Getting slower speeds than what line was capable of with BT

keith160377

Morning all, I'm looking for some advice and hopefully somebody on here may be able to help.

Sorry for the War and Peace excerpt, but its just to give a background into what happened.

In 2014, we upgraded our BT broadband to FTTC.

When we went live, the line was outputting at the full 75 /80Mb as our line length from the house to the PCP is 195m. However after around 4 – 6 weeks, our broadband speed plummeted to 52Mb. This suffice to say very surprising seeing as though the speed on FTTC is usually distance dependent.

We phoned the BT Technical department as the line should not have dropped 23Mb and requested that this be investigated.

An engineer came out, tested the line, changed the faceplate and re-tested it. It still came back at 52Mbs. The engineer said ‘We can’t find anything, it’s just a little bit of crosstalk’ and left. He didn’t even bother to check the cabinet to see if there was a throughput / port problem.

This left me and my mum quite perplexed as we felt that there was still a problem, because I have never heard of anyone on an FTTC circuit dropping 24mb when the distance between the cabinet and the house was well within the 80mb range. BT and the engineer are really supposed to be the experts and therefore we thought we had no choice but to accept the outcome.

This was the case for the past 3 years when we were paying for an up to 80mb service, where we were only receiving more or less up to 52mb.

On 23rd August 2017, we switched to PlusNet. After 14 days we received an e-mail saying that our speed was well below the guaranteed speed for our line and would we like to have an engineer out.

We agreed and on the 26th September a BT Openreach engineer came out, checked our line, put another faceplate on and then checked again. Still getting 52mb. The engineer then went over to the FTTC cabinet and checked the output. It turns out that the FTTC cabinet was outputting 52mb and wasn’t outputting the data as it should have been.

The engineer further investigated and discovered that there was a fault on the port we were on. It has now been brought to light that this has been the case since the line drop, so for 3 years we have been on a dodgy port and not getting the full bandwidth that we should have been. Therefore it was not the result of ‘a little bit of crosstalk’ but the wrong port.

This has now been rectified and the BT Openreach engineer that came out was fantastic. Our line is now outputting at 71mb/s, but we were appalled over the lack of investigation into the fault and also over the blas! approach of the engineer for not investigating this properly at that time (2014) and if the engineer would have checked the cabinet then this problem would have been fixed.

We phoned up BT and complained and requested a partial refund / compensation, but because the account was closed and all of the speedtest results were 'deleted' they said there is nothing I can do.

Is there anything I can do as we feel quite robbed as we were paying for a lesser service than what the line was capable of?

I do have evidence of the line being below the guaranteed speeds from PlusNet and we do have a majority of our BT bills to back up that we were paying for BT Infinity 2.

Can this matter be taken further and if so, have we got any kind of case?

Apologies for the novel!

Many thanks

Regards

Keith

iniltous

Unless upload speed was the most important thing , why , when (incorrectly) advised that 52Mb (ish) was the most your line would support did you remain on Infinity 2 and not call and request a regrade to Infinity 1, seems strange that you continued to pay for Infinity 2 when receiving approx Infinity 1 download speed, and although you were unhappy with the first engineers attempt at rectification, you didn't continue to persue the problem, it sounds as though you are pretty savvy with the way the system works and knew you were fobbed off.
As far as compo, I doubt it, your old provider BT with who you don't any longer have a billing relationship were as much a 'victim' given that they were also paying OR the wholesale charge for an upto 80Mb service when it appears it was either faulty or mis configured port ( although I accept it could be argued that they compensate you , then are themselves compensated by OR.)
AFAIK , when you move FTTC provider , you also move port in the 'fibre' cabinet, so it may well be that the 'new' Plusnet port and the 'old' BT port you were connected to were not the same, so although your theory sounds plausible it may not be the case that you were on the same faulty port all along.
Finally, when you moved to Plusnet , why did you purchase an upto 80Mb service, if you were convinced by the first OR person that 52Mb was the best you would get, surely you would have went for Plusnets slower product