Stay away from bt

VisionMan

mr_rodge wrote: »

Morning all,

First things first - Apologies for a long and heated post. By the time you've read it, you'll be annoyed at me for losing a couple of minutes of your life, and never getting them back. I have been with BT for a grand total of a day, and have already lost countless hours of mine.

I'll give you a summary before I go on.

BT are a useless organisation that I wouldn't urinate on if they were on fire. I have been with Sky for many years and have not had the problems I've suffered in one day with BT. This applies to phone AND broadband. Interested? Read on.

I've just moved into my new home (I'm saying just, I've been there for six weeks). I never actually wanted a phone line, just broadband that was fast enough to watch multiple catch up TV channels in HD. BT's 'Infinity' package seemed to fit the bill, as it gave my speed estimate at 54mbit/s. Excellent, I thought, as I was moving from a rural area that could only receive ADSL at 1mbit/s. Sky offer a similar service, though it's only currently capable of 40mbit speeds for slightly more money, so I went for BT.

The online sign up process wasn't without its niggles, right from the word go. The £10 line rental advertised on the home page turned out to be £16, unless you paid for a whole year up front. I didn't like this, as moving home I was low on brass. I paid it anyway, to get the rental down. Installation was touted as free and worth £130, and the router/necessary gubbage was also free. I finished the process only to receive confirmation that installation/activation was 6 weeks away. This was due to flooding in various parts of the country. It was flooding in Cornwall, I live in Yorkshire. I wasn't happy, but swallowed it regardless.

A couple of days later I got an email stating my telephone number, and it also had a VERY small comment right at the bottom that said something along the lines of 'Don't forget to maintain your discount you must make ten calls a month'. ??!! WHAT?! I didn't even want a phone line! I immediately Googled around and quickly found that many other people had been had by the same scam. It's apparently there to make you 'earn' your 'free' £130 engineer's visit. If you fail to make the payment, 6 sterling will be added to the line rental on each month that you fail to make the calls!! So the large sum of money that I forked out to get the advertised £10/month rental, it seems, was now under threat. I had numerous rants and raves to the Mrs about it, at which point I checked out the competition and couldn't find a better deal. So I swallowed, and planned on making the 10 calls by ringing a relative and hanging up ten times, on a weekend, on the second Saturday of every month. Another kick to the nether regions that I didn't need.

Anyway, yesterday the date finally came. I thoroughly research everything I do, so I knew what to expect. Apparently the Openreach modems for the FTTC service are prone to overheating, so the engineers mount them vertically to aid ventilation. Mine was dumped on the floor. Again, another kick down below, though I guess I can move it myself.

Now was the time to test it all for real, when the engineer had gone. I tried the phone line, it worked fine. I tried the internet over WiFi, it ran at 11mbit/s which I thought was OK for WiFi. Alarm bell number one. My router was kicking out not just my WPA2 encrypted service, but also two other, unencrypted services. I connected to one and quickly it appeared that I was unknowingly contributing to BT's Openzone network! I knew my account came with free ACCESS to openzone hotspots that I would never use, but NOWHERE did it say that I'd be contributing. It also seems that it's impossible to turn this off, which brings me to my next point. BT have access to my router, and can control it fully. I HATE this. If BT can access it, so can anyone else. Ports must be open. It's more the fact that I wasn't told and can't disable it. If I remain on BT's service, I'll hack and debrand their 'hub' as soon as I can.

Next up, hard-wired speed tests. The MOST I got was 34mbit/s. I used multiple different speed tests, all of which gave the same result, so I know they're right. I've tried at numerous times throughout the night, also. This morning, the speed tests measured 34mbit/s, but the BBC's iplayer wouldn't play HD content without interruption. You only need 3.5mbit/s for this, so BT are clearly throttling, not just slightly. Furthermore, Sky don't throttle their connections and offer 40mbit/s connections, so if I'd known I wasn't going to get 54mbit/s I'd have gone with them.

The speed checker on the BT site shows 54.5mbit down and 18mbit up. The small print at the bottom states you should get between 1-2mbit of the described speed, so WHERE THE HELL IS MY 20mbits?! Useless. FTTC doesn't have a 'learning' period, either so I know it isn't a case of waiting for the connection to 'settle'.

This is pretty trivial, but where is my £50 Sainsbury's voucher?!

Anyway, rant over. If you have common sense, stay away from BT. I'd better start calling Bangladesh and brushing up on foreign accents because there's going to be some hours on the phone to follow.

Pardon?

Your 'only' getting 34Mbps? Are you joking?

And no BB provider guarantees speeds. They're all an 'up to' estimation. But it sounds like you already knew that. And of course some ports on the hub are open. How the flippin' eck else do you think they can update it? And as to the rest of your complaints...

You sound a bit picky to me.

pullenuk

Go to Www.speedtest.net and do a speed test. Once it done look in the right hand corner of the results it says "faster than x% of gb" if it above 80% quit moaning about the speed.