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Review by simon UK 
member for 6.5 years, 942 visits, last login: 8 days ago
updated 51 days ago
 UK, N.Yorks'
 $28 per month- (18 month contract)
 about 9 days "best vfm in the uk with our metered billing" "conjested vp, poor speed & high pings at busy times. FON is VERY POOR" "£18 pm for 40Gb but poor compared to our old 'bespoke' isp"
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The ONLY reason for us moving to BT as an ISP is the bandwidth.
The Home Hub 3 is basic.
update:
HH3 is crap/a joke
FON is next to useless with ios devices
Tech help ok as the helped sort out there screw-up
which degraded our DSL for two weeks.
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 Review by mcmillan
member for 10.8 years, 417 visits, last login: 74 days ago
updated 74 days ago
- united kingd
- $70 per month
- (18 month contract)
- about 25 days
- "They provide me with an internet access."
- "Low DL and shameful UL speeds. Long contract term, low max speed comparing to adv."
- "Good thing that they are not any slower, longer pinged etc..."
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Where do I start...
I moved and started setting up the services. Landline and ADSL decided to get so called "Broadband option 3" unlimited weekend calling and UPTO 20 Mbps (up to is from 1 to 8 Mbps) d and 0.34 u. If you are giggling at the upload you have every right to. I would be too if it was not mine.
Router/ modem is BT brand HomeHub3. Just like any other ISP provided hardware it is very basic and highly provider friendly (auto updates and such, I assume). One can not even turn off the SSID. It has the BTFon »www.btfon.com/. "BT and Fon have teamed up to bring you more free access to Wi-Fi worldwide!" says the website. I believe it to be a scam. Customer is paying to maintain hotspots for the ISP.
English/ British way of doing things is 3 weeks + for anything you want to do. After I moved the second time (between flats in this same building) It took 3 weeks + again to transfer my service. Can I get an AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA... and then some more AAAAAAAAAAa... sound of falling into BT telecommunication abyss. Their abyss should have many more "sss" than the normal one.
I do not know much about the services they provide. They provide 5 emails and some "extremely valuable" software to protect the computer and the children and blah, blah, blah.
I wanted to watch some VOD last week and my PS3 (it gets 1 Mbps down, 0.30 Mbps up) kept buffering instead of playing. If BT is in good mood they let me stream video.
BT throttles the non-http traffic between 0600 and 0000 hrs. (6 am to 12 am) or something close to it.
Even if my speeds were "upto" I would still not be able to get myself all the distros (Linux distribution) images (up to 4 GB of data) I want to play with in a day. If they use BitTorrent it is even worse. Uploading photos to my website is a pain (0.34 Mbps upload)
I understand that the area where I live now is not a metropolis but I expect more than this it is 2011 after all.
FiOS not available and no cable company to go to.
I had similar experience with AT&T in USA. They were not able to upgrade the service to higher speed, they sold me the upgrade to it. Funny how my paying more did not make line faster. It seems that both ADSL providers were happy to get monies, not so much to spend them for hardware upgrades Couple of years later I went with Comcast. Bills shot up but they, sure as hell, were faster.
All that is left now is leasing the line. Symmetric 100Mbps... it is soooo sweet to dream.
»www.speedtest.net/result/1612732663.png
»www.speedtest.net/result/1612741430.png
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Review by wildthing666
member for 1.2 years, 0 visits, last login: 1.2 years ago
lodged 1.2 years ago
- undisclosed location
- $23 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 21 days
 BTI- "stays connected for long period, months, before roter loses connection"
- "Never reconnects att he fastest speed available"
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I have been with BT sins June 2008 at first I subscribed to their unlimited £25 a month option 3 but my connection speed was so slow I had to look at pages with images disabled otherwise I had to wait a long time for a page to load, I was lucky to use 3Gb of bandwidth in a month, I wanted to download a file that was 127Mb but when after 2 hours the download helper said it would still take 2 days to download the file I gave up and bought Microsoft office.
After voicing my opinion of how bad the connection speed was, on the BT forum, by connection suddenly jumped to 424kbp/s on the router homepage and even when it dropped the connection it would reconnect at 424kbp/s but as the minimum 12 month contract approached I was still using less bandwidth than the 10Gb allowed on option 1 so I moved to option 1 with BT and the day that came into force my router lost the connection and reconnected at 160kbp/s. After many hours of resetting the router I got a connection speed of 320kbp/s but the router often disconnects for just a second or so not even long enough for the router BB light to have to flash orange to find the connection but just long enough for the router to change the download speed on the router homepage from 320kbp/s to 160kbp/s or 190kbp/s In my opinion this is BT capping my speed so others who are paying for more services can get a better service from BT
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Review by (hidden by request)
(review was emailed from domain btinternet.com)
lodged 1.2 years ago
- Purgato
- Contract price not specified.
