 Review by MarkH 
Posted: 2 years ago
member for 6.8 years, 1932 visits, last login: 1.3 years ago
 undisclosed location
 $55 per month (12 month contract)
 about 10 days
 "Very few."
 "More than you could mention on one line."
 "As soon as my minimum contract is up, I'll be leaving them."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
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Where to begin?
I signed up to BT broadband in April this year, and I am eagerly looking forward to April next year when I can leave this pathetic excuse of an ISP without penalty.
Firstly you get all the hype of up to 8Mb, in reality, unless you live close to (and I mean within spitting distance) of the exchange, you'll never get even close to this. I manage to sync at 3700kbps now, and that is after many complaints about the quality of service.
When you ring prior to signing up, you get connected to a salesperson and they go through all the usual cheery chat about how wonderful the service is. Once they have you as a customer though, things change. You want technical support? Good luck getting it from the same well spoken people you talked to before you signed up, once you are a customer, you will be connected to a call centre somewhere in deepest darkest Asia to a script reading helpdesk employee. The person has an accent broad enough to cover the whole European continent usually, and is about as technically adept as your kids goldfish. They have a script, and they are not afraid to use it. They don't however have enough knowledge to deviate from the damned script, even if you can tell them what you suspect the issue is.
It takes days for them to deal with the slightest problems, and you are constantly passed from one person to another to try and get your issues resolved.
Then to top it all, if you want to complain about the poor quality of support, the same desks actually deal with that too.
As for the equipment provided, the BT Home Hub, well, all I can say about that piece of equipment is, it makes a great coffee table ornament to discuss with people, which is a good job really, because as a router it is not worth bothering with.
I use my own Linksys router with the service, because after the first few days of the home hub being unable to hold a constant connection I got sick of it, plus if you try to ring the service line, the first thing they want you to do if you are using their equipment is to reset it to factory condition. (Yup, all your settings wiped in one easy step, I know you can back up your config, but I still shouldn't have to spend time reloading it when I know the fault is with the line.)
The hub would sync with the exchange at 500kbps less than my own equipment can achieve, which when the best your line can manage is less than 4000kbps is a joke.
The best experience I have had so far with this ISP? Getting them to finally admit to an issue that I knew existed for a long while, and them finally refunding (well, reducing the cost of my next bill) some money for the service not being delivered.
The worst experience so far? Being stupid enough to sign up with them.
It would be so nice to Ofcom finally grow a pair and take BT to task about it's poor service, but unfortunately I don't see that happening any time soon, so roll on April when I can finally be rid of this joke ISP.
(Please note, the price is expressed as $US, the actual price is £26.99 per month.)
Followup comments:  
FUCKINGWORM
@btcentralplus.com
| BT MAn you told EVERYTHING THAT I WANTED TO SAY, All the time that i need to technical support......i start to take drugs to keep calm and talk like, my really wish is to kill them all and stick the fucking hub up their asses!!!!!
but anyway, do you have any advice for each one would be better??? | |
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MarkH
reserved for later use
Premium
join:2002-12-19 | Moving I'm planning on moving to www.vivaciti.net when my contract is up. They are a reseller of of etnanet services and seem to be highly regarded amongst various online communities. | |
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