Is it just me or...

Are BT getting worse?

Over the past few weeks I have noticed more and more people complaining about the service provided by BT. Even this forum until recently had been dead for months. It seems since BT announced quite poor financial performance, combined with the large pensions deficit that customer satisfaction has been going down.

Personally I have noticed that the quality of service mostly speed has been getting slower and slower. HTTP downloads during peak hours struggle to get above 130KB/s, download speed is very erratic and not very stable e.g. 400KB/s one second 100KB/s the next, sometimes the variation is more. Even after contacting @BTCare on everybodys favourite 140 character update I had breakfast Web site, Twitter. Even with a poor BT Speedtest result (~600KB/s) I am still waiting for them to get back to me.

It just seems with all the new social media that BT are participating in that even more problems are going unresolved, more problems are occurring and customer satisfaction is heading south in a big way. I have been with BT for what must be coming on 3 years. Service generally has been good, Hub phones are still as rubbish as they were on launch of the whole BT Total Broadband and Home Hub experience. Even then, I have stuck with them, even when Hub v2 is only slightly less rubbish than Hub v1 & 1.5!

I haven't been with an ISP this long since the days of unmetered (No unlimited then ). In the coming months will I be seeing more of "How do I get out of my contract?" & "Why is my broadband so slow" or is this just a little hiccup...

Good post and yes i agree its getting worse and thats why i'm outta here!. Not just because of the poor evening speeds but the dreadful customer support has also played its part. I've been a bt member since the days of BT openworld thats how loyal i was , but enough was enough and i'm waiting for my sky router and next week sky broadband max!.

When I had an engineer out he received a text from one of his mates about the job cuts. Asked if he knew what was going on and he shrugged. Probably get rid of the engineers and then get more complaints about poor service etc.

Blooduk I'd be interested in how your migration from bt to sky goes. Should of been on their service by now but instead am stuck with bt for awhile.

Good luck with it.

Speeds haven't been great during peak times - while I don't like that the biggest issue for me has been how laggy general browsing gets during peak times... I'm still not sure if its DNS or something else related...

Typically if I open a site like facebook it will pause for ~10 seconds on "opening page..." with a blank page - then it will suddenly go in a rush but some images won't load or are slow loading.

If I connect via my VPN then web pages respond instantly with no lag loading more complex elements, images, etc. I've tried using the same DNS settings as my VPN end point as well without it speeding up at all - so it suggests to me that something like phorm or a form of DPI is in use within BT's network and is overloaded.

Outside of peak time its a bit quicker but still not as fast as browsing via an encrypted tunnel.

That and the fact they are struggling to provide 1990s speeds during peak timesis hardly inspiring...

End of the day tho - its about what I'd expect to get for the ~£20 a month or so we are paying... what makes me more annoyed is there are no higher tier packages - but thats probably a sign of BT's general inability to manage their business properly...

Surely it would make sense to add another couple of packages i.e.

£40/m for 2Mbit minimum throttled, "unlimited"
£70/m ~200gig/m before throttling applied.

In reply to a post by paulbeattie87:

Are BT getting worse?

Over the past few weeks I have noticed more and more people complaining about the service provided by BT. Even this forum until recently had been dead for months. It seems since BT announced quite poor financial performance, combined with the large pensions deficit that customer satisfaction has been going down.

Personally I have noticed that the quality of service mostly speed has been getting slower and slower. HTTP downloads during peak hours struggle to get above 130KB/s, download speed is very erratic and not very stable e.g. 400KB/s one second 100KB/s the next, sometimes the variation is more. Even after contacting @BTCare on everybodys favourite 140 character update I had breakfast Web site, Twitter. Even with a poor BT Speedtest result (~600KB/s) I am still waiting for them to get back to me.

It just seems with all the new social media that BT are participating in that even more problems are going unresolved, more problems are occurring and customer satisfaction is heading south in a big way. I have been with BT for what must be coming on 3 years. Service generally has been good, Hub phones are still as rubbish as they were on launch of the whole BT Total Broadband and Home Hub experience. Even then, I have stuck with them, even when Hub v2 is only slightly less rubbish than Hub v1 & 1.5!

I haven't been with an ISP this long since the days of unmetered (No unlimited then ). In the coming months will I be seeing more of "How do I get out of my contract?" & "Why is my broadband so slow" or is this just a little hiccup...

Been more noticeably degrading in recent weeks for me also. Web browsing is sluggish, gaming pings are up, iplayer doesn't work as smoothly as it used to.

generally not up to standard.

Is it just me or is internet on BT starting to feel "turn based"?

Its literally getting to the point where I hit enter on a URL and go away do something else while it waits to connect/open page...

Pretty sure its not anything local coz as I said works fine if I tunnel via encrypted VPN.

If you think it's poor now Paul wait until the national rollout of the "new world" BT systems!

Right now has been the final straw for me and BT, the service has been getting continually worse over recent months. Why have they went and made a service which was OK and you could recommend to people without issue into something that's much, much worse than I could have ever imagined. Such a shame as I really like the BT Vision box but the broadband service is truly horrid.

right now I don't even know where I am with BT one day to the next...

Thursday I think at peak time I was barely getting 400kbit/s and 150+ms ping and then then friday through the weekend was flat out speeds and sub 10ms 24x7.

Strange you mentioned that, I have also noticed increased ping at certain times. Your case that said was strange in the fact even when you tried to get in touch with BT nothing happened, you should have been told something along the lines of that's great you have a problem, Wholesale will fix as the speedtest results you were posting were well below the fault threshold.