BROADBAND WOE'S

[sawdust1]

Hi all, Boy in bedroom playing shoot up's, wife on laptop shopping, girl on tablet doing girly stuff and me on laptop on uk workshop of course and all's well until BT engineer repairs fault on line. Now when boy play's his games everyone has to get off as the ping goes up like a rocket and then his games are unplayable.
Got onto BT live chat and after 2 Hrs of unplugging this and that the tests come back as with in limits, boy points out to the tech guy at the other end that the noise band which they do not check is lower than normal, they said it was and would be sorted give it 24Hrs and all will be ok and they would ring back 2 days later which they did not.
2 weeks past the problem was still their so contacted them again, 1 1/2 Hrs of more testing with the result that everything was within limits, but no one could give any answer as to why the fault has occurred after the fault on the line was fixed.
So the problem is still their and i don't know how to get it resolved.
Funny thing is when i told the engineer that broadband was bad our end he said that by disconnecting all the extra phone sockets in the house and disconnecting the line to my work shop this would all help, after this the fault has occured.
Any idea's please.

 

[NickWelford]

Move to a better supplier. John Lewis Broadband has best customer service.

 

[Steve Maskery]

Virgin.

I shall never, ever, ever, be a BT customer again. This is leading to something of a dilemma, as my mobile is with EE, with whom I am perfectly happy. I started with one2one, it became T-mobile and now EE. Very few problems and good customer service. But BT are buying EE (and therefore also Orange) and that limits my options a little

Steve, whose dispute with nPower has been taken up by the Energy Ombudsman

 

[mseries]

Plusnet + BT asked me to plug my router into the test port on the wall socket, which I did. This eliminate most of the wiring in my house except for the modem cable. My problem remained so they sent a man to take a look. He detected that my speed was 3Mb/s faster outside versus inside, that is from my external junction box to my socket. He replaced the cable to my socket and the socket itself and got someone to twiddle some settings in the exchange and it's been fine since. So see if you can get an engineer visit

 

[stockonehundred]

Been with EE Broadband for years, long before Orange sold up to them. Had two lots of down time lasting only a few hours in the whole time. Also moved house twice and the change over went like clockwork. The only downside is the foreign call centres, but hardly ever have to call them.

 

[RogerP]

Addressed to all. What does it cost and what speed do you get and how reliable?

 

[petermillard]

Addressed to all. What does it cost and what speed do you get and how reliable?

+1 for Virgin. I pay £40-ish/month for 125Mb and they generally deliver this or very close:-



The ping can vary a bit but I'm not a gamer so <shrug>. I could get it cheaper if I put our TV with them as well, but I like the flexibility of having them separate, and I want the fastest broadband I can get, which is currently Virgin - no-one else comes close where I live.

Re. reliability, it's been absolutely solid for the ~3 years or so we've had it - no outages at all, no need to call support. The only weirdness is that we occasionally have to reboot the router if one of the various devices can't connect - usually when they've been used on wifi elsewhere - but a simple restart has always fixed this.

In short; highly recommended.

HTH Pete

 

[AJB Temple]

Are you sure you are not getting interference from another device nearby using the same channel? It may be worth logging in to your router and experimenting with channel changes? I have two separate channels running in mind as some computers work better on different channels, depending on wifi compatibility.

Check all connections and speeds one by one with intranet cable.

Generally with broadband, unless you have cable direct to your property, it all comes via BT openreach, so the core upload and download quality depends on the integrity of the copper or cooper + fibre optic. Hence different providers have limited flexibility except in choosing contention ratios.

 

[Steve Maskery]

Generally with broadband, unless you have cable direct to your property, it all comes via BT openreach, so the core upload and download quality depends on the integrity of the copper or copper + fibre optic. Hence different providers have limited flexibility except in choosing contention ratios.

All the more reason to go with Virgin, I'd say. BT anything don't come into it.

 

[AJB Temple]

The point I am making Steve is that whether you use Virgin or Deflowered, very often they are delivering their service over BT Openreach network, which is either copper all the way to your house (sometimes not copper - see London problems with alu cabling that is corroded to hell) or fibre optic to the nearest box, sometimes FO to the nearest pole (this being the upgrade path) and then copper to your house. Virgin do not own a cable network to many UK properties. They mostly buy space on the BT network , along with everyone else. There are a few exceptions, but "few" is the operative word.

The key thing here is to identify where the problem lies. Is it the delivery to the property? Is it a wireless problem (conflicts etc)? Is it a modem problem? is it a router problem?

I run a business that depends for some parts on extremely high speed, very high volume, internet connections and we use zero contention dedicated leased lines for this. We are clued up about this stuff. Sadly it does not stop me from having a carp internet connection at home in rural Kent, which may as well be rural Somalia ;-)

 

[RogerP]

T............. Virgin do not own a cable network to many UK properties. They mostly buy space on the BT network , along with everyone else. There are a few exceptions, but "few" is the operative word.
..........

