Home internet BT

[Theldron]

Hi all,

 

Just wanted some views on this issue I am having at home.

 

Since moving house 9 months ago we moved from TalkTalk to BT as TalkTalk couldn't provide a service in our area and BT had a good deal going. Since going with BT, we have been having constant connection dropouts, I have continually contacted BT via the forum and directly. Its frustrating as whenever I contact BT directly asking them to look at the issue they say its the hub and they send me a new one. I have had 4 hubs in 9 months with BT. I have tried 2 of my own hubs in between and have told them that, but they dont listen. In October after going through the forum and speaking to a BT moderator, they got it sorted and all was good for 2 months, but since the beginning of December it has been terrible.

 

What are your experiences with BT?

 

Who do you think are a good reliable service? Or good prompt customer service at least?

 

Has anyone managed to break their contract with their ISP because they cannot provide them with a reliable service that they are paying for?

 

I know internet issues happen and can accept that its just it seems such hard work to talk to anyone and get things sorted and I am getting fed up with new hubs.

 

Cheers

Sean

Edited January 7, 2017 by Theldron

[Cazale]

> What are your experiences with BT?

 

Terrible. I've had to deal with them professionally for years (working for an ISP), and personally twice when I was a customer (the first time for ADSL, they were awful and I said I'd never use them again. The second time for BT Sport, they lived up to the expectation of being awful again, billed me incorrectly for months, never fixed the billing error, and in trying to solve it created a second account under my name so I started getting billed double. After speaking to hundreds of people I just cancelled the direct debit and took the hit on my credit rating. It was honestly preferable to speaking to their customer services!).

 

In all my dealings with BT, I've rarely spoken to anyone competent. You literally could not design a company to be as inefficient in customer services if you set out to do so! I would never use any service from BT again, in fact, I would pay any company double the amount so as not to have to deal with BT (if I had to).

 

> Who do you think are a good reliable service? Or good prompt customer service at least?

 

Zen Internet. Sky aren't too bad TBH, and you can generally get a large discount or even get broadband free for a year (and then ring back and get it free again the following year).

 

> Has anyone managed to break their contract with their ISP because they cannot provide them with a reliable service that they are paying for?

 

Go to Citizen's Advice before attempting to do so.

Edited January 7, 2017 by Cazale

[rogerdnixon]

I have been with BT on Infinity for years now. Hardly any down town, rock steady connection - same speed all the time. I do use OpenDNS for DNS and an Asus DSL-AC68U rather than a HomeHub - which other than the latest one are rubbish.

[MatthewL]

I wouldn't touch BT with a barge pole. When I was at home we were with PlusNet (yes part of BT but a totally different company) started with them on dial up and still on ADSL with them. They have always been great when there has been issues (which have all been BT related), there is a faulty piece of kit in the local exchange called a mux (?) that has faulty ports on, this causes mine to slow down and as a result needs swapping, also in line with that the IP profile needs resetting and then left for 10 days to retrain. Other than a physical line fault I've never had any issues but you don't mention weather its ADSL or FTTC you are on?

 

I would fight to get a broadband engineer out, get them to check your line, check the mux and once then back to the ISP request a IP profile reset.

[mikeprice]

Experience of BT

 

Terrible

 

when I was with them it took them over 3 MONTHS to connect me - in spite of all the cables already being in place

 

they don't seem to be able to communicate between different areas of the company - hence someone will make and appointment for you to be connected - then an engineer will cancel it as he/she already knows that the cable is already set up - but no-one tells you and it doesn't get referred onto the next dept. that need to do the next bit

 

I ended up shouting down the phone at 'senior managers' several time

 

and it's not just me - I have met several other people with the same sort of experience - they seem to be fine if everything is OK - as soon as it goes a bit wrong they fall apart

 

YMMV

 

Mike

[rad]

We have BT Infinity and not had any issues. We have a Homehub 3 (given to us in 2012 when we had it installed)

 

My bro gave me a spare HH5, had issues with that so swapped back to HH3 and all is fine.

