metaltoast:In a few months time we've been with BT Broadband for 3 years! This is the only ISP (Internet Service Provider) we've ever had & I must say in all the time we've been with them, we've only ever had to call their freephone tech support line once. The reason: we had an old Modem installation disc which wasn't compatible with Intel Pentium 4 Processors. I was on the phone for less than 3 minutes & the help was very clear, easy & got the job done. We've had no other problems so we decided several months ago to sign up for BT Total Broadband. Our BT Home Hub arrived on the specified date & within a matter of minutes we enjoying 8Mbps wireless broadband. And the best bit: we've had no problems - not a single one! We haven't even had our connection drop once, unlike our relatives who are with AOL & Talk Talk. One family found it a pain to sign up in the first place & the other was fine until they moved house. They moved house early August & since then they haven't had ANY internet since, they've tried calling Talk Talk but if they can get through, Talk Talk don't want to know!
As people have stated ISP's will always have a big percentage of people who are happy with what they get.
My experience of BT has been woeful at best.
Switched on someone's reccomendation that they would be the best for online gaming for ping and so on which they are. Called up to sign up, was told that I would get around 4-5Mbps and everything went fine other than myself giving an incorrect digit on the MAC code I gave them 5 instead of S. So when I went online to check the progress of my order it said cancelled so I called up and found out that it was a wrong MAC. Fair enough that was my mistake but they could have called. Eventually got connected 7 days after the second call and my connection was rock solid but had stayed at 512k (my previous connection speed with Orange) so I called up that night and complained and was told everything was fine and that my connection would be unstable and it would work it's way up to it's top speed. So I waited a couple of days and the speed of the connection hadn't gone up at all. So I called back up again and got told the same thing and went through the usual rubbish of clearing cookies, disabling firewalls and restarting the router. At some stage during this time someone went online and changed the speed that showed up when I did an online availability check on my line. When I first looked it was 6.5Mbps and it was then showing up as 512k. Everytime I said this to BT they said it was impossible.
After about 20 calls to India I got frustrated and put in a formal complaint and was given a phone number for the onshore customer support. Was told about 5 times that someone would call back and this never happened and my fault continued. One particular incident which sticks in my mind was speaking to an English gentleman and explaining that someone had edited the speed available on my line and was told that this was not possible and that I was lying. As someone who's worked in the customer service industry I wasn't too happy and asked to speak to his manager and was told "No" I then asked again and got the same answer to which I said "Why can't I speak to your manager?" to which he replied "Because it won't sort anything" so I said "can I please speak to your manager about YOU!" at which point I was put through. This was at work and was really irritating and was getting me stressed so I got the girlfriend to call up. When she called up she got much the same treatment and could clearing hear a BT employee nearly in tears in the background saying "****ing customers calling up with their ****ing complaints, they make me sick". Now maybe it's just me but customers wouldn't call you up and make you unhappy if you went and made an effort to solve their problems! Just a thought......
After a couple of weeks banging my head against the wall with the onshore call centres I put in another formal complaint and a helpful lady gave me the number for BT Broadband's high level complaints department. Spoke to a lady called Theresa who insisted on sending out a technician even though we'd had a BT technician out a few years ago to fix an issue we have and I just knew that it wasn't a problem with my house but I was getting somewhere so I didn't complain much. Technician came out and before he'd got through the door he'd heard the story and was a little peeved at having been sent out as it was a waste of time and his dad was sick in hospital so he had better things to be doing. Found no fault with my line at all and said that the problem was with BT @ the exchange. 2 or 3 days later is was sorted and I now get between 3-4Mbps which I'm happy with. Got a call after this from Theresa who gave me 3 months free broadband plus about £20 for all the calls that I made.
So all in all just over a month, 50+ calls, hours of my time and oodles of stress and I have a good broadband connection.
If you just want your connection to work flawlessly and cheaply and don't want stress then don't go with BT.
But if you want things to be as fast as they can be in regards to ping and connection then go with BT. I might take a while but you will get a good connection when you get sorted.