Broadband only from BT as exchange locked/classed as Market 1

Bluebirdbank

Hi, does anyone have any advice?
I need to sign up for a new landline, line rental and broadband - we originally had this via BT, but as we had major building work done and moved elsewhere temporarily, the actual line was removed
We all know there are some great deals on landline and broadband, but all the companies I have tried say they cannot help us as we are not in one of their 'low cost areas'
When I delve further into this, it seems our exchange is classed as 'Market 1' and is blocked for use by any company other than BT - even Plusnet !! cant offer anything cheap!
Does anyone have any idea if there is a way round this, or if this situation will change soon. as this seems to mean BT have a strangle hold on us. I really dont want to go back to BT again as we had so many problems with them before, and their customer service was awful!!

mije1983

Bluebirdbank wrote: »

Does anyone have any idea if there is a way round this

Yep, move house

But seriously, the prices on Market 1 exchanges are set by Ofcom so there's not much you can do about it.

Roland_Sausage

It's not blocked as such, it just means BT Wholesale are the only operator. You should be able to get service from any company that resells BTW services.

brewerdave

OP-I'm on a market 1 exchange...with 2 unbundled suppliers (TT and Sky) !! -It hasn't been reclassified by OFCOM -have you actually checked that there aren't any other providers??
Use Samknows site
https://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search
I'm with Plusnet ...and I'm getting a competitive deal for both because I could quote Sky's offers to them :T

bluenose5_2

what are plusnet like for broadband any good, they seem to get a lot of Bad Press from the people that are with them,Thank you.:beer:

brewerdave

I've had virtually no problems with PN and I've been with them for over 6 years now for b/band and 3 years+ for telephone service. Their predecessors for b/band supply, HOrange!(now EE), were a nightmare both in terms of technical support & billing.
Initially I was told by Orange that I couldn't get more than 2Mbps service -switched to Plusnet and immediately got a speed uplift to 6.8Mbps!!!
The changeover from standard ADSL Max to ADSL2+ went perfectly and I now get 16Mbps.
Only issues I've had were defective external cabling (sorted by BT Openreach in 5 days) and a c**kup by BT when they changed my telephone number, sorted via PN in just over 3 days.
They have had some adverse press over the past year or so, because of excessive waiting times on Customer Service lines due to taking on too many new customers before they had the infrastructure to handle them BUT at least you can understand the agents when you get thru' which is a vast improvement on my experiences with Orange and BT when their CS ops. were based somewhere to the East of the UK:)

onomatopoeia99

Roland_Sausage wrote: »

It's not blocked as such, it just means BT Wholesale are the only operator. You should be able to get service from any company that resells BTW services.

To clarify that, ISPs using BT 20CN or 21CN backhaul are not "reselling". Backhaul is only one part of makes up an ISP's service.

The ISP I use provides my service over BT 21CN, but do a lot of things that you can't get from BT Internet, or Plusnet or even Zen (e.g. full IPv6 support).