3.5 miles from my local exchange and I’ve completely given up on BT and switched entirely to mobile providers. To the extent that I’ve had the land line removed.

Speed’s up by a factor of 10 and cost down by 50%.

Really resented that line rental charge. Hellishly expensive bit of copper wire considering it’s been the same piece for the last 40 years.

had a very intersting chat with the network director for superfast broadband in cornwall last week. fttc installation rate is slowly increasing, but the downside is that fttp is preffered option for business. its a better long term solution, but much slower rollout speed. cornwall should have very good speeds on average by early next year. pilots for satellite are about to start for really remote areas via avanti partnership. so its painful waiting but made worse by the lack of decent information/updates, but positive news in the medium term

@Tomble – any other information you can provide? Line speeds, costs, provider?

I really want to give up with BT. I’ve had eight faults in four months with their service. I have a letter saying the estimated speed would be 6Meg. But I rarely get above 2.

@Kane

Apologies about the photo – my fault, not Mark’s. Replaced with a photo of the 100% British Lake District.

Barry Collins
Editor

@Kane Actually BT does operate in the US. A friend of mine has worked for them there since 1999 (and Singapore before that)

Beware of satellite broadband unless you are sure. With 1/2 second latency you can’t play interactive games and Skype is a waste of time.

I quote from the letter BT sent me:
“Due to the technical limitations of the DSL service you are renting from us, specifically line length, unfortunately I have to confirm that we are unable to provide the service to a level which would be deemed acceptable by BT.
I understand that your current position reflects a requirement to continue to pay for the intermittent service irrespective of this fact.
Unfortunately we are unable to continue attempting to resolve an issue which has been deemed beyond BT’s control and therefore cannot commit to offering any further assistance with the rectification of the service.
I am very sorry we have been unable to reach a resolution to this matter. Regrettably we have now exhausted our internal complaint review process and reached a deadlock. This letter therefore constitutes BT’s final position.”

We are 6km from our exchange. I was effectively cut off for complaining. My neighbours still have an intermittent service. I had to install satellite broadband as BT would not resolve any future issues with my broadband service.

@mark newton

sat broadband simply cannot achieve faster latencies each request takes 0.24 seconds to simply travel to the satellite and back, that’s not accounting for any delays introduced by network level equipment and simply a factor of the speed of light and the distance it has to travel, so adding 30ms to this as a rough guess your now at 0.27 seconds on a request/response cycle – may not sound like much but can cause havoc with certain applications

Are the Moderators at lunch?
Almost an hour now, and my message is still “being Moderated”…..

BT’s statement is plain wrong. In our small community we have a BT van attend several times a month for many years, and still get less than 1.5Mb/s. They do NOT care about rural areas, and we are only 40 miles from London.

I was once thinking of buying a property in Madeira. It was way up in the mountain and miles from the nearest goat. When enquiring about the broardbard the ISP come back ‘Very sorry but we can’t guarantee better than 2Mb up there’ Wake up BT

BT are definitely handling each fault as a one off in my experience. In my village – just 7km from Aberdeen and 500 meters from the nearest exchange, there has been an ongoing speed problem that many broadband users have reported and shared notes via the local village association forums.

Basically at peak times even web traffic crawls to a point where it unusable – I have seen downloads run at less than 10kilobytes per sec and latencies in the 1200ms vs 30ms offpeak (using BTs own speedtester).Online shopping times out during payment screens!!! And before anyone says it’s the distance from the exchange we see synch speeds in the 5 to 7 Megabit range and at, say 6am, I can download using exactly the same infrastructure at 700KBytes per sec.

Everyone in the village that reports a fault is subjected to a whole range of tests and fob-offs designed to make you think it’s the in-premise kit that is faulty (faceplates, filters etc) when clearly the fact that it affects so many many people in the village and is time dependent would suggest that the problem lies in the BT infrastructure.

Most of us have given up trying to get a fix but one guy has persisted and got them to say that his problem is being caused by over contention ie there are too many users sharing the line. Clearly if contention affects him it affects many others too by definition!

But has BT done anything to bring contention back into acceptable limits – no evidence and the rest of us who have reported similar faults have NOT been told that contention is the cause/solution to the problem.

Oh and by the way I have a Business broadband account so I *should* be getting a much lower contention guaranteed than the consumer users but I bet BT have me on exactly the same contention as the consumers because there is clearly not enough shared bandwith for the volume of users in the Village.

And this all started last november, almost overnight affecting many users via many ISPS. Interestingly Aberdeen became fibre enabled in December – I can’t help wondering if the sudden onset of the problems in the village aren’t in some way connected with the fibre rollout in Aberdeen – maybe some of our backbone capacity has been repurposed to serve the Aberdeen fibre users?

Ha,

I live 1.5km from the exchange.
On a good day we get 6 Mb/s
BUT
every few months (normaly after heavy rain), noise on the line triggers BT to drop us to 200 b/s.

It then takes a couple of weeks of fruitless talking to polite Indian folk at BT Broadband, who naievely believe that they can fix this, before Openreach get involved and replace something. (to date, 2 routers, a BT vision box, 200m + cable, a card at the exchange)….

Soon I’ll give up, Virgin have fiber running past my door and the extra £10 a month looks very tempting.

Our local exchange is being upgraded, I mentioned this to a friend and he said he’d got mail from BT offering fttc at no extra cost, I contacted BT to find out when fttc would be in our village, answer ‘not schedualed’, the differance between us? friend has Virgin cable outside his house, we don’t, seems to me time SFO started looking into this as all I see is fruadulant use of public money

We are 5 whole miles from Newbury – just checked speed at 0.76 Mbps, which is much faster than Sat. evening, when it took 25 mins to get Google! Map says there are folk around me with 4 – 6 Mbps. Is it jus Demon?
There’s no chance of exchange upgrade until 2021 say BT and we are in a mobile dead spot – only Voda basic reaches here. Other users have to stand on drive to get 2 bars signal. I say again, 5 miles from Newbury. I bet the Yanks had better at Greenham Common!