7584 this morning
Attenuation (u/d):   16/32
SN Margin (u/d):      20/5.5
Ouput power (u/d)  12/19.5

What I have noticed are the CRC and HEC errors (not sure what they are). The stats for these are:

CRC (u/d): 0/9814
HEC (u/d): 0/6812

Things seem OK at the moment. Maybe they have sorted things out, but this is BT we are talking about. Reading the many posts it seems anything can happen.

BTW thanks for the quick responses. Suppose you aren't interested in taking over the running of the BT helpdesk  :)

Mike
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kitz

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #7 on: August 19, 2007, 04:56:25 PM »

At 32db Atten then your current sync rate looks about right.   It was possibly lower this morning because something had made your line unstable at some point and it dropped the connection resyncing at a lower speed.  7584kbps is still within range though. 

Your SNR Margin of 5.5 looks ok right now - but if it falls too low during the course of the evening then you may resync again at the lower speed.

CRC and HEC errors (without going into techy detail) are often a sign that your router has had patches when its not quite been able to hear the data and some packets have been lost.  These data packets will have been re-requested by your router.  A lot of errors can be an indication that your line is about to loose sync.

If you are syncing in the 7500 - 8000 region then your IP profile is going to be around 6500, which is an indication of the maximum throughput speed you are going to see.


Bear in mind though that with maxdsl this can and most likely fluctuate.  You can check your IP profile by performing a BTw Performance test.
Be warned that this does get busy in the evenings so day time is normally the best time to use it.

To help increase the stability of your line, try some of the tips on my low SNR page.
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Dabber

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #8 on: August 19, 2007, 05:11:42 PM »

Thanks for the replies and help. I'll check the links to see if I can stabilise the connection a bit more

I'm monitoring the stats twice a day to check the performance. I have tried to use the BT speedtester, but it invariably fails on the lat part of the test with an exception error so I can't get the IP profile.

Thanks for the help again

Mike
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kitz

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #9 on: August 19, 2007, 05:27:57 PM »

>> but it invariably fails on the lat part of the test with an exception error so I can't get the IP profile.

:(

Perhaps try early in the day when it isnt too busy..  and also check you have the latest version of Java installed.
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Dabber

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #10 on: December 10, 2007, 01:13:01 PM »

I could do with a bit of help as the numpties at BT Support (with the exception of 1 BT Vision engineer) seem incapable of understanding or answering a couple of questions that I believe require answering to sort out my ongoingt and never ending problem.

The BT Vison engineer believes (after he spend 3 hours at my house 1 evening) that the number of CRC and HEC errors I am getting downstream are far too high - in the 10's of thousands - and this indicates a problem either with BT Vision box I have connected or a problem with the line. BTw keep saying there are no errors being displayed when they run their tests but my router says different. Why is this and is the BT Vision engineer right?

I personally think the cause of my problems is connected to this as after a while (and as the errors increase) the router re-syncs at a lower speed. It does this about every 2 days and eventually the downstrean speed drops to around 4Mb. I'll be interested in other people's comments and advice on how to make some headway with BT - writing two letters of complaint to the Customer Service Director didn't help as I didn't even get the courtesy of a response or acknowledgement  >:(

Mike
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Pwiggler

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #11 on: December 10, 2007, 02:02:22 PM »

hi dabber

i take it that you have been writing to:

Customer Service Director
BT PLC
Correspondance Centre
Durham
DH98 1BT

if you have then write one final letter to them but include on this one that if a response is not received within 7 days then your direct debit will be stopped/payment with held until a satisfactory conclusion has been achieved.

thats what i did and i did get a call from someone (altho from india!).

good luck.

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Paul

Dabber

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #12 on: December 10, 2007, 02:16:59 PM »

Hi Paul,

The last one did include this plus asking for the MAC code. Still waiting for a reply from them although I do get phone calls from India and BT Vision team asking if they can close the case down as "there is nothing wrong with your line, router, Vision box etc". Well if there isn't why the hell does my speed keeping dropping, can't use on demand TV without it freezing and the router re-syncs every couple of days >:(

I said to one of the BT Vision guys that I'll move over to Sky if they couldn't sort and he said "they're not much better"  :D
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kitz

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #13 on: December 11, 2007, 01:01:13 PM »

>> It does this about every 2 days and eventually the downstrean speed drops to around 4Mb.

That along with a high CRC error count indicates a problem between your home and the exchange.

BT Vision Engineer?   Is that a BTw adsl engineer - or someone that is sent out by BT Broadband to check/install BT Vision hubs?
Reason I ask is that if it was a BTw adsl engineer and he noticed and commented on the amount of errors, I would have expected him to perhaps try some more diagnostics from the exchange.
If it was someone who does an installation I would have expected him to try a different hub/router... or at least he should be able to confirm to BT Broadband on your behalf that he is seeing many errors.

Have you tried connecting the router in the test socket behind the master socket to see if things are any better from there?

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/troubleshooting.htm
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Dabber

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Re: BT Total Broadband
« Reply #14 on: December 11, 2007, 04:26:30 PM »

Hi Kitz,

The guy was sent from BT Vision to change the box as they thought this ws the problem. I got speaking to him and he was actually quite knowledgeable and caried out a lot of testing in the extension socket the previous engineer had put in for the Vision box, the master socket, test socket etc. His conclusion was either a problem between the junction box (I think he called it the junction box, but its the grey box) on the wall outside and the master socket or it is either a problem on the BT line/exchange. He put all this in the report, but the numpties on the helpdesk haven't looked at the report. They also have no idea what I mean by the HEC and CRC errors. They sent me a new Home Hub over the weekend and I very reluctantly agreed to change over to it. The errors are still there and my router  has re-synced 3 times since Saturday  :'(

I'm really struggling to get this resolved. They seem to think these errors are nothing! Surely they must be the cause of the problem or am I barking up the wrong tree.

Mike
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