So, it's whinge time against BT

So, it's whinge time against BT. For the last 6 months I've had some major issues with my internet connection. Thanks to a combination of living a little way from the exchange and BT sending the wiring the tourist route I don't have a very fast connection at home in fact last year with max turned on I used to connect at roughly 1536 to 1792 and with the BRAS rate applied this gave me a 1 meg connection. Happy days! twice as fast as it previously was though so ok for now.

Pre easter the line started to slow down - the usual 1600 or so became 1400, then 1312, then 1180 and then 1024. line drops started and the speed would go utterly apeshit, dropping, speeding up, slowing down. - Synching at 860 or even lower, usually at roughly 2-4 on a Saturday. Contention issues I wondered.... Going away for easter I decided not to raise anything but to see if things improved. On my return things had got worse, a sub 1000 connection now seemed the norm with speeds of 384 being the lowest recorded.

So I raised a technical case with BT. This went round and around, log the case, explain, go through loads of stupid questions, test line, nothing wrong, your line can only do 512k, ignoring that it used to be fine for up to 17/1800. repeate several times, never getting the same person, having to explain the issue repeatedly, again and again and always starting from it seems level zero. No one at BT seems capable of reading up on an open issues previous events and a customers history.

In May I ended up asking for a call back, 2 hours and 30 minutes later I had been passed from the technical support team to the line team, the line team passed me back as the idiot in technical clearly just dropped me into the queue, didn't want to know and basically couldn't answer my questions prefering to patronise me and tell me the line was only ok for 512k - which it is right now as it's got issues , he just ignored what I said. Way to go BT. I was then passed back to Technical support and had to explain everything again. The suggestion here was for me to call up sales and get them to turn max off. This would be funny if it wasn't so sad. It fails to answer why the line has degenrated, it fails to address the issue and Max was placed on the line at the explicit request of a BT openreach engineer as last year we had an issue with the login for my account timeing out. No one was able to tell me how this would affect my line, what has changed that the resolution for last years issue should be removed and once again why a line degeneration of so much is acceptable. I was then bounced to someone else and went through it all again. and still no answers just people reading from a script.

The upshot of this was that the margin on my connection was raised to 9 from 6., not that I was informed of this it just happened once the call had finished. This meant that I now connect even slower - 384 to 860 now. Stopped the line drops but thats like fixing a car by not going over 40 mph rather than lining up the wheels properly.

I finished the call at 8.30 having been on since 6. I then complained to BT via email again and a call back was arranged. I ended up explaining everything again, the agreement was to mionitor the line and then get a call back. Well guess what, no call back. So I logged a formal complaint via BT and pushed the same case back to BT via their email. I included my wite up of the issue in long and tedious detail, despite them both having case numbers that should include my previous history. I received nothing from the offical complaint except the automated replies, despite chasing them up and I received a baffled email on the technical enquiry from someone who clearly cannot read back through an email nor read the write up of what has previously occured on the case. so, we are back to Zero, again.

My advice, if you can, avoid BT, it's great until you have an issue at which point no one frankly cares.