That's a very good point about taking responsibility for a line fault.

It strikes close to home with us as we had a 6 week service outage years ago (when we were with Virgin - never again) where there was clearly a system fault (a few dozen local houses had the same fault - all had working phone lines but but no broadband) yet we were repeatedly given the run around, with multiple engineer call-outs, all reporting the lines were fine. This was only resolved by emailing the MD at home, when mysteriously the system was fixed before dawn the next day.

Thanks for the info about the probable way that the PhoneCoop buy services, it explains a lot, but seems a hellish complex way of doing things. I can't help but feel that there is a very deliberate amount of obfuscation in the market that is deliberately intended to make it challenging to compare one provider with another. So far I've spent around three hours collating information from different providers to try and do a reasonable breakdown of the elements that are important to use and select a provider that is a reasonably good match. It certainly isn't easy, as the better providers all seem to include a lot of things we have no use for, which seems wasteful to me.

Tomorrow I'm going to to start looking at small home/business providers as they may offer a better solution for us.

Edited by deleted (Mon 24-Oct-16 21:40:40)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Where? I had a bit more of a look around but didn't see it. Just a mass of "wonderful entertainment products".

Years ago it was almost impossible to find, then became quite easy. Now?

Sky Fibre Max seems to be a 80/20 product. From the Sky homepage going into Shop and Broadband and Talk lists 4 packages for me - the top one being Sky Fibre Max.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

Having the voice and broadband from separate suppliers may cost more. It just depends.

I think the main problem is where there is what is essentially a voice line fault that manifests itself as a poor broadband connection. Who do you report the problem to?

Openreach would not tell BT retail phones about any perhaps additional work they might do for Plusnet broadband to correct a particular problem.

Having a single supplier for both services avoids that problem.

Apart from the fact if a service provider runs a KBD or GEA test, it will flag up a PSTN (phone) issue, so report to phone provider, if no issue, you continue down as a broadband fault.

Don't seem complex to me.

In reply to a post by JSHarris:

Thanks for the info about the probable way that the PhoneCoop buy services, it explains a lot, but seems a hellish complex way of doing things.

Both old and new ways are complex, but in different ways.

Think of it this way...

Back in ADSL days, Openreach provided the copper line only, while the LLU/unbundler provided a DSLAM in the exchange plus cross-country backhaul to get your data to the internet. BT Wholesale did the same job - a DSLAM and backhaul - though they also provided old-style voice exchange equipment too.

In modern FTTC days, Openreach provides the hybrid copper/fibre line and the DSLAM. The LLU/unbundler no longer provides a DSLAM, but still has to provide cross-country backhaul ... with a caveat. The backhaul needs to be provided from the parent "fibre head end" exchange; most rural exchanges will be a "child" exchange without the head-end equipment.

When an ISP wants to provide an FTTC connection to you, they have to use the Openreach DSLAM and copper/fibre path. However, they can choose to use backhaul from any company that services the parent head-end exchange ... BT Wholesale is one such supplier, TalkTalkBusiness is another; others exist too.

There are around 5,500 exchanges in the UK, but only 1,200 of them act as a parent head-end.

That's for data. The voice service, however, stays on the original exchange.

Is there a way to determine what head-end exchange a particular cabinet is connected to? For a particular cabinet I am interested in, I can draw conclusions from the availability of Talk Talk FTTC, but is there a better way?

It was in the leaked Openreach spreadsheets a while ago. I imagine those present in the spreadsheets probably haven't changed, but those scheduled since would need someone with current access to reply.

Thanks, I supposed what really matters is whether I can use a particular ISP or not, which I can find out just by asking them.

I've not seen anything since then.

BT's topology for 21CN had around 1,100 "tier 1 MSANs" and around 100 Metro PoPs. I imagine these will be the locations of the parent head-ends.

These cover around 70% of the UK premises. The other 4,300 lower-tier exchanges deals with the rest...

Michael its routed the way its routed

though you were in Gigaclear land or was not that as its seemed at first -- or the reality was differtent to the "Sell"

I do indeed have a Gigaclear service, but at another location.