BT Broadband - 4 months of misery.

Hi there,

This is my first post. I don't know if it's against forum rules to post a problem in this particular section, and I am probably shooting myself in the foot by having my first post be such a negative one, but I am at my wits' end. I am posting here in the hopes that someone can help.

I activated my BT Broadband (Opt 1) on March 12, 2009. It worked reasonably well until about the second week of April, when I started experiencing extremely slow speeds - .13 meg (if that makes any sense) All I know is that I can't even watch a YouTube video without extreme amounts of buffering, emails with relatively small attachments take ages to download, even the BBC News homepage takes ages to load. And forget about watching iPlayer. I have phoned BT numerous times - had engineers visit my property twice, am on my second Home Hub - and still I am experiencing ridiculously slow speeds. No one can figure out what the problem is, but that doesn't stop the helpdesk from putting me through the same tests over and over again.

Every time I phone them I get a different story - one day they tell me the problem is at the exchange and the profile for my line needs to be reset (apparently our line is capable of handling up to 6MB, the fastest I've ever been able to download a file is at about 250kbps, and more often it's in the neighbourhood of 12kbps - I am not downloading torrents and am not a heavy user), the next time they say there's no problem at their end and I have to pay £65 for an engineer to come to my flat and check the wiring... I've had so many different excuses that I can't keep track.

I am already paying for a service that I am not getting, and now I'm being told I have to pay extra for them to come out and try to diagnose the problem. To add insult to injury, I was supposed to get the first 6 months at half price (on a promotional offer through the BT website) and I've been charged full price since day one. They were supposed to adjust my bill to reflect the discount, and this still hasn't happened.

It has been nearly 4 months, yet I am no closer to a resolution. I spent over an hour on the phone to the technical helpdesk, then finally was put through to a supervisor, who then put me through to a complaints department. The "result"? They are "escalating (my) complaint to the faults department", and they will "run some tests on (my) line" - I have been through this THREE TIMES already. They say they will only refund me for the months I've been without service when the problem is resolved. It's been 14 weeks. How long before they finally decide that they can't fix the problem? If I cancel the service I have to pay half the fees till the end of the contract (I'm on an 18 month contract).

I am at my wits' end. I almost broke down in tears on the phone last night, that's how frustrated I am at being so blatantly ripped off. I often work from home, but these slow speeds make it absolutely impossible to do much more then send emails without attachments. And forget about VoIP. I want to make a formal complaint but BT have told me that there's no point making a complaint because until I pay for an engineer to come to me they won't consider the case closed. What kind of moron would agree to throw extra money at a company that has already proved itself so utterly incapable of providing the service they promised? Surely this is just an evasive tactic? They won't even give me an address to write to complain to. All they do is try to get me to go through the same process of unplugging everything, plugging directly into the exchange, waiting 48 hours for "test results" which inevitably take another 48 hours...

I just want out of this contract. I know the get-out clause is "up to 8MB" but surely there is a minimum standard? I'm not even getting dialup most of the time! Surely this is illegal?

To my knowledge it's perfectly legal sadly. Such as the way broadband is in the UK, everything is up to etc etc. Strange you've had an engineer out and they cant find a fault with speeds that low!

Really the service you have received is totally unacceptable, BT were just today awarded the award for worst customer service in the Daily Telegraph/onepoll.com poll. Yes they beat British Gas and more amazingly Sky! Hopefully though this is the wake-up call they need to improve.

The service you have received isn't very good at all, BT have support reps on these forums and I will leave this one with them to sort out. I've just had a rant at a number of people within BT about their lack of involvement in forums despite a team being in place. Hopefully they pick this up tomorrow and get the appropriate details from yourself and get it resolved.

On the off chance someone here can help it would be useful if you could provide the router stats especially sync speed up/down. line attenuation, SNR margin and CRC errors.

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php

Also results from:

http://www.speedtester.bt.com/

--------------------------------------------------------------------
<needs updating>

Thanks for both of your replies - I didn't expect anyone to be online so late

I can't get the BT speed test site to work now, but I've used speedtest.net and have the following results:

d/l - 0.13 Mbps
u/l - 0.37 Mbps
ping - 74 ms

Router stats are:

downstream - 6464 Kbps
upstream - 448 Kbps
line attenuation (d/u) = 35.0 dB / 22.0 dB
noise margin (d/u) - 14.8 dB / 27.0 dB

I'm not sure where SNR margin and CRC error readings are.

Thanks once again for replying.

Really you need to get the BT speedtest done for BT to do anything about it, third party speedtests cannot be controlled and therefore not used for accurate testing. All I can recommend is that you keep trying until it works.

Hi Paul,

I managed to get it to work just now. These are the results:

Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
Your DSL connection rate: 6720 kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP profile for your line is - 135 kbps
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 78 kbps

I've had an engineer out today (amazingly when I rang this morning they booked an appointment for this afternoon) and he said that I was right to refuse to pay for a visit as the problem is most definitely not in my flat.

Yeah the sync rate and IP profile pretty much confirm that the problem is almost deffinatly not your end - unless you have irregular freak noise bursts that pull the connection down really low...

BT need to reset your profile its prolly stuck.

If its really taken them 4 months to work this out tho.......................................

--------------------------------------------------------------------
<needs updating>

Edited by Rroff (Tue 30-Jun-09 15:53:03)

I was starting to doubt my sanity. Thing is - and I'm sure anyone who's been through tech support will know - they don't seem to keep very accurate records of ongoing problems, only that complaints have been made about slow speed. I've been told several times that my profile is being reset, but it never happens. I just wind up going through the same process over and over.

Thing is, the engineers who have visited all say the same thing - my profile needs to be reset - yet this message never seems to reach BT.

I'm sure my story is similar but I will keep posting updates so that if this ever does get resolved, someone might benefit from it.

This isn't usually a step I like to advise but with BT its too often the only resort...

If you've made more than 4 attempts to resolve this and its been ongoing for more than a month (which I guess it has) without being resolved then I reccomend you fire off an email to Ian Livingstone (sorry Ian) - his team are very very good at getting things sorted and do have some clout with WholeSale...

Just be prepared to be called 3-4 times a day with updates even if they are just updating you to say they are still on the case.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
<needs updating>

Stuck profiles have been going on as far as I can remember.... I had to get this sorted twice in the past year. The other week my new ADSL2+ connection was stuck with a 1Mb profile. Surely when you say you are connecting solidly at over 8Mb and the speedtester says your profile is 1000kbs they should not have to ask anything else, it is a stuck profile full stop and nothing you will do will change the situation. Yes I did do a test in the master socket (synched at 9175k, good this ADSL2+!) but in the end having left the hub connected solidly for 4 days it sorted itself out. Whether anything they did or not I don't know, but at least I now have my 7150kbs profile back.

If you get through the the right people in UK support some of them are quite helpful. But India is a disaster, once I just put the phone down as I could barely hear her. Keep trying...