[NokiX]

My personal experience with BT has been good, I've had two hub failures in total but the service itself is fine. From my understanding every area is different, most people in my area are on Virgin Media and as such the utilization on VM is terrible and my performance was bad so I switched to BT and although sure it's a lower DL speed at least I can actually play games and stream without issues.

 

It's annoying they lock you down to a contract with no way out unless you pay cancellation fee's as personally i think it's all about trial and error to find the best provider in your area.

[Theldron]

Thanks for all the comments guys. When I moved in with my OH she had Sky, but we couldn't afford it anymore so we went with TalkTalk which was really reliable service, but we moved to the Cotswolds and went with BT (uh-oh). My dad has BT in Gloucestershire and he has had nothing but trouble with them.

[Sibrows]

I've had issues with BT residential, the wireless on the HH5 is crap so I have disabled it and I'm using a seperate WAP but the major issue I've had with the competition is contension it would appear that BT have a set of kit in the local exchange for their customers and then a set of kit they resell other ISPs services through. We're too far 'out in the sticks' to have Virgin fibre or any non-BT offering.

 

I have no way of proving or disproving this but I've now tried two alternatives and both times returned to the dreaded BT

 

That having been said apart from wireless issues I've not had any issues in the past 4 years with the service.

[edmokeski]

Had nightmares with BT re: transferring phone and broadband when we had to move out of our house temporarily (and then all over again when it was time to move back in). One piece of advice: get to their Complaints Department. I talked to loads of hopeless BT call centres around the world, escalated to supervisors, etc., etc.. I eventually got escalated to Complaints, and the whole thing changed. A person, with a real name and direct line, who took responsibility for our case, wrote us letters to update us, apologised profusely for the crap service experience I had before getting to him, and actually had the authority and discretion to make decisions and get things done. I was genuinely impressed that there were still people out there who were allowed to make decisions without being locked into the flowchart/script.

So if you want to get things sorted, get yourself put through to Complaints. Only more surprising customer service experience I've had was talking to Complaints at First Direct, who on top of everything else sent me four bottles of wine as an apology for their customer service rep's rudeness.

 

ps - I'm nevertheless leaving BT as soon as my contract's up, as they say upgrading our cab (in central London) to FTTC "isn't commercially viable" due to water main placement or some such. Virgin fibre goes past my front door, so I'll be trading in one terrible ISP for another, but at least it will be faster!

[mikeprice]

 

ps - I'm nevertheless leaving BT as soon as my contract's up, as they say upgrading our cab (in central London) to FTTC "isn't commercially viable" due to water main placement or some such. Virgin fibre goes past my front door, so I'll be trading in one terrible ISP for another, but at least it will be faster!

 

TBF I have been with Virgin for the last 3 years and they have been great - problems sorted with no hassle and if a problem is reported they take responsibility for sorting it - no having to ring up 17 times to see where it is up to

 

 

YMMV

[Blue_Cookeh]

We've been with BT for 3 years and had 0 issues aside from about 3 minutes of down time one night. On the other hand we had a 100Mbps service with Virgin and had no end of issues. Firstly Virgin kept giving us "free" speed increases, only to up our monthly bill two months later, and 2. every evening we were being throttled down to 0.2Mbps. Our support was escalated up to Tier 3 and they still couldn't find the reason why.

 

Oh and have they fixed their god awful streaming issues yet? Virgin used to shove everyone's YouTube/Vimeo/Netflix etc down some sort of proxy that completely broke them for many customers.

 

We left Virgin to go with BT and haven't look back.

Edited January 9, 2017 by Blue_Cookeh

[Meldrew]

Personally had no issues with BT, but no end of problems with PlusNet.

 

Meldrew

[mikkydoos]

BT stink and they always have. Funnily the resellers who use their network are usually ok. TBH it all depends where u are to get decent internet.

[mikeprice]

Actually when I had broadband with Virgin first they used a normal phone line - hence any promlems in that area were looked after by BT

 

and they were great - guy from Virgin who installed everything told me to NEVER call BT about anything but to always go through Virgin as they had absolute priority over BT customers due to paying loads of money