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 Review by Cudni 
member for 8.1 years, 3636 visits, last login: a few hours ago
lodged 4.5 years ago
 Someshire
 $50 per month- (12 month contract)
 about 10 days "humming along"
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as a packet and considering all that is included for free, unbeatable....so far
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Review by kolala
member for 8.4 years, 277 visits, last login: 5.1 years ago
updated 5.8 years ago
- UK
- $26 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 30 days
- "reliable, fast"
 "pricey, but improving"
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BTopenworld on an alcatel frog, have reinstalled a few times when upgrading PC/OS. Problems are very rare and always resolved by a reboot. I have used both the supplied driver and a newer one from Alcatel site without seeing much difference other than the icons change! Dynamic IP address. Connection Sharing works fine with sygate as S/W firewall. BT recently contacted me to say the price is being reduced for me as a loyal customer!.........................3 years later, still with BT, replaced frog with netgear DG834GT wireless adsl switch router firewall (with free WG111T wireless USB dongle) Network was down for 11 days once, BT Helpdesk kept closing the call and passing details to 'engineering' , would have probably had the same fault with whichever ISP I used, as they all use the same wires - but at least I have only the one company to deal with.
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Review by hell18
member for 8.7 years, 10 visits, last login: 6.9 years ago
updated 6.9 years ago
- uk
- $49 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Stable connection, very fast downloads!"
- "can be slow at times due to traffic"
 "very good ISP"
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I was first on 56K before i brought broadband. I was with the old BT anytime package, whereby you can use the internet anytime for free. that was £15.99 a month i think. I then decided to go digital, so i ordered the 512/256 connection with alactel speedtouch USB and i was activated a day before the offical date. The monthly rental is £29.99. I've recently brought a new PC and i have networked them together, so i brought a ADSL combined modem, with gateway, firewall and router. And now i have this modem, my connection is much much more stable than before. I get speeds of around 478 / 243, which is good. the slowest which it has been to is 131 / 93  that speed is crap!. That speed happens when its busy. Im on a dynamic IP, dont like static IPs. I've only phoned once to get dial up settings for the ADSL modem, due to a reformat on my other PC. Since broadband i have had not one problem, i get good download speeds mostly 59.8KB from most web sites. Downloaded the hulk demo in 52Min. which compared to a 56K modem, would take forever.
oh the modem i got is the Zoom teletronics ADSL X4 modem, gateway,firewall and router. it is £99.99 from PC World. if you got 2 computers and need a stable connection rather than using the frog, i would go for this modem.
Update,
got 1MB broadband, waiting to upgrade to 2MB, being done within this week sometime  cant wait for it to boost up in speed , 1MB has been good, but isnt enough, but what is? lol well having 3 other machines, demands alot of bandwidth, so 2MB should do the trick .
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 Review by girthtrude
member for 10.2 years, 1192 visits, last login: 1.2 years ago
updated 7.3 years ago
- UK
- Contract price not specified.
- "Runs Well"
- "Ok. Until the 30gb cap comes along in january. Then it's gone"
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Upgraded to 1mb for the same price. Pretty much same service. Twice the speed.
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Review by bazzer5
member for 9.6 years, 1572 visits, last login: 289 days ago
updated 8.2 years ago
- UK
- $45 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Speed/reliability"
- "Price"
- "Good if a bit expensive"
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Had BTO since May 2002.
Whole of order and activation procedure was faultless. Equipment (Alcatel) arrived as stated and line activation was 2 days earlier than promised.
Installation of hardware/software could not have been easier and took approx 15-20 minutes. (using Win98SE and had no problems with stability, machine normally left connected 2-3 days at a time).
Speeds have been consistently good (in the order of 450/250), with some slight slowing down during peak periods.
Realiablity has been 100%. Only needed to use support once (after hard drive failiure), got through after 3 rings and techie was both helpful and informative.
These days price is a bit disappointing and after 12 month contract may consider different provider, though maybe the devil you know applies.
Have had no negative experiences with this service (though it seems others have)
(12/11/03) 12 months are now up and looking at possible change to another provider. Only reason for move would be cost, BTO price a bit high compared to others.
Reliabillity and speed (500/272 after MTU tweak) have been excellent, speed reduction at peak times seems to be less than before.
Not changed rating appart from VFM
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 Review by spudgun
member for 9.4 years, 1444 visits, last login: 2.1 years ago
updated 8.3 years ago
- New York,New York,NY
- $48 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Reliable"
- "none so far"
- "Upgrade to 1Mb sometime soon"
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New ISP Zen, cheaper than BT Openworld and Monthly contracts. Still using the old Green Frog modem, so far so good.
Ian (Spudgun)
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Review by ashbysoft
member for 8.4 years, 1 visits, last login: 8.4 years ago
lodged 8.4 years ago
- UK
 Business customer- $60 per month
- "24x7 Uptime"
- "Customer Support"
- "Expensive for what they are, no comeback"
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A good case of the left hand and the right hand...
