Are BT actually doing anything useful?

I'm a BT customer at Calvine exchange (ESCLV), located approx 9.5 km from the exchange with a line made up of copper, aluminium and what at times appears to be baked bean cans connected by string. As you might expect I don't get much speed: for the last 3 years my normal connection is a downstream DSL connection rate of 0.7 - 0.8 Mbps, IP profile of 0.5 Mbps and a download speed (on the Thinkbroadband tester) of around 0.43 Mbps. I've been in a slowdown period for the last 3 weeks where the connection rate is 0.35 Mbps, IP profile 0.25 Mbps and speed of about 0.2 Mbps. These are through a Homehub4 and measured with a wired connection.

I've had an Openreach engineer out twice in the first few days after opening the fault, once to do a line repair and once to investigate the slow speed (same person both times), neither visit had any effect other than to confirm that he was seeing the same connection rate as I was. I have spoken numerous times with BT second level support, so far nothing they have attempted has achieved anything. Today they have reset my profile to 0.5 Mbps. Is this just them tinkering to make it look as if they're doing something or can it actually achieve anything? If the DSL connection rate is still 0.35 Mbps then I don't see how setting the profile to a higher value can do anything (but there may well be something that I don't know that means this is a good thing to do).

I'm now seriously starting to consider satellite, but that's for another thread (coming soon).

When they said they were resetting the profile they may actually mean they are putting you on a fixed 500Kbs connection (rather than letting the DLM choose a speed). This is how ADSL was originally delivered.

Satelite would probably give you an improvement but most of them are now heavily contended and see massive drops in speed at peek times - but even then it may be worthwhile compared to what you currently get.

Not what you want to hear.

At 9.5Km from the Exchange with Copper and Aliminium you are not going to improve beyond what you had.

The 0.5Mb fixed profile should improve your present speed but may cause some drop outs.

Unless you are going to get FTTC provided within 1.5Km you are the perfect situation for Satellite or LTE. Have a look at the Scottish site for SFBB to see what they are planning for your locality or if you are in the tail. You should get the min 2Mb from the BDUK subsidy but this may be by the above two mechanisms!

Thanks for the replies.

I'm not looking to get any better performance than I was previously through the landline, just to go back to what I've had for most of the last 3 years. Given that the distance between my house and the exchange hasn't changed there must be something in BT's infrastructure that has caused the fall in speed, but I'm having difficulty persuading them to do anything about it.

I'd say the chances of fibre or any other type of infrastructure improvement happening here in the next few years is remote, just like the location, hence the interest in satellite.

It seems like they are attempting to put me on a fixed profile - I'm not yet sure if it's really working as in the 3 days since they made the change I've only had a connection for two periods, one for 2 hours after 2 days with nothing, and then another 12 hour gap before it connected again this morning. An engineer is coming tomorrow so we'll see what he has to say.