- "Download problems effectively resolved"
- "As usual, verbal communication could be better"
- "Good all round service"
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Sirs.
It is not often I contribute to forums on the net, but, as I have found
yours to be one of the more valuable, here we are!
I have been a BT Broadband user for some years and must own up to having
dealt with BT services in a business environment for many years and being
biased in their favour. I'm glad to say that Broadband offerings are very
competitive these days and I am under a lot of pressure to move away from
BT. So my recent experience is pertinent. I am on Option 3 - Up to 8M bps
(bits not bytes) download. About three weeks ago I suddenly found I was
getting 16k bps! I went through all the checks -including using the
extensive and very good info you provide (not just flattery!) - and moved my
kit all round the house, spending four hours on to BT (Calcutta) (they made
the call) going through the usual checking routines. They agreed they could
see a problem. I had to reserve 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on 24th for an engineer to
call. At 8 a.m. the engineer phoned and arrived 10 minutes later. At 8.15 a
second engineer called and arrived about five minutes later!
I was given a new hub and my main telephone socket changed, but, in
conversation, I mentioned that I switched off all my computer kit at night
to try and be environmentally friendly (yes, you could consider it nano
friendly!). I had not mentioned this when I first phoned BT; nor had I been
asked. I was told that this was probably the cause of my reduced speed as,
in its polling, the central system, not detecting a response, assumed I had
a problem and therefore reduced the speed. My speed is now back to over 5
Mbps.
So, I won't be moving just yet and I will not be quite so environmentally
friendly! I was also told that 'Infinity' will be in my area about next
March.
Julian Rye
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Review by bonalymac
member for 2.9 years, 2 visits, last login: 1.6 years ago
lodged 2.9 years ago
- undisclosed location
- Contract price not specified.
- "Actual line service pretty good and very reliable, Never lose service"
- "help system poor"
- "Would reccommend"
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8 M order at £23 PER MTH
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Review by mimjed
member for 3 years, 1 visits, last login: 3 years ago
updated 3 years ago
- LE17 6NA
- $29 per month
- "fairly reliable connection."
- "poor speeds, even poorer customer service, lots of false claims."
- "one to miss."
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the only reason i changed to bt was because i wanted bt vision. big mistake. i ordered the full works 8mb broadband, home hub 2, bt vision (gold) and a mobile. i was told from initial line tests i would be able to receive around 6.5mb/s....although i did not believe this i was assured this was the case.
then everything started to go wrong items missing from boxes, boxes not turning up, delays on line connection, poor speed when running.
after several hours of wasted phone calls i was put through to a different department who said they would stabilise my line and all my problems would be solved....err no several more hours of wasted phone calls being told my download speed is actually 8128kb/s and im told there must be a fault with my line.
but i already gave them a bt speed test from the test socket where i saw a huge increase of less than 50kb/s bringing me up to a grand total of around 600kb/s. a speed test on any other site reveals a much lower speed, and yet im supposed to believe its my fault and i need to pay over £100 call out charge and £99 an hour labour for some bloke to scratch his ass and feed me more lies....blow me ill go somewhere else!!
on the whole all i can say is steer well clear of large companies and go for the small fries. they are more greatful for your business and have time to fix your problems. odds are on they are local to you so you wont be patched through to india when you have a problem.
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 Review by armourer
member for 7.8 years, 440 visits, last login: 1.6 years ago
lodged 3.3 years ago
- England
- $40 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Never been unable to connect"
- "Cost and Tech Support is in India"
- "It's OK"
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BT Home Hub router and Phone supplied.
Tech support has always been able to sort any problem out.
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 Review by wonko3fc
member for 10.7 years, 2940 visits, last login: 1 days ago
updated 3.4 years ago
- UK
- $5 per month
- (month by month)
- about 10 days
- "Good call quality and price structure"
- "Great when it works - pray it never goes wrong support is almost non-existant"
- "More for the enthusiastic armature or professional than the home user."
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When this was first offered as a service way back in 2002/3, I became an early adopter on their UK launch trial.
Getting set up was reasonably painless although obtaining support to allow the then CISCO telephone adaptor to pass through the firewall was a near impossibility. As it turned out, you don’t need to open some 3,000 plus ports as the nice lady suggested to make it work, just port 69. Yet to this day the technical staff appear oblivious to this.
