@RobertoS
Thanks for the positive comments. I currently squeeze about 4-5mbps out of my O2 connection & cable isn't available in my area. I honestly felt hard-done-by until reading people overjoyed at getting 1mbps out of their lines. Puts things into perspective I guess. By the way I picked my router based on your recommendation in other threads by the way so I hope it's not going to let me down!

Aquiss have just emailed me to say BT are coming tomorrow to try again! They can't possibly screw it up twice....can they?

Hope it all goes well MadPom

I get a voicemail at 8AM from a BT Engineer. I call back, and he's saying he's at the premises installing the line, for BT Infinity!
No warning, no notification! How stupid would it have been if the offices were closed and they would say they're charging a fee because nobody was there, yet they never informed anyone that they're coming!

I'll update with line statistics after I get to the office. Unfortunately they had to move the modem back to the place where the socket is, downstairs. My computers will be losing internet access for a few weeks while we wait for our own line from IDNet. The reason was that it would be a 'different charge' or something if they had to extend the line to where the modem for the old Broadband is right now.

@Saltank - Hope you at least get connected & it works.

BT haven't even been to me today - they visited my cabinet earlier this morning and discovered from there that it still wasn't going to work. I've just had a call from Aquiss now to tell me BT won't be coming over, and it's going "up for review" at some point. They couldn't tell me any more at this stage but have promised to call later.

Needless to say I'm incredibly cheesed off with this. In all seriousness how many attempts should I be allowing BT to actually get this right? Or should I face facts now I'm forever doomed to ~4mbps unless Virgin decide to cover that extra mile to my house after all?

I think we're all early adopters, despite the fact that this product has been implemented for a few years now, the fact that BT seem to be using a broken down computer system in addition to completely ineffective work practices and strategies, will mean that unless they change that (dramatically), everyone will continue to have the same problems.

It's not like the good old days when the market was pretty much saturated and everyone knew (at BT and other ISPs) what they were doing, so the customers had a reliable time frame.

I'm no expert, but from the way I've seen things go wrong, their decentralised department strategy is doomed to failure: - everyone's order goes through different people at different places through different computer systems, and when there's such a huge strain on the company to deliver (lots of demand) and they don't have the resources, it'll just get worse.

Good luck with your connection, and the one thing I would advise is that you wait, like we have (check my first post here, it's a while back!) Eventually they'll get your FTTC conneced!

Edited by Saltank (Fri 20-May-11 11:15:10)

Well Aquiss just left me a voice mail. Seems BT have admitted there's a fault with the cabinet. Now seeing as I'm the first person to be enabled, it's clear they didn't test the thing after they implemented it. I work for a major IT firm & if we demonstrated this level of incompetence we'd be facing serious fines from our customers, assuming we had any left!

Anyway the earliest BT can look at the cabinet fault is the 27th. 7 days! This leaves me with no confidence whatsoever in the system, especially as I rely on broadband for work (on-call at 3am for example). In nearly 3 years my O2 broadband has never failed. I'm starting to think that my slow-but-rock-steady O2 connection is better than will-it-ever-work FTTC?

Had a think about it & decided to cancel my order. Can't fault Aquiss in the matter - they've been great and handled my cancellation request/refund promptly. However BT are just useless. There's no way I'm paying £50 installation, plus £36/month (with a 12month lock-in) for the sake of being their guinea pig! I'd rather stick with a slow but reliable connection that's less than half the price.

I might try ordering again in 6 months, but for now I don't consider it worth it!

It took the engineer five minutes to connect everything, and said it's not his 'job' to do the speed test or anything, because I had to provide my own router. I went with the Linksys E4200, and it seems fine so far.

Here's the speed test: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1313187406.png
He showed me a text he received on his phone saying it synced at 40/10 (maxium speed). So here's to hoping things stick this way.

Edited by Saltank (Thu 26-May-11 15:29:09)

Glad you got connected & it works! I thought the Openreach engineers were meant to perform a speed test regardless of which provider you were using and whatever router? The engineer that visited me tried to get a reading from the modem using his own equipment (of course couldn't due to other reasons).

I have no regrets about cancelling my order, it was rapidly becomming far too much hassle. Will (hopefully) see tomorrow if Openreach still bother coming out to the cabinet knowing I've cancelled my order. The cabinet is faulty regardless of whether a customer is wanting FTTC or not so needs fixing. I'm hoping that someone else in my area will be the "guinea pig" with FTTC instead & I'll re-order in a few months time when I'm more likely to have success.

He said he could only provide to do the speed test if I was using one of their own routers. Incidentally, there was one of their routers lying around, but it was when BT made their initial screw ups trying to get ADSL2+ on another line, and I just had it left over. So he didn't bother because he didn't know any connection settings.