Car insurance... house insurance.. etc.. any insurance really.

...and yet my personal experiences of my last 2 BT outages were a 3 and 4 day wait while BT denied there was a fault on my line which mysteriously fixed itself on the day an engineer visit was scheduled, and on 1 occasion after an engineer called me - allegedly from the exchange - to ask if I was home in order for him to visit. In addition, despite a complete rewire internally and experimenting with both an Internal ADSLcard and several routersmy line has always suffered random drops which are of no concern to BT(whoever). I still have no idea what it was that caused the outages.. strange attitude this, pretty much any other professional will tell you "what the problem was" - even if they know you are not capable of fixing it. It seems that doesnt apply with BT these days - quite a change from the first ADSL issue I had several years ago when a very helpful BT engineer told me that a simple gel crimp had broken my service - progress... gotta love it!

I wish I had an alternative to the BTw local loop, but in my location they have a monopoly on fixed lines and seem content to offer a hit and miss service to a captive audience

Just My Opinion (Based on personal experience).... YMMV

In reply to a post by Pgre:

I guess it shows how important some view their Internet connection though.

Oh I think you will find it important soon enough, when the government force you to use it in all your dealings with them.

looking at their recent behaviour and customer feedback they look far less agressive to me than BT.

Why is it always Openreach that is sent to customers premises when an ADSL fault is logged?

I expect he's using it just because you have a backup doesn't mean you don't then worry about fixing the primary.

running on the backup your service is now "at risk" because should the worst happen to the backup you're screwed so the idea being get the damn thing fixed ASAP.

I hate BT that much too I as the field engineer that I was had to resolve many problems caused by BT over the years many of which saw me dragged out on Saturdays to explain to someone why they could not accept credit/debit cards in their shop or why £50,000 worth of transactions could not poll to the bank or why links exchange would not connect meaning lab results were not transferred from the lab to the gp

If it's THAT critical you have a router with a USB port on it that takes a 3G dongle and on loss of sync auto failsover to that, expensive router and you've got to maintain some form of contract for the dongle but that's your answer (if you can get a signal of course)

In reply to a post by Pgre:

Car insurance... house insurance.. etc.. any insurance really.

Then thats nothing like having to have a back up solution if your ADSL goes down.

Car Insurance the law says you have to have that for starters so no choice and rightly so, if you hit someone on the road they shouldnt have to pay for your bad driving.

Home Insurance is to protect your home should damage occur (or if you are talking contents if some thief or similar nicks things) again thats hardly comparable to having to have an alternative method to connect to the interent because a company provides you with a days worth of faulty service.

Both items you mention are to protect others and property i fail to see the connection between that and having to pay for alternative broadband connection methods due to a company having faults at an exchange, leaving you without service which you pay for.

If someone burns the exchange to the ground LLU and BTW won't help, but then again that's fairly rare....