Okay, so it was early technology and problems were to be expected. What wasn’t really expected was the comprehensive lack of support from the incumbent telephone operator in the UK
Essentially, there is next to no support for the service at all and even less if you are not a BT Broadband customer/subscriber. As a Cable subscriber, I am then, the target audience for the service and to this day, I engage in interesting conversations with the ‘customer services’ people who always want to blame third party routers for anything when they learn it is not a BT Home Hub!
However, perseverance and many-many months of refunded bills later, the service is, at best, still flaky. To be honest, when it works, it is first class the call quality is excellent and on a par with my land line. Tariffs are as cheep as they come from the market research I’ve gathered from within the UK and the service offerings call divert, blocking etc are easy to use on the web site, that, whilst constantly changing from one year to the next is still navigable.
Another unexpected surprise was the forced change of server and subsequent telephone number as year or so ago. This is as a result of a technology uplift but it did impact on the service to which, regaining it was another trial of patience and frustration. It didn’t help that about three years ago, they outsourced the call centre support to India where, for the best will in the world, these good people have a very limited understanding of English and next to none of the UK telecom market.
The telephone adaptor has also changed several times as well, each time being replaced by a later and allegedly greater unit, currently a BT Voyager 10V.
These in turn have also had problems and faults both hardware and software requiring replacement units. To cut a long story short, there are/were different models of these with non-flash able firmware/middleware that needed uplifting to a more recent unit.
That said, various units were dispatched and did arrive in reasonable timeframes with various degrees of instruction on how to re-configure, given that the web site address had also changed – this they neglected to inform the customer of.
However, once again, jumping through all the hoops did eventually result in a working service.
I have to say, on balance, if I was offered the same service’s for the same price from another provider, I would have jumped ship a long time ago – the hassle factor alone is just not worth it. Yet I stay. Why? Well for the vast majority of the time, the service is functioning and actually very, very good. But! Be afraid, be very afraid if anything goes wrong. Your patience will be tested to the limit and I would suggest that the unit has more chance of being forced through the nearest window than the service returned – unless you have the patience of a saint and then some!
This is why I believe the service, whilst good when working, is probably better for the enthusiastic amateur or IT professional than the wider domestic market – for which it is aimed. IF they recovered the call centre to the UK, offered a fault resolution path to customers and have a responsive customer support, then yes, it would be well worth paying for.
MMmmmmm having been prompted by a system message, I was shocked to learn of the 200 days since I posted this. Still, having reviewed, I still feel the same way. However, various call packages have changed in the UK in the last year or so and as such; I no longer feel that the price structure is competitive in that the same discounts and similar pricing can be obtained from the generic BT domestic land-line.
Triple and quad play services from various ISPs also make it less attractive than it used to be. As such, I can’t really recommend this service as a viable product any longer, unless you particularly want a VoIP service from BT.
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Review by MickyDuff
member for 3.7 years, 2 visits, last login: 3.6 years ago
lodged 3.6 years ago
- dl13 5dd
- $26 per month
- (18 month contract)
- about 5 days
- "Unlimited"
- "Tech Support"
- "Good until you hit a problem then beware tech support is not that good"
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I joined BT due to having a BT telephone line, i never really looked into other providers and had no problems after joining. I upgraded from 1gb to 2gb speed with no problems then upto 8gb connection everything went smoothly until i moved house then my problems started i had 6 golive dates over a 3 month period and tech support didnt really have a answer why. i have now been with BT Broadband for 3 years and until now had very little problems until i joined btyahoo webhosting to make and run a website for my local football team as of late i cannot access the site btyahoo say the site is working fine all there settings are correct and it is a tranlusant problem due to my ip provider ( BT Broadband ) after many emails and phone calls i now seem to be going round in circles for example the first reply to my email was a "sorry your having problems please keep all the information screen shot etc and send them in" 10 emails later i recieve the same email back as if my other 9 emails have been tottally ignored. i now have bt broadband saying the problem lies with btyahoo and the issue is irresolveable even though i have explained that anyone else who has problems with my website seems to also be with BT Broadband and that anyone with other providers have no problems connecting to it at all. The only other thing to mention is i have the unlimited package option 3 they have also put a speed restriction on my line between 6pm and 11pm when i asked why they say its the fair use policy which i totally disagree with as im paying for the full package
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Review by AVsdoyle
member for 10.1 years, 579 visits, last login: 1.5 years ago
lodged 3.9 years ago
- UK
- $25 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 7 days
- "Reliable service in a rural location but need netgear router"
- "Off-shore help desks are variable"
- "Worth considering"
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It took a while to get back on line after a lighting strike but it was a severe event - punched hole in neighbour's roof (slate tiles in UK) not shingles!
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