The reason that I have included this post here (instead of with my service provider) is that I believe that the problem lies with BT Openreach. I don't know enough to know whether they are spinning me a line or whether it is indeed possible that I get no performance improvement with fibre and that my performance is much worse than that of my neighbours.
I’m looking for advice about how to proceed with our fibre broadband. We get poor speed (<2 Mbps) but our neighbours get relatively acceptable performance (12 Mbps+)
We moved into a semi-rural property in South East Wales just over a year ago. We’ve had a lot of problems with our phone and broadband over this past year and as a result have endured over 15 engineer visits in the past 12 months – our neighbours have had a similar number of visits. We are Talktalk customers, our neighbours are a mixture of Plusnet, Talktalk and BT customers.
The cabinet that serves our property is 1.5 km away by road but the line back to it is around 3.5km due to the circuitous route that it takes. The cabinet has been supports fibre. Until we “upgraded” to fibre we got between 1.5 and 2.0 Mbps which seems reasonable.
We upgraded to fibre broadband on 6 December 2012 and the speed we got was 5.0 Mbps. This reduced by 200-300kbps every day until it has settled at 1.8 Mbps. We’ve had three engineer visits, the first two of which were the “wrong kind of engineer”. The feedback from the final visit on 27 December (I didn’t get to speak to the engineer unfortunately) was that our line was simply not suitable for fibre broadband and that BT Openreach would not replace the line.
I don’t trust that engineer. Partly this is because I don’t understand how the line can be good enough for between 1.5 and 2.0 Mbps on Adsl2 and not get any better on fibre and partly because while the engineer was doing his investigations, he managed to wreck my neighbour’s telephone line and broadband connection completely. I feel that we are being fobbed off , that BT Openreach are simply sick of us and that the engineer is just covering for his own lack of knowledge and/or incompetence.
I also don’t understand how neighbours both sides of our property (one closer to the cabinet, the other further away) who must have 99% the same topology get perfectly acceptable broadband performance while we do not.
I could of course have the fibre equipment removed but every time we’ve had an engineer come to do something it’s taken at least four visits and a month to undo whatever has been done in the first place.
Do any of you with more experience of dealing with this kind of thing have any advice about how I might proceed – or maybe at least explain why our fibre performance is the same as our non-fibre performance and is so much worse than that of our neighbours.