My Virgin connection is fibre optic all the way. I pay for 100mb it tests as 110mb ish and never drops lower any time, any day. I could pay more and have faster. Costs me £25 a month just for the that though.

The fibre optic cable was put in many years ago by United Artists. Virgin inherited it.

 

[sawdust1]

Hi and thanks for the reply's. Out in the sticks so fibre a dream. 1/2 mile from road and pole then underground to pole by house, 1 mile from exchange. Boy's computer is wired via an ethernet cable the rest of us are Wi Fi.
Will look at some of the suggestions.
Does not explain why problem has occurred after line was repaired.

 

[rafezetter]

Virgin offer 100mb or 200mb, I have the latter and it costs £52 odd but then there are 6 of us in the house. Virgin are not amazing, and they have been caught out oversubscribing people (selling more connections per main hub than it's rated for), but I've never had a problem so bad it's made me consider swapping suppliers in the 10 odd years I've used them. A call to their agents usually gets most things in motion and you can negotiate a refund for lost days etc, if you push hard enough.

as for the repair - you only have their word that it was - I would call them again, ask to speak to a manager direct as soon as the agent picks up your call, and tell them if it doesn't get sorted in 24 hours PLUS a refund against the cost of 2 weeks worth of disrupted service you'll refer the complaint to :

http://www.ombudsman-services.org/make- ... tions.html

and don't take just a token £10 or whatever - don't settle for anything less than 50% of a monthly cost (or more if you can get it). In the past I managed to get virgin to refund 3 months worth after they admitted proposed fixes to a main hub had been delayed by 3 months.

Go your suppliers forum and see if you can find posts regarding similar issues, this will help you negotiate.

 

[Steve Maskery]

Round here at least, Virgin don't use any of BT's infrastructure. I suppose it may not be the same all over the country, I don't know.
Yes, pretty much all of the other suppliers, like Talk Talk etc. use the BT copper system installed and maintained, if you are lucky, by Openreach.

 

[Bigdanny]

Here in Bulgaria I live in a village about 12 miles from the county town. I get about 85-90 Mb Download AND Upload for about 10-12 pounds a month. There is a fibre optic router within 100 metres of my house. It hasnt always been as good but every year connectivity has got better and better. Ive been here 10 years and started with dialup which was painful having left a 2Mb connection in UK. But within a year I managed to persuade the phone company to install adsl. Then about 4 years ago I jumped ship to a cable company who had the foresight to install fibre optic to the village. At the start of this year they upgraded to my current speeds. So I am very happy.

Before I moved here I worked for Cable & wireless ( later ntl before Virgin bought them) in their fault department . The fibre optic system they have is upgradeable massively in capacity even without putting fibre to every home. One of the weak points is the places where they have to use other providers ie BT interconnects. I am sure they are a lot more alternative providers available now .

Interesting fact for you. I was working there when digital STBs were rolled out, remember all the freezing pics etc. Shortly before I left when ntl were reorganising they were developing a new computer operating system for everything, web-based. This was to consolidate many legacy based systems. Each town or region had its own special custom computer program to control stuff for phone, exchanges , TV etc etc. During this review of all their systems they found a large data centre that was set up for digital roll out . On it was info like every time you changed channel it recorded how long you watched which channel, and a lot of info besides. That was over 10 years ago so who knows what they know now.

Danny

 

[Harbo]

We don't have a choice in our village - it's BT ( or it's cheaper sibling) or nothing if you want fast broadband.
Having said that, I've never had any problems with them over the many years I've been with them.
We should get 80 but generally average 40 due to the aluminium underground feeders in our street.
Before that it was 1.5 on a good day!

Rod

 

[paulm]

Blimey, that's still good Rod, we're stuck on 6mb here, unless I want to upgrade and pay an arm and a leg for fibre !

Cheers, Paul

 

[NickWelford]

Sadly it does not stop me from having a carp internet connection at home in rural Kent, which may as well be rural Somalia ;-)

I live in a small hamlet where I swear the final leg between the box and our house is two tins and some wet string. And the string keeps drying out.......

 

[Racers]

Virgin 100Mb here on NTL cabling and its going to be upgraded before Xmas.

I would hate to have broadband on twisted pair, its made for telephones not high speed data.


Pete

 

[Steve Maskery]

I've just had an email from Virgin, advising me to "Hold on tight" as my "speed boost" is on its way. They have neglected to tell me onto what I should hold tight.

I'm going up from "up to 50 Mbps" to "up to 75 Mbps" at some point between next April and September.

Not exactly light, by the speeds above, but then this is Kirkby.
I've just tried to different BB speed checkers and got such wildly different readings (181 and 51 Mbps) that I can't have any faith in either of them.