Home broadband: I may have leapt from frying into the fire

After months of super shoddy home broadband I have binned Sky and taken up with BT. Right at this moment I feel an enormous sense of relief, and I hope it will last.

Any BT horror stories?

I’m hoping the BT home router will help too – seems the auto-channel switching functionality it offers might help improve things in a wifi crowded area.

There are loads of BT horror stories but they’ve never caused us any problems and I’d be loathe to leave them.

Same here. Just switched to infinity.

I also switched from Sky to BT in the sale.

There are loads of BT horror stories but they’ve never caused us any problems and I’d be loathe to leave them.

Same for me with Sky. Been with 32gb fibre band since it started, only had an issue one and that was due to the neighbours car alarm confusing our router. Sky talk me through switching it to a different frequency and all fixed in 20 mins.

Every large company has horror stories.

I reckon they are pretty good.

Switched back to them last year when Fibre went live, wish I’d done it sooner been the best ISP I’ve had since well BT the last time many years ago.

BT couldn’t supply out infinity, something about the telegraph pole being overloaded. They strung us along for a month with broken promises until we eventually went back to Virgin.

Then we had all the hassle of trying to organise refunds etc.

I’m sure they can’t be all bad since they wouldn’t exist, but on this occasion they were awful.

Was with sky for years. 2 megasmurfs pretty useless these days, constant drop outs and expensive. Changed to Virgin in Jan. I pay 10 squid a month less for 150 megasmurfs. No drop outs since Jan. Should have changed years ago.

Dad just jumped from sky to bt infinity and gets 40 smurfs from about 0.5 with bt (going from copper to copper / fibre is the main reason for the increase) but he has been very happy with the service. The only issue he had was with the hub 5 and vpn link used for work. The hubs firmware needed to be updated – may not be an issue if you don’t use vpn!

Never had any issues with Sky here. What sort of problems do people gave with them?

Homehub3 wifi was rubbish and kept dropping out. Homehub5 seems to have sorted it.

You get problems if all your neighbours have BT too and they have more modern homehubs than you.

Quite impressed with home hub 5 so far. I seem to have nearly 80 megasmurfs down and 20 up.
I use a van for work and it’s been great so far.

Apart from quicker downloads etc voice and vid calls seem to be a lot better than on the old service.

Dumped Virgin after the broadband was **** 9 months in a 12 months period. Been with Bt for 2 years now and not had any downtime – reliable as a Casio watch.

I’m envious. I’m lucky to hit 1.3 DL.

Been with BT for years now in three different properties and never had a problem with them.

Been with BT for about 7 years now. No real issues, any problems have been sorted here and then on the phone.

We did have a spell where the BB was erratic for a few hours at a time. After a week of fault finding at their end they came round and tinkered with the line coming from the pole to the house, new hub and all has been fine.

Never really had any issues with BT, apart from when I first had the broadband set up, and my connection to the router kept dropping out. I had several long phone sessions, even a new router, without fixing the issue, until after one marathon session lasting an hour and three-quarters, there was a lightbulb moment, as I was quietly saying aloud the password key for the router as I was typing it in: the techy bod suddenly said stop, what did you key in? So I read it out, and he said I was missing the $ at the beginning! What $ sign, I said; turns out BT had decided that if you had a Mac, you had to put a $ in front of the code! Someone taking the piss about the perceived cost of Macs, I’m sure.
It did help that I wasn’t talking to regular call-centre staff, reading from a prepared script, but the dedicated Mac specialists.
Nowhere in BT’s literature did it say anything about the bloody $ symbol, though; no wonder it took so long to sort.
Now they use a different password key, so there’s no issue. And when I upgraded to Infinity, the people I dealt with were very helpful, and it all went very smoothly and quickly.

megasmurfs

?

Over the years in the UK I was with BT most, they seemed to be able to fix things when others couldn’t. All big companies have horror stories especially when you talk about BB speeds/quality. So much is to do with an aging bit of copper in a trench and without replacing it nobody is going to improve your service.

Given that all fibfre is BT behind the scenes the only difference is in how much you pay and what the CS is like.
I’ve got infinity in one house and zen in another and both have been absolutely fine.

Been with Sky for ages and never had any problems. Consistent 38 meg down / 8 meg up from their 40 meg service.

We were with 02 and then Sky took over, not long after that they put the price up and dropped the connection speed. Switched to BT (not infinity) and it’s been fine and fast (the speed that we had with 02) ever since.

I’m tempted to go BT fibre optic, but really like my Humax. hmmm.

I’m with Sky and apart from their dreadful router that I’ve replaced it’s been fine.

The fibre link is provided by Openworld still so speeds will be the same as BT would give anyway.

+1 for BT. The Homehub 5 is really good, our neighbour logged in to it when his BB was borked by EE! We had an issue with speed when we first signed up, I emailed the MD at BT and miraculously elves appeared and fixed it. I’m very loathe to move despite it costing a few bob more than the opposition.

I’ve been feeding the Sky beast for too long. Swapping over to plusnet as we speak (free broadband for a year + £75 cashback) – any current users want to quickly tell me their username so I can say they ‘recommended’ me and they get a ‘reward’?

I want fibre, but despite openreach saying my cabinet is accepting orders, no one is letting me order it.

I’ve been with BT for a few years. I find that the router works, and DL seems to be pretty consistent.

When there’s a fault (which has been rare), they can be a bloody nightmare to deal with until you get through to the higher level tech help teams. Other than that, I like them.

Despite all and sundry having fibre all around us, we are stuck on copper and get nearly 3mps on a good day. Apparently the current work plan has us slated to upgrade to fibre in 2017 but it keeps getting put back further and further.

We use BT and have the old router which keeps dropping out and is a real PITA.

Other than that BT are fine. Just counting the days until we can catch up with the 21st Century.