About 18 months ago our area became fibre enabled, I looked around and switched to BT on a years deal that I then extended by a year not so long ago. We are probably 3/4 mile from the main exchange and 1/2 mile from the distribution box. Speeds and service were orginally ok, speed now varies a lot and each day we suffer numerous short outages. They sent someone round a few weeks ago, he changed the termination box, checked the router (its the latest) and tested the speeds and they were decent. Since his visit the outages have increased from a few a day to a few each hour. I am giving serious thought to switching but in my simplistic head I keep thinking how can plusnet (BT owned) or Vodafone etc be better as they will still be utilising a lot of the BT cabling/systems ? Any advice or thoughts are most welcome, atb Paul

Vodafone are not better.

In the last week I’ve been suffering multiple minor outages each day. Enough to f*ck Netflix up, stop 6 Music from streaming and generally make my day rather stressful.

Cheers ET, are they worse than your previous provider ?

It depends really what’s causing the outages.

It’ll be the same physical infrastructure, so if it’s a physical problem – eg, a cable fault – then changing providers won’t make a fig of difference (unless it’s a fault on your home router ofc).  If it’s something to do with the way it’s been configured then that potentially could be resolved by changing providers.

If it were me I’d be barraging BT to fix it before moving, if only to avoid the inevitability of two different companies denying all knowledge and pointing fingers at each other.  It’ll still be an Openreach engineer knocking on your door as who you’re with.

Are the outages definitely BT? So the Hub flashes orange (?) lights to show no broadband? Or is it more that wifi etc speeds drop, but the main connection is still there?

If the latter, check what else might be interfering with your wifi in the house (eg neighbours on same channel, microwaves, dodgy virus infected PCs etc). BT HomeHub does have a known issue with 5Ghz signal lowing and dropping out – apparently BT aren’t interested in fixing it, and despite looking at multiple threads the only answer is to replace or augment the HH. 2Ghz band should be OK though.

Paul – was with BT before who were actually fine for Infinity. Talk Talk before that…lets not go there.

i moved to Vodafone when I moved house. Purely because they don’t charge line rental and yes – they use the BT Openreach infrastructure.

It’s been generally fine until the last 7-10 days. I use their modem and then an ASUS wireless router on the back of it. With some wireless extenders too.

I have an ethernet-connected laptop by their modem. So if connectivity drops I can check it quickly at source. Generally speaking it’s a latency problem rather than the connection actually dropping. Enough to screw things up for me though.

I’ll give them a call once I can summon up the courage and patience to go through the scripted diagnostics. And the escalation. And the call back. And the accent issues (not racist – just genuinely can’t f*ckin understand them).

Vodafone user here (VDSL), had to replace my free router with something that doesn’t disconnect every few hours. I also use my old BT home hub as a wireless access point. I’d say its pretty solid now.

I would recommend checking SAM knows for supplier availability at your exchange https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search

Each supplier has its own pro’s and con’s but its what you can put up with that matters.

If you’re using the original BT router it might be worth giving it a tweak. Use a hammer and buy something else.

Worth a try?

As others have said, check your connection via ethernet.

Try and get a line test done via the BT website whilst your connection has dropped (use a mobile connection)

Does your dial tone drop or line get noisy?

Cheers guys, all replies much appreciated. FWIW I know its not the just wireless side as the tele is wired in to the router and suffers like for like problems. I have put the problem back to BT and I am going to see if dropping back to 2 ghz makes any difference. ATB Paul