We’re moving ISP’s.
Thinking about BT. Lots of bad stories about them. Is that just because they’re big so there’ll always be something that goes wrong?
Any good experiences of BT?

Thanks,

Have been using BT infinity for a couple of years and it has been great (speed and reliability) so far.

Our speed is really slow and customer service is bad,so I couldn’t recommend them. If you do go with them look on here for other bt threads and keep a note of the head mans email.
Once we dealt with his office things were resolved.
Still leaving when our contract is up.

Ours has been fine, fast and reliable. Never had to call customer service so can’t comment on that.

My old house was a PITA to get connected though, gave up in the end and told them to refund my money, that was with plusnet though, so one step removed from BT itself.

Anyne who misscalls bts customer service really hasnt experianced bad customer service.

Bottom line for me was orange telling me openreach had 30 days to fix a line fault ( i was holding one end in my hand in the garden at the time) on my parents line and because they are third party it would probably be day 29 it would be fixed – and it was

Line fault on my own line with bt and it was fixed next day. – farmer had put his flail through it cutting road side.

Got the new Infinity Broadband and after about four months, no complaints. It’s fast and reliable. But then, so was my previous provider, Utility Warehouse. Also enjoying the revamped BT Vision/Sport.

If you are thinking about it, keep an eye on topcashback and quidco for significant sums in cashback. I think I got about £150 back when I signed up at the end of last year.

Been with BT for over ten years, speed is fine and so long as you keep up with the renewal dates you tend to be able to reduce the cost a little most years too. We had one technical problem in that time which took about a day to resolve, and they are normal pretty speedy to send out new equipment when its needed too.

My niece set her system up recently and a fortnight after completing the order decided that she’d really like to move the room around and that she didn’t want trailing cables, she spoke to BT and they sent her a pair of home plugs free of charge.

I also look after my mothers virgin media account and they’ve been really helpful too, to the extent that the engineer that works locally gave her his mobile number so that she could get in touch directly if she had any problems.

Parents recently switched to BT when they moved house. Getting everything ordered was a bit more time consuming then it might have been and hinted at the fact that the internet stories about their customer service or lack thereof might have some basis in fact but so far system has worked fine and supplied router seems excellent.

We are in the proces of leaving Demon having been with them since tenner a month dial up days and stuck with them through several changes of ownership. Now owned by Vodaphone and when we suddenly fell foul of a fair usage policy that they defended on the basis that they hadn’t emailed us to tell us of changes in policy and useage because they did not have an email on file for us – despite us having used demon email addresses for 15 years – it became obvious that they are aiming to attract and serve business users for the moment not domestic. Apparently Customer services can only be contacted between 9 and 5 and customer loyalty have no direct line because “they are not customer facing”. Felt embarrassed for the staff involved who were polite and helpful despite the idiocies of their system. Therefore, am in the process of changing to Zen and so far their customer service seems exemplary. Changeover this week so keeping my fingers crossed.

their customet service can be massively painful, but once set up ours has been reliable for a good 10 years

moving to infinity was also more difficult than it should have been but again once installed weve had nearly 2 years of super fast service with no outages or issues whatsoever, the wifi router is also quite good, cover the entire house and garden! and we run a few devices at once hppily

Thanks for all the replies.
Ratadog, that’s the same as me, Demon since before the internet! Now getting hit by the fair usage policy, but no alternatives from Demon as there’s no ADSL2+ here (but they did offer a (really) special deal for about £35 a month plus VAT). We’re just changing email addresses, when that’s done we’re off. I’m also looking at Zen, but the Sports from BT may swing it that way.

We have had infinity for 3 years and it has always been reliable and we get constant download speeds of +60Mb and upload of17Mb. We also have the youview offering from bt which allows us to watch the rugby, moto go and all the cycling on Eurosport.

They’re both good until it goes wrong!

I’ve worked for both BT and Virginmedia (1st line support), Virgin are probably a bit quicker at resolving BB issues (unless its an oversubscribed router (UBR)), BT can be a pain to deal with due to the way the company is structured/fragmented.

Ours has been fine, fast and reliable. Never had to call customer service so can’t comment on that.

This. The engineer who installed was polite, on time, efficient and neat. No complaints

No complaints here on BT infinity. It was different before we got superfast. Had many outages and the Indian customer service was appalling over the space of two years. Each was convinced that they had the cure to our problems. Finally I managed to speak to an English call centre and they offered usan engineers visit. Within a minute the Engineer diagnosed a faulty modem (supplied by BT froma faulty batch).
We did try and move to Plusnet but twice their engineer failed to keep their appointment…

If you’re buying it for the you view box then i should warn you that it is a pretty crap piece of hardware. It becomes completely unresponsive to all controls about once a week, and often loses the ability to connect to the internet channels like todays Milan San Remo on Eurosport. We’ve got the slightly older box and my niece has the new slimline version and has the same problems.

