[Closed] BT broadband experiences...

we use, seems to work, certainly no worse that talk/tlk

pros - when travelling round UK (which we do)you can use t'net via BT hot spots where available(*and this does work in quite a few [well populated] places)

I *think* you can get discount by paying yrs line rental in advance

we got intro deal of 50 sainsbury vouchers with t'net

also apparently I can view BT sport via t'net

The speeds will be the same over the same bit of copper but BT really seem to throttle badly. Their customer service is also powered by a 1800w Hoover!

Zen has excellent service, low contention but is a little pricey. Tesco is cheap and has good service with no slowdowns that I've noticed.

From experience both BT and Sky throttle / at peak times have terrible contention ratios. But that matters to me as I work from home and ssh connections seem to be prone to being throttled even further.

So I pay more to a company called Xilo - at £15 odd a month it's certainly expensive than any of the big companies but their customer support is fantastic with issues being picked up and sorted within no time at all. We're out in the countryside and they helped diagnose problems as well as wrangling a BT Openreach engineer visit for free which took us from < 1MB to 8 to 9MB.

Find them excellent and they don't throttle except on P2P, never had an issues with their customer service either.

Ah! Wait. Just noticed you don't have infinity, yes they may throttle then on lines with poor connection. They don't on infinity. Sorry for confusion.

No problems here.

Make sure you pay line rental up front - 12 months for the price of 10 and go through topcashback which gave me a further £100 cash back.

Together with their introductory offer I saved about £150 for the first 12 months 🙂

Avoid like the plague, crowd of useless shysters who deserve to go out of business.

We moved from Virgin (high speed) to BT Infinity when we moved house, no problems with them so far, but I've not had to deal with customer service.

Its one of the marvels of the world that a company so utterly and completely useless in absolutely everything it does somehow manages to stay in business. Its an act of satire to even refer to 'customer service' in the same sentence as BT.

But I suppose thats inevitably what happens when you get a ****ing enormous private monopoly handed to you.

The other half is convinced that BT and their customer service is arse

^^^This

Its one of the marvels of the world that a company so utterly and completely useless in absolutely everything it does somehow manages to stay in business. Its an act of satire to even refer to 'customer service' in the same sentence as BT.

^^^And this with knobs on, wasted far too much of my life on the phone to them, when it works its great, ANY kind of issues and its a nightmare

We've been on BT forever. All non-fibre as that's not available. Works fine, very occasional drop out for maintenance. Using speedtest to check we do get decent speeds (10mb +). Yes BT customer service is terrible as its all outsourced to India and the people cannot actually understand you when you speak to them. The BT routers are quite crude and I don't like the fact you cannot change the network name but it's useful to have the BT anywhere wifi, ie with BT you can use any router anywhere eg by standing outside someone's house or in the town centre.

Have a look at the online deals, usually quite a good combo of introductory price plus Sainsbury's vouchers and if you do it all online and you have an existing phone line you don't need to speak to anyone.

What mintyjim said, got infinity, no problems here except some distance from the exchange so never quick with any provider. Parents in same village have nightmares with Talk Talk.

I've found the customer service to be very good, I phone them once a year to sort out the best deal when our 12 month period expires, for the last 5 years it's always been a bit cheaper than the year before. This is probably because I'm dealing with sales rather than complaints/support and given the nature of the call it's in their best interest to be helpful.

Technical support on the other hand is complete arse but I've only had to speak to them once in about 10 years so I can handle them being a totally crap, inflexible, menu driven service.

"crowd of useless shysters"
CG I've lost all my love for you now, some of the people I work with are quite good.

PlusNet= BT's "cheaper" product.

I have infinity and its great. Had BT broadband before and that was solid. Considering the extent of the network other users experiences may differ. 😀

When I changed a year or two ago, John Lewis (through plusnet) were offering a bigger deal than BT for the same money. I wasn't going to stay with BT.

it looks like my last post got deleted for trying to evade the swear filter. Whilst I maintain that this was not trying to evade the filter at all, I still stand by my earlier statement about the quality of BT's customer service and general service.

Plusnet might be cheaper, but they seem to be better. Maybe they are still hungry for business.

Rural BT (non-fibre) = fine download speeds (5+Mb) but appalling upload speeds (0.2Mb) so your email may time out if like me you are on a work based MS exchange. Tech service is poor - foreign call centre staffed with v nice people following computer prompts - so resolution is slow. The hospot service is handy when you're out and about though.
I don't use the hub for wireless, but run mine through an apple time capsule and airport extenders - which avoids hub issues (new ones better though)

Fine for me but worth trying to do a deal.
Tip. If your BB gets a bit iffy and you don't want to jump through the hoops with India, report it as a phone line issue. My case have always turned out to be this and you speak to England and its very quick.

Ordered BT Infinity about six weeks ago, phoned them on Tues eve to see what was happening as id heard nothing. Unfortunately it was after 8pm so only limited staff on and they promised to get me a call back to sort on Thurs at 6:30pm. I called them tonight to ask why they hadn't called me back. Their answer was that because I had moved recently it was with their credit control.....Aghhh why couldn't they have that on the initial form stage how long at current address and previous address. Told them to stick it and back to sky whom had a totally different attitude as soon as they picked the phone up.

BT Infinity for the last 4 months after years with Demon. No problems with the connection and hand over, but the Home Hub isn't. (I used to be able to play recorded TV on my PC, not any more. But I get GB's of unlimited download, so still happy.)

BT were meant to come and install a business connection last Wednesday between 9 and 12. They came at 3, faffed about and said they'd return at 9 on Thursday. They did not appear at all and no-one knew what was going on at BT. Unless I didn't have to use them I'd take all this as an indication of more of the same to come. Buyer beware.

Been with BT forever.

Last house (rural) after many visits they were going to send out 2 teams of engineers and a cherry picker to replace ageing local pole and cable. Final engineer got it working the day before the pole was to be replaced. We got speeds of around 1.5m download.

Current house (semi rural), engineer spent all day replacing 100m of phone cable. He climbed all the poles between our house and the lane, cut back overgrown trees and got a cherry picker along (the same day) as he wasn't allowed to climb the final pole as it was a different type. We get 1.3m download.

My experience has been that living where we do it's only BT who don't mind throwing resources and money to give us broadband which will take years to make a profit from. Their customer service is what it is but as long as you jump through all their hoops your case eventually gets escalated to an engineer visit. As their helplines are all 0800 who cares if you have to hold a while to get through or call them back every 2 days for a resolution.

I guess if I lived in a town or city where broadband was guaranteed I might look at other providers.

Their customer service is terrible.
We can't listen tthat's no useernet radio due to it buffering every song. So we have to turn the wifi off on my phone and use that as 3g is better. That **** in the advert who goes on about no buffering will get it in the mooey if I ever see him.
Thanks to the people on here i got a really useful contact at who to moan at. They agreed that they were shit and gave us over a years free service. Not really sure we want it.
Edit. ..alphabet mentions their numbers being 0800 , thats no use when your phone doesn't work AGAIN and you have to use your mobile.

"crowd of useless shysters"
CG I've lost all my love for you now, some of the people I work with are quite good.

Um, apologies for tarring all employees with the same brush. 😳 My main gripe was with the neds in their Indian call centre.