Customer service treacle.

A friend recently moved and decided to leave AOL and take a bundled package from BT. This seems to have been a big mistake.

Firstly, a couple of days after the phone line went on he lost voice service, this was around the same time as the broadband was to be activated. We reported the voice fault and assumed that the slow broadband speed was linked to this. BT apparently had to farm out this fault to a "contractor" to rectify (according to text messages received on the subject) who took some time to rectify this, in total a 16 day period with no voice service and Broadband at around 1.2 Mbps

Once the fault cleared we ran a speedtest only to find that despite a 6144 sync and a 5000 Ip profile the throughput was around 1300 - which has since dropped to around 1Mbps. We called Support who looked at a few thing their end, and said they would have to pass this on to a team for further tests and that they would call the next night. The next night... the same thing, the guy looked at a few things and said he would pass it on to a team for further tests, and - yes - would call back the next evening. Already I felt as if BT were wasting my time.

I explained that the customer has problems that prevent him dealing with stuff like this, and as such I would have to make myself available to deal with it. I agreed that I would be available for a call around 6.30 pm last night. By 7.30 last night we decided to call BT - no call had arrived - great customer service there. after around 20 mins in a queue, the support guy spoke to "the broadband team" who apparently told him they had tweaked some settings at the exchange - to which we told him that throughput had actually dropped over the previous evening.

He went away again and returned to tell me that he needs to book an engineers appointment to remedy this. Of course there are none left for this weekend when my friend is home, but they can do it next weekend when he is away having his access visit to his kids. Reluctantly I have agreed to go there Monday afternoon and wait.

I am rather expecting this to work out like my last 2 faults here where I was told an engineer needed to visit only to find after waiting around that the fault had been cleared at the exchange - either way the BT group hasn't covered itself in glory so far, and I am really regretting not talking him out of taking this package, certainly it is something to recount for other friends in the future. Getting any fault fixed by BT seems to be like wading through treacle - unpleasant, time consuming and something that I wouldn't wish to repeat.

20 days in and he still has unacceptably slow speed.

As you have allready pointed out this is a throughput issue so why an engineers visit ?

The initial fault was probably one wire of the pair was disconnected. That seems to have been corrected as the sync would be low if it were not.

What do the router stats look like? Including error counts. And what about the Quiet line test?

Is he running wired or wireless to the router?

Not being a great fan of the Home Hub. I went round there last night with one of my collection of HGV2700s, apart from sync being much higher I found that the line was now delivering 4.5 megs. I swapped back to the HH and found still over 4 megs so I'm assuming someone has tweaked something. He did say that his connection was rather temperamental late Friday night.

Cancelled engineer, now we will see how it runs for a few days. The only snag now is that now he has seen the 2wire sync higher (67xx against the home hub 3's 61xx) hes after one of my 2700's. If hes a good boy Santa might drop one off to him xmas day lol

Out of interest, I dont have the figures but his line seems a lot cleaner than mine, far fewer errors, quite line was fine, ran the NM and ATT through the checker and it came up with 6144 as the sync so I guess all is about where it should be. interesting to see such a difference between the 2 routers though.

Thanks for your interest anyway guys, its nice to have this resource where those familiar with the ways of the force can impart wisdom on us lesser knowledgeable ones