I received a letter from BT on Friday and the monthly costs are going up quite a lot. Because they are implementing a price increase I am free to move without penalty. I phoned to see what they could do and this seemed to have slipped the guy’s mind until I told him I read that I could move penalty free.

I had a quick look around and the Post Office is over £100 a year cheaper for phone, anytime calls and broadband 🙂

We live in rural Cumbria so miss out on the super cheap EE deals etc.

Does anyone have any experience of the Post Office for this?

Friend of mine is with them, far as I remember he rated them quite highly.

Have a look at samknows.com, see what LLU offerings are available to you.

ime of rural broadband and the increase of line faults that come with rural broadband. its not worth straying away from bt ime.

Ive found BT to have more power with open reach to get faults fixed quicker – where as orange , o2 and talk talk (others ive tried in the past) have always taken 29 of the 30 days allowed from when the fault is reported to an engineer coming.

engineer coming thursday this week for fault reported saturday with BT.

my neighbours are on talk talk and sky via unbundled LLU and they cannot use apple tv on their connection without a 3 hr buffer – yet they are fed off the some pole as me and i can stream immediately.

YMMV

Dont do it. My parents did and 3 months in still dont have a reliable internet service. The latest excuse from Post Office is that the router they supply is not compatable with winddows 8.x so you get an intermittent service until they get round to figuring out a fix!!!

Pi$$ poor service

Early scores 1 for 2 against. I was hoping for a bit better than that.

Trail rat – it is a good point they did fix one problem in the last 9 years pretty quickly. After threatening us with the £99 service charge if it wasn’t their fault about twenty times.

Chris – we don’t have windows 8 but it points to pretty poor support

the router they supply is not compatable with winddows 8.x

That seems unlikely. Wifi is wifi and Ethernet is Ethernet, it’s a standard (for most practical purposes anyway).

“£99 service charge if it wasn’t their fault about twenty times.”

the simple answer to that is – “your responsible for everything to the box right ? and you supplied the filter and router right? ok – so everything on this line right up to the router is suppled and owned by you – so how your going to work out its my fault is beyond me.

https://account.pobroadband.co.uk/SelfCare.UI/ContentManagement/FAQs?topic=YourConnection#000

What computer system do I need to receive Post Office Broadband?
…
The computer must run one of these Operating Systems –

Windows 2000

Windows XP

Windows Vista

Windows 7

Windows 8.

Someone’s telling porkies.

(Quite why they need Windows I don’t know, other than to run some unnecessary ‘setup CD’)

how your going to work out its my fault is beyond me.

I think the caveat here is if they send out Openreach and it transpires that the wet string you’ve used to wire your internal extensions is the cause of the issue.

Plug directly into the Linebox test socket to rule this out.

We had it and it genuinely is appalling. The supplied router is useless, their customer service useless and it was just very slow. You couldn’t get any signal from the router upstairs.

we established that im pre decimalisation on my equipment what with living in the arse of no where.

no test socket.

in todays age of wireless phones do people really still use internal extensions ?

People actually use the routers supplied by the ISP???

Rachel

why wouldnt i ? the bt homehub works fine…..

its the fact my aerial feed from the pole is split where its secured to the house and swinging in the high winds of late means that my connection comes and goes and my profile is being throttled as the exchange is confused as to why i keep reconnecting.

We are with the PO. It was going to be temporary as they offered a monthly contract with no tie in but we’ve stayed with them as its been fine. I thought they just piggy backed onto BT, ie its the same service but the bills go through them.

People actually use the routers supplied by the ISP???

Sky insist on it (though there’s ways around it).

we established that im pre decimalisation on my equipment what with living in the arse of no where.

Noise on the line? BT will jump for that. I wouldn’t mention broadband, it’ll muddy the issue.

no test socket.

That’d be my starting point, get a Master Linebox installed. They’ll charge you in isolation but if it’s part of a fault they should do it for free.

I am with PO, whilst they are cheap, they aren’t good. the phone bill sometimes seems erratic when I check it with certain calls that we thought we in our package seemingly not. The router and other hardware they supply is very poor too.

I had a problem with one router and called up to ask advice. The tech support guy I spoke to said he would talk me through the testing / fixing of the problem. He immediately jumped into overly complicated ways and means of testing the hardware, using unintelligible jargon I struggled to understand. When I kept asking him to slow down and that I wasnt sure what he was on about he just went faster and added more jargon…eventually instructing me to take apart the socket on the wall. Was an unbelievably frustrating experience so I asked to complain. He refused to put me through to anyone to lodge a complaint for a good 20 minutes of me telling him I wanted to complain. The customer service manager I spoke to and explained how poor the service was (for someone who isn’t scared of IT / anything technical) didn’t seem to give a toss.

Cheap? yes, good? no.