Appalling BT Customer Service beats Groundhog Day!

Since March my BB speed has degraded by two thirds. Every time I report it, I have to go through the 0800 or 151 trauma of speaking to people several thousand miles distant, who each time return my complaint to 'Go'. This involves the infamous call back, to tell me 'there's no fault': then weeks later and after many conversations with answering machine paraphernalia, eventually escalating the matter to 'Openreach'. This achievement with the strict caveat that if it's 'my fault'! theres a charge of £££££££££, judged by - you got it, BT ! (rats in barrels etc.). Even when you email the entire history - the whole wretched little saga just starts the loop off again with the 'Scriptreaders' on the sub-continent.

These firstly insist you perform the pedant ceremony of 'The Test Socket Chronicle' - taking off the faceplate (I have a new and hideously expensive ADSL face splitter, which they'd even never heard of) and placing the plug in the hole with a filter etc. Despite me insisting this has all been tried before and that the last physically attendant BT 'engineer' declared (on the 21st of August) my wiring 'fit' and surcharge free. Also that he'd replaced my 'legs' in the local pre-war, street side green cabinet, housing it's arcane structures, and leaving me (post cabinet look in), with the veiled warning 'that this work might not salve the scenario'! Poor chap looked as if he'd just eyeballed 'The Mummy', when he returned here!

To date, I've spent fortunes on New routers, Cabling, Filters, etc in fruitlessly hoping one of these expenditures, or eventually all of them might remove my continuing misery with BT customer service. Why they don't keep notes on faults, limiting frustratingly circuitous repetition defeats me - except of course it's a monopoly, so take it or leave it! Presently over geared and only able to survive by forcing it's primeval substructure on suitably named 'subscribers' with no alternative, this vertically inegrated, substandard, poorly invigilated hulk, sails sublimely on.

Apparently 'Fibre-optic' will very soon become available in my locality, no doubt at vastly elevated pricing, so facilitating a quick payback and fulfilling tenets to this toothless Government, who are sanguine to 'BT's' statistical manipulation of minimal achievemant! It should be rolled out at no extra cost, as an apology for the primeordial network that so many have suffered with, for so long. But more misery abounds, even if you do spend and upgrade, your copper pair will carry the fault on to 'super-fast provision anyway'. A sort of BT, MRSA bug!

I'm going Satellite on Broadband, quitting the 'Victorian' land line for a mobile package and leaving BT to their happy little self congratulatory shop of horrors - but only after breaking their apathy and seeing they fulfill their obligation to supply a product that doesn't breach the Trade Descriptions Act!

Edited by deleted (Thu 26-Sep-13 15:47:00)

If only you'd posted sooner, we could have looked at the data from the router and quickly suggest if there looks like line issues/wiring afoot.

On the fibre optic - prices start at around £12.50 these days, so cheaper than first generation broadband was a few years ago.

Which mobile package have you picked?

In addition to Andrew's response also please review satellite carefully before going that route - satellite can be very limited by available bandwidth and you may find is even worse than your current ADSL.

Whether fibre would continue to have the issue depends on where the fault is with the cable (if it is between the cabinet and exchange then that part of the line is removed from the equation on FTTC).

Even BT for fibre is not expensive. Also, in Britain ADSL is not exactly high priced and hence the reason there is limited investment - sending an engineer out to look at your line could remove their profit for years - when paying so little for broadband some things have to give.

Does this mean you have given up or are you still looking for help and advice on your current problems? If you are then feel free to post your line statistics and see what the combined wisdom on here is able to come up with.

Thanks, its been through all that many times elsewhere, but here they are anyway.

Router Statistics

System Up Time: 99:48:19
Port Status TxPkts RxPkts Collisions Tx B/s Rx B/s Up Time
WAN PPPoA 282724 329935 0 12029 91 98:57:59
LAN Down 0 0 0 0 0 99:48:19
WLAN Up 620774 489429 0 7204 977 90:26:20
Broadband Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 4439 kbps 796 kbps
Line Attenuation 46.5 dB 26.8 dB
Noise Margin 13.6 dB 10.5 dB

Do you know roughly what the stats were before the issues? Especially attenuation and SNR? How stable is the SNR - does it fluctuate a lot? If the SNR was dropped to 6dB you would gain some speed.

Also, do you know what mode it is connecting - ie ADSL or ADSL2+? Guessing ADSL2+ given upstream but not certain.

If you can get the 4.4 Mbps sync then yes satellite will be a waste but not sure they meant satellite broadband.

Well line looks fairly stable, 99 hour up time, a better uptime than I manage and I do this site over that connection (not host it but all the content upload)

http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/calc/index.php?param=RG...

Is a projection of what you would expect, 4850Kbps to 7900Kbps you don't have that because you have a high target noise margin. If the line is stable a reasonable ISP can get that tweaked down and as ISP's have got better at doing that it is a long time since I did one via the back door processes, but if you want I can pester and ask.

Perhaps the solution is to find a provider with a better customer service reputation, the best for tweaking would be Andrews and Arnold but that comes at a price.

Thank you Ian, very much appreciated

I've posted my stats above. I don't think I have an option with anything that involves BT as they steadfastly refuse to admit their at fault, or to do anything - (sub Openreach). There's nothing wrong with the wiring in this entire building (Phones that is). The problem we (many neighbours) know is with the very old BT infrastructure sited 30 metres from the North Sea. I believe because they're rolling out Superfast right now here, they are not maintaining the existing very old equipment. But I think from what I've read elsewhere that even with Superfast if you have a bad connection via the ageing BT copper pairs, your doomed to failure anyway, i.e Fibre won't solve an existing bad line?

Trouble is with Satellite (Avonline) as far as I can see it is, you have to invest £150 quid plus commit for 12 months, before you can test what you've got. Because I'm very high here, (Penthouse 4 storeys up), sea to the front 15 meters from the door and nothing higher for 10 miles we do get a magnificent reception on Sky with just a small dish. Also installation is a doddle because I own the huge loft on top of the entire building with easy access to my apartment from an ouside walk round balcony. I've heard latency can be a problem with Satellite, but don't know what that is? I don't game or stream TV, just web surfing and emails, so 6gb monthly seems good on Avonline, as I am within 2gb a month now,

I really find speeds going down to dial up days very frustrating and at my age bad for my blood pressure! Especially as I have Speed Test results going back 7 years now, all very good - 7mb average until March this year, when the BT board game of Re-set / DLM / Re-set, set in...

It is strange you are getting such slowdowns. However, please have a read through this unhappiness forum at the thread on Avonline (link) - you may not find it any better.

Latency is the time it takes for a piece of data to get from you to the end point. With satellite it has to travel into space and back - this adds more time. Mostly it impacts gaming and voice/video conferencing (ie Skype). If you don't use those then latency shouldn't be a big impact for you.

As far as fibre it could fix this issue - just by the fact it moves a big chunk of the copper network. But if any problems are in the copper from cabinet to you then you may still have issues.

Is BT your ISP? It does seem strange that you are having slow downs to dial up - how are you testing this and what direct symptoms do you see (rather than just the results of speedtests)?

Edited by ian72 (Thu 26-Sep-13 16:55:46)

Can I be frank, if all you do is emails and web surfing then money would be wasted the connection you have now is more than capable of doing web surfing and emails.

If the complaint was that HD video was buffering all the time, then even that could be fixed with the right changes to the connection parameters.

The line stats show no sign of sub dial up speeds, so issue might actually be the ISP element which you can change by moving to another provider (assume you are with BT themselves at present). Which telephone exchange are you on?