Stuck with poor internet provider (?)

Cognito

A friend of mine just moved house and signed a year-long contract with an internet provider... The connection is relatively slow and keeps "dying", which she can rectify by restarting the router, but she has to do it 5-6 times a day.
She works from home and as part of her job she has to upload and download large files, and those router restarts cancel the up/downloads and she has to start all over again.

The provider say there's nothing wrong with her line, and the restarts are the only advice they gave. She asked to cancel her contract so she can switch provider, but her current internet provider wants a £160 cancellation fee, almost 6 months' usage of their crappy service.

What are her options?

Thanks in advance

chanz4

as technically they are providing only a gesture would allow your friend to cancel, if she also needed a line for work she should of gone for a business connection

Gordon_Hose

Who's the ISP?

Retrogamer

The ISP can usually check the stability of the connection up to the point of the router. If they are saying there is no problem they can see, i'd assume the connection up to the router is ok.

Is your using wireless? if so, tried wired and see if there's any change and depending on the results from that i should be able to advise how to resolve either way.

forgotmyname

I went to sort a similar issue out with someone that swapped from Tiscali to SKY.

No issues before but with SKY the connection kept dropping. I phoned them and got the muppets.. Its the computer, its the line blah blah.

They said test the wiring in the house by using the master socket. I said yeah OK.
Had a cuppa and phoned back and said done that still doing it ( i didn't).

Then got to the real tech support. Check the line. Brilliant its just dropped again. Can you see that. Yep. faint voice in the background (i wonder, ahah, got it)
Comes back and says they have made some adustments and it should be fine now. It was.

pickoftheday

You read so many nightmare stories.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a BB connection but sometimes when you ring up, you just get the feeling that they don't really wanna help, they just want to get you off the phone as quickly as possible regardless of whether your issue has been fixed or not.

Cognito

Gordon_Hose wrote: »

Who's the ISP?

a word for "speak", twice...

Retrogamer wrote: »

The ISP can usually check the stability of the connection up to the point of the router. If they are saying there is no problem they can see, i'd assume the connection up to the router is ok.

they have some horrible customer services located in another continent. she called them while i was there once, a woman who probably doesn't know what an IP is told her she can help her resolve the problem, then she wasted 20 mins of our time reading unrelated crap from a script... "what operating system are you using?", "have you checked that the router is plugged in?", etc.

Retrogamer wrote: »

Is your using wireless? if so, tried wired and see if there's any change and depending on the results from that i should be able to advise how to resolve either way.

yeah, that's the first thing i told her too, didn't work one bit better.

Cognito

eeyore123 wrote: »

Sounds like the router is the problem. Check to make sure the settings for MTU/ PPP are correct.

thanks. how would i do that? it's one of those already set up routers they send these days, they didn't give her a control panel...

Retrogamer

Disregard the above.
PPP is authentication so if it was wrong there would be no connection at all.
MTU can cause problems if it's set too high but i can't see the ISP sending you a router that's not going to work correctly on their service.

Are there any lights on the router which say broadband or internet (or both?)

duchy

pickoftheday wrote: »

You read so many nightmare stories.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a BB connection but sometimes when you ring up, you just get the feeling that they don't really wanna help, they just want to get you off the phone as quickly as possible regardless of whether your issue has been fixed or not.

If we suspect you're like the muppet above who lies about the set up and what troubleshooting steps they've already taken -Yeah you're right we do want to get rid and move onto people we can actually help (we're only human after all)........... You can normally tell when a muppet is lying -they aren't very bright.

Most customers are very nice -and co-operative and it's a pleasure to get them back up and working ...... but some -ring up wanting to be as difficult as possible. Thankfully they are the minority.

Retrogamer

Giving false information about the set up is fine by me when i'm diagnosing customer's problems.
It's them that will be charged if the Openreach engineer determines the fault to be on their internal wiring / equipment.