Ours has been fine – so far. Been with them a couple years, TV box has been pretty reliable but an os upgrade last year meant we lost all recordings – we were warned but there’s no easy way of backing up (not sure if there is a difficult way)

Mine was a nightmare to get set up, they connected the wrong house in the box at the end of the road and spent 2 weeks figuring this out. You view box is slow and crashes regularly

BUT the broadband is decent speed and been 100% reliable in the 8months since it was finally connected.

BT customer service is a foreign call center and difficult to deal with, they don’t understand that as a rural customer when my phone line was down I had no mobile signal, so no means of them calling me back, so i had to use my mobile 3 miles down the road at 60p per minute! until I was given a cheaper number at 25ppm

The real issue I had was Openreach it took them 5 weeks to fix my fault and BT retail have no influence over how Openreach deal with faults, its the same for any line provider though! Retail kept telling me they were working on it when clearly as the faulty cable was 30 feet away and no sign of an engineer, they were mislead!

Openreach response was terrible! and they kept telling Retail porkies, so I was told porkies by Retail, even when BT put me on the priority list it made no difference to Openreach response, we even made the local TV news, because it was the whole Valley affected not just me!

The service is fine but faults can be hard to sort out IME!

God awful service, and shoddy products.

Cost us £80 connection fee when we moved into our new pad, even though there were two live BT lines already at the house. BT were adamant they weren’t live and an engineer needed to visit, despite the fact I was calling on one of them to arrange connection.

BT Vision box is a waste of space. Having a toddler with a penchant for fiddling with the telly remote means the TV source is often changed mid-program. Can you just switch it back to the BT Vision input? No. You have to do a hard reset, which takes about 5 minutes and wipes any recording you may have had planned. Customer services solution is to unplug for 5 minutes and update the software. Problem remains, customer service solution is to unplug for 5 minutes and update the software. Problem remains, etc.

BT broadband router power supply has melted in the socket twice in 4 months, as in electrical buzzing, smoke, molten plastic on the carpet, hole in power supply. Customer services simply do not understand that I want to cancel my contract and have their dangerous equipment out of my house. £430 to end my contract early, apparently. Customer service chap refuses to escalate my call to a supervisor.

To conclude, I’d go with Virgin if available. Ludicrously fast broadband, TiVo is magical, UK based customer services. Very few issues over the 7 years we were with them, and not a single one took more than a day to get sorted, even if it involved folk coming out and fiddling with the fibre optics in the street.

Been with BT for years and got infinity a couple of years ago. I work from home so reliability is crucial for me and I’ve got absolutely no complaints at all! Performance is really good at 34Mb and their service has been good whenever I’ve needed it too. Can’t see any reason for changing right now, even though there are some tempting offers out there.

Why do I pay the same for a lousy 1 Mbps BT download speed out here in the country as others getting 10X that and more?
I hate BT, and if I change supplier I’m still stuck with BTs copper wire designed for 20th century telephones!

Don’t go SKY totally useless we was meant to be receiving between 6 to 8 MG
we are receiving 0.7 MG !
Plus I asked why had they changed my IP address IE from East London to Romford Essex.No answer ?

The customer service is totally useless and what peeved me off, they was to contact me after
they done tests, but sent a TXT message to my wife’s mobile asking how well did they do !
But they done nothing so I called to cancel and all they said was do I want money off ?

Now awaiting installation with BT infinity. And another joke is SKY told me I couldn’t have Fibre optic
in my area. BT yep Fibre optic is fine but a small one off charge ?

On tesco.net down south, never had a prob, never had to call customer services.

Up north on BT broadband, just the basic with the home hub router, nearly 5 years service.
Only problems occur when pikeys steal the actual phone cables for the copper (twice) knocking out several villages. Takes a few days for BT to re-thread and connect the underground cables.
First time we got told there was no line fault….few days later…yes it’s being dealt with…..takes a while to get through to help lines, apart from that been allright.

BT Infinity for a year now. Zero problems with the internet. Only problem I encountered was with my BT vision box but a call to the Indian call centre sorted it out in ten minutes.

