ADSL24 Not Recommended

I held off writing about my quite frankly, shocking and terrible service and support that I have received from ADSL24 since I joined this shambolic ISP.

I was previously with bethere and had been with them for 3 years prior to looking for an ISP who could provide a fibre service at a decent cost. oh, just as a background note I also have been with BT, F2S, Plusnet, eclipse, O2, SKY & VIRGIN so I have experience of support at other ISP's

Anyway, I signed up for ADSL24 and had to wait ages for my install as apparently due to the olympics there was a lack of engineer availability. I booked my appointment for the day after I returned from holiday (Monday PM). Waited in all day.....NO ENGINEER

At 1730 I called ADSL24 to tell them that the engineer still hadn't arrived - they work up till 1800 I was told (yeah right!!) anyway NO ENGINEER

The following day I called to complain - oh we'll look into it.... we'll call you back ( I later had learnt that this means we will never call you back, we'll wait for you to call us and have another moan) - anyway eventually an engineer arrived on Friday and installed the faceplate and extention.

Engineer told me I should be seeing 45MB down / 14MB up this is significantly different to the wholesale checker which tells me 60MB down / 18 MB up (yes I know this is an estimate)

anyway I wait for things to settle down after the install rather than being impatient, I run a speed test (BT SPEEDCHECKER) and find I am getting 40 down and 7 up. Ok whats the problem? So somewhere I have lost 7MB on my upstream speed thats a 50% decrease in my service on the upstream and 5MB on the downstream.

Contact ADSL24 elite team of support engineers - yes this is sacarsm - I was asked to plug the OR modem into the test socket on the master socket - I questioned the engineer as to whether he had indeed ever seen a fibre install - NO was his reply, oh dear, not good

Anyway the whole process has been very boring and tedious and ongoing since 7th September dealing with the support engineers at ADSL24 not one engineer was willing to take ownership of the case although I did get slighly further with an engineer called James who I now think has been abducted by aliens as I haven't heard from him again.

Everytime you call them they want another speedtest, they all need to read through the notes (which I suspect doesn't contain all the information I have provided them) as they repeatedly ask me the same questions.

I have now forced them to book a BT engineer which I may have to pay £110 +VAT to tell me if I actually receiving the service I am paying this god damn awful ISP for. Luckily it's a 12 month contract, I'm already counting down the days.....

My advice to anyone looking for an ISP is DON'T use ADSL24

In reply to a post by jimmyn:

I was asked to plug the OR modem into the test socket on the master socket

I don't want to upset you even more, as you're having a bad time of this, but in the context of your post you seem particularly irate about this bit.

There's nothing at all wrong with that suggestion. In fact it would appear to be essential in this case. The insterstitial filtered faceplate is just a modern, (easier to install), version of the normal ADSL filtered faceplate. There is nothing special about it.

All a broadband filter does is prevent anything outside the audible frequency range passing to or from the phone side of your setup. For broadband only it is perfectly permissible to have no filter.

There have been a considerable number of botched installations by the recently recruited and only half-trained Openreach engineers. I note you say an extension was installed. There could be a problem there. Do you have any other extensions as well? If so, please can we have a reasonably detailed description of what is on them, where the OR modem is on these sockets, and what else is connected?

In summary, it could be a bad installation, or it could be a faulty interstitial faceplate. It might help if we can establish which or neither before the engineer arrives. Make sure when the faceplate is removed that no other extensions work for the phone.

Hi and thanks for your reply.

Believe this or not when I plug the OR modem into the master socket and connect with a PPPOE session the speed is actually slower than when connected to the extention.

All I have connected to this master socket is 2 extentions (1 which the OR installed) and another for the analogue phone line.

So you are suggesting I remove the new faceplate and connect directly to the test socket and create a PPPOE session with the OR modem?

In reply to a post by jimmyn:

Engineer told me I should be seeing 45MB down / 14MB up this is significantly different to the wholesale checker which tells me 60MB down / 18 MB up (yes I know this is an estimate)

anyway I wait for things to settle down after the install rather than being impatient, I run a speed test (BT SPEEDCHECKER) and find I am getting 40 down and 7 up.

Can you give the full results of the BT SPEEDCHECKER including your IP Profile, which is the important bit.

Note that all engineers are OPENREACH engineers, not ADSL24.

IP Profile for your line is - 45.51 Mbps (43.83Mbps reported)
Upstream Rate IP profile on your line is - 20 Mbps (10.64Mbps reported)

That's what the OPENREACH engineer said you should expect too. In my opinion, you have nothing to complain about.

BatBoy has a point. You may unluckily be suffering from congestion at some times of day. You may also however also have a dodgy installation, preventing you getting the original estimate at good times.

I'm still very unclear on the wiring layout. The modem is supposed to be connected using the short VDSL/ADSL cable that came with it, direct to the master. Do you mean the engineer moved the master, and the old master is now an extension? That needs checking. Similarly, once we find the master, if the faceplate on that is removed then everything else should give up.

The socket the modem should connect to looks like the one on this page. If the old master still has a removable half faceplate as in this pic we have a possible problem.

Photos of the inside wiring of all three sockets, uploaded somewhere, might be useful.

Ill take some pics of all the sockets and post back. Thanks for the help

He said I should expect 14MB up? It's never been that since I had it installed

The BT speedtest isn't great for upload speeds, there is a better one - http://mcslhr.visualware.com/myspeed/myspeed_line_ca...

Edited by deleted (Tue 25-Sep-12 17:02:06)