Don't touch them with a bargepole unless you want to spend about 5 hours on the phone to support every other month.
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 Review by xiphrex
member for 10.4 years, 1631 visits, last login: 289 days ago
lodged 8.5 years ago
- united kingd
- $29 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 180 days
- "Its broadband"
- "Insecurity, never know when it will fail again"
- "There are better ISP's out there now for ADSL"
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I ordered the 512/256 kbps ADSL Btopenworld package at the time it was still on a "sign up now and qualify for free installation". This was because installation was about £90 or more (cant remember, too long ago).
So, because it was still intesting phase, I waited about 6 months, before they informed us they can now install it. Everything went smoothly, except the guy who did the installation did not know his computer stuff very well. He told us that the connection was "576 kbps" just because it says so in the tooltip over that connection icon. This, ofcoarse, is wrong, as your max conection is 512kbps, and it never gets to that speed due to overhead and other things.
It was working fine, until it went offline for a few days for no apparent reason. Phoning technical support just broguth about info that they are doing something about it, and this was from an automated machine.
When it works, it is okay, speeds are a little lower than other ISP's, I know because my friends dont have BTOpenworld.
However, a few months ago BTOpenworld cancelled my service without informing me. I spent 3 days trying things out, then I decided to try phoning technical support. They told me it was a "computer mistake" after about 2 hours of being on the phone. It took a week for them to correct the error. I lost more than a weeks worth of my money this way, and when I asked about compensation, they directed me to make a complaint.
I decided I didnt have time for that, and left it. A few weeks later a person from BtOpenworld phones and does a 30 minute survey with me about the service, to issue my complaint. I told him I didnt want to be contacted again, and as of yet have not, which is good.
Overall, it is an okay service, using PPPoE, dynamic IP and a USB modem which they issued me. However, better ISP's now exist, and if I had the chance and time I would switch over to them. Oh but I would have to wait for contract to end, which is 12 months.
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 Review by A J 121
member for 11 years, 3251 visits, last login: 2 years ago
lodged 8.7 years ago
- UK
- Contract price not specified.
- (12 month contract)
- about 14 days
- "They seem to have got their act together at last."
- "When they rolled broadband out in the UK it was a horror story."
- "Good things come to those who wait."
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I had ADSL Broadband installed in 2000 at a time when there was no self install package. I did not have to pay any installation fee (£150) because I was one of the first to apply for broadband in the UK. At the time it cost £39.99 a month (later reduced to £29.99) The engineer showed up on time and had the connection up and running in less than half an hour by means of the Alcatel USB modem (Frog) and a splitter box (so no filters for me).
During the first few months of 2001 the connection was pretty bad. The whole broadband network in the UK would fail but by mid 2001 these failures thankfully stopped. This left quite a few other problems though. Ranging from a bad transparent proxy, packet loss, high latency, missing emails and poor newsgroup servers.
First off, we managed to get BTO to ditch the transparent proxy.
The bad packet loss and latency were mainly (but not only) due to the way BT had set the network up. This issue was sometimes improved by changing your MTU setting within you OS.
The missing email problem has not totally gone away, as some people still say that it happens. But for me this is no more a problem.
BTO did upgrade their news servers but they are still poor.
At the moment BT are upgrading the Home Gateways to improve widely reported problems concerning slow web browsing. So fingers crossed.
To sum up. BTO are far from the best broadband ISP in the UK but on the flip side, they are far from the worst. There network (for me) runs at acceptable speeds as does their mail. Their news servers are very bad as is their support department.
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Review by Pawan59
member for 8.9 years, 6 visits, last login: 8.7 years ago
lodged 8.7 years ago
- uk
- $45 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 10 days
- "Installation went to plan"
- "Failure to prepare for market growth"
- "They've got a monopoly so they don't care"
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14 months ago, BT installed ADSL and everything went well.
(I did ask some questions on what they would reccomend to connect it to a wireless network and they said "don't understand" "you can't" and "we don't really know" - they now advertise themselves as the hub of home networking - times change!!!!)
After 3 months the service slowed down and then hit my first problems. The service died completely. Their tech support were almost insulting in their lack of savvy and insisted that it was my fault as there were no other reported problems.
They arranged for an engineer to visit, who didn't but then claimed my problem had been closed. So they did send an engineer, it's over a week now. And the engineer phones me to ask if it works now. It didn't. After 14 days they finally got it sorted.
When they dropped their prices they decided against hiring any support staff to cope with the increased problems and calls generated. This meant that calls to their help desk took up to 75 minutes before speaking to a human.
These days things appear better, and I haven't called them (fingers crossed) for over 6 months.
But their blaise attitude really sucked. I'll by going with a local supplier this year (heck I own the company I have to ).
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