Only horrendous BT experience I’ve had was when I tried to move from Sky to O2 broadband. From what I’ve learned there’s essentially a behind the scenes directory of everyone’s landline number and exchange which is controlled by BT. They had me listed as being connected to the wrong exchange and this made changing ISP impossible. Took me about 6 months getting passed between multiple arms of BT before I got it resolved,

BT for about a year now and been the fastest most relisble provider I’ve used. When I’ve had to contact about a query it tweeted their support team, they answered within minutes and responded to my responses just as quick. Their router is very good to gives a better signal the Netgear router I used before that.

BT customer service can be dodgy and they certainly seem money grabbing with prices going up regularly; they seem fairly aggressive to if you try and get out of a contract!

You also get a fairly bare bones service (since we’ve been with them they’ve scrapped their web host service, ditched Flickr and have even started to threaten to cancel your email accounts if you don’t use them often enough; their UseNet service seems pretty ropey too).

That said, I can only recollect losing our broadband once in 5 years, which was rapidly sorted out; their service has been fast, reliable and consistent.

We’ve just switched to BT Infinity at virtually no extra cost and are now enjoying download speeds in the high 70 – mid 80Mbs and upload speeds of 15-18Mbs!

Their latest BT hub (which comes free when you sign up) is top quality too.

BT have been great. The only provider that has.
On a couple of occasions over the past 10 years service has gone but so has the phone at the same time. Whinging about a bust phone seems to go to a UK number and gets fixed rapidly. Like (but better than) every other provider I have had BT do try to go through a host of software issues if things go wrong. Every single time it has just been a line fault and I regard that as part of life. I never phone the broadband help, just my phone and its fixed very quickly

Thanks. No Virgin here, so limited choice.

Hi richmars,

Nice to know I am not the only demon refugee. I also felt able to turn down the 35-45ukp per month for the next 3 years minimum to up my usage allowance to 100Gb/month. Thankfully, I had already purchased a domain name and sorted out a hosting contract that meant that our demon email addresses are almost out of use. I can in any case keep them in operation for 4-5ukp per month if needed.

No fibre to cabinet in our village yet but exchange should go ADSL2+ in the next 3 months as allegedly BT are to have all exchanges upgraded to ADSL2+ by the end of June. We are certainly the last one round here to go as they apparently need a road closure to do it. Zen assure me that they will be able to upgrade the service for no extra cost when the exchange gets sorted.

Been with BT about 9/10 years now and no bad experiences so far. I know i could save money by switching suppliers but i don’t mind a couple extra £££ a month when i hear about the problems friends have had with Talk talk etc.

Had a couple issues with the line a few years ago but on both occasions Bt sent an engineer out the next day and fixed the problem straight away.

Had BT for most of our time in the UK and were fine, as there was no other fixed line options they could get issues sorted within days rather than weeks with other ISP’s we tried.

Don’t trust what any isp tells you on up to speeds, there are a couple of comparisons which tell you what should be possible at your postcode.

Use the home hubs, they worked. Used my own router it worked, in some ways the delivery of the data to and from the house doesn’t really vary with who sends out the bill.

In my experience the product is fine but the customer service is awful.

Plusnet fibre optic here…. Which runs over openreach from BT. It’s bloody brilliant as is plusnet customer service.

Why do I pay the same for a lousy 1 Mbps BT download speed out here in the country as others getting 10X that and more?
I hate BT, and if I change supplier I’m still stuck with BTs copper wire designed for 20th century telephones!

Ohhh copper wire what luxury, stuck on shitty aluminium wiring in our street. Every street around us can get fibre but BTO will not upgrade us.

I changed from O2 to BT as I didn’t want to be part of Murdoch’s empire. Been with BT for almost 6 months and i haven’t had any problems with connection or speeds, therefore, I have no experience of their customer service. Their sports package has encountered some issues, although I only use it occasionally.

Thanks for all the comments, it seems there’s good and bad (no surprise there). My biggest concern is the router power supply problem The Flying Ox had. Anyone else seen this?
Richard

I’ve recently moved from TT to BT. I stuck with TT for ages believing that the problem with BB speeds would be resolved. I’m 300m from the exchange & my speed was <0.2 Mbps at most of the day getting up to 5Mbps during the morning.
If you’ve heard bad reports about BT they’re not reflected in my experience with them. TT on the other hand !!!

I’d have no hesitation in recommending BT.

D.

I’ve been with BT for 10 years, despite them being more expensive…

Why ? … simple, all people i know have BB issues, drop outs, failures, issues…. I have had none… ever…

BT works for me… always has…

nah my routers been fine for a couple of year richmars