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BT hike prices from December 2014

ranworthbreeze

By ranworthbreeze
in The Broadscot Lounge

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Paladin

Paladin

Posted
Posted

The broadband/telephone market has shrunk considerably over the years, as the big fish swallowed up the minnows. But you pay your money and take your choice. Talk Talk, the most complained of provider, has hiked its line rental by 6.6% and its TV package by 19%. In this case, BT seems to be playing catch-up.

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Time to change the broadband package I think and if BT really expensive I may have to re-think the land line.

 

There's another side to it though Mark.

 

I was with Talktalk Broadband for 7 years until quite recently, when I returned to BT.

 

Talktalk (and Tiscali, as they were called before), are indeed cheaper than BT, but the speed dropped to an unacceptable level, and I had to go back to BT.

 

They may be comparable speed-wise in more populated areas, but in rural Norfolk there's now a huge difference.

 

For years, Talktalk gave me just over One mBit, but that dropped to just over a quarter of a mBit at busy times during Evenings and Weekends, which was almost unusable,

 

Six months ago I switched back to BT, and I now get a steady two and a half mBits, all the time, with no other changes to my set up or the local cabling.

 

If you live in a rural area and can only get Broadband via BT telephone lines, then it's best to stay with them, as other ISP's speeds over those lines suffer greatly from "contention" and "IP streaming".

 

Be very wary of switching providers, if things go wrong and speed promises are not met up with, it can be very expensive to switch back after the new contract has been signed.

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SPEEDTRIPLE

SPEEDTRIPLE

Posted
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I`ve been thinking of swapping over to BT just so i can watch Moto GP on BT Sport. I have O2 at the moment, but that was taken over by Sky some time ago. With O2, all i had was Broadband for £12 pm, although over a few years that did go up to £14. But since Sky have taken over, in the last 12 months, i`m now paying £25pm, with surcharges thrown in be cause i don`t have their phone or tv packages.

 

I signed a contract with O2 for broadband only, with no surcharges for not having their phone or tv packages, so surely, if Sky, or anybody else takes them over, are`nt they governed by my original contracted terms and conditions?.

 

Thieving s..s i call them, and it`s NOT the first time i`ve had problems with Sky either, but that`s another story.

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I care more about pound in pocket than internet speed, I doubt it takes that much longer to load up a forum or ebay, I dont use it for that much else.  

 

Believe me Mark, it really does make a difference, even to Ebay and forums etc..

 

The Talktalk speed I was getting was 256k, which means that even ebay pages were taking 30 seconds or so to load, rather than the usual 3 or 4 seconds.

 

Talktalk was ten times slower than BT, which makes any surfing much more laborious.

 

I occasionally view short Youtube videos, because there's now so much useful stuff on there where people explain how to check and fix things etc..

 

With Talktalk it was ridiculous, buffering for minutes, even when strangled down to 240p. 

 

Now I've changed to BT, I can run most at 720p with no buffering at all, which makes a huge difference when trying to understand what's being explained.

 

I consider myself to be a very tight Git, but the extra £5 a month or so is money very well spent for me. :)

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....... How many broadband providers are there that give a direct (non BT hosted) service, I wonder?

 

The problem for many consumers is not how many truly independent Broadband providers there are, but more that there are none in rural areas.

 

Running copper or fibre cable along streets is very expensive, so all the "super fast" independent providers are only interested in the cream, like cities where they get maximum properties per mile of cable run.

 

I much prefer living in the country, but rural areas with much lower population densities will suffer slow speeds and total dependency on BT cables for many years to come.

 

It's actually a toss up whether advancing  technology may overtake the very slow fibre provision, by going wireless instead, 5G, 6G, or something of that ilk.

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Paladin

Paladin

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As Strowager has pointed out, in rural areas of Norfolk, it doesn't matter who the ISP is, speeds cannot exceed the line capacity. Fibre optic cable is very gradually being introduced, but, as I live 3 miles from the exchange, which still uses copper cable, the best speed I can get (with BT) is around 3.6 - 4 Mbps, which is twice what I ever achieved with VirginMedia.

 

The chances of Virgin bringing cable out into the 'sticks' are less than nil.

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Siddy

Siddy

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Just got off a online chat with BT about my connection failing on wifi yet again (3 router in 8 months Homehub 5) got the 30meg package and do get it also on limit of infinity. Advice is note everything that is said with them, do it online and list history after problem I had after getting charged £127 for a engineer turning up and found a fault but still said there wasn't a fault after removing our extension (left me new socket and cable to install again). Got the invoiced cancelled.

I pay bt line upfront and get it cheap and use mobile for calls using free minutes.

Looking at other isp's with this contract few months to run. but they still come via bt lines.

 

I was with O2 many years with no issues but didn't want to put all eggs in one basket plus there router at the time was pants (can't say much about HH5)

While typing this router rebooted.

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.......Advice is note everything that is said with them, do it online and list history .......

 

I quite agree there, BT's "customer support" was quite useless for me too.

 

When I returned to BT, I wanted to retain some old BT email addresses that were still working, so I needed to get them "associated" with my new login ID to avoid them being lost.

 

It was like swimming through custard.  two guns

 

I got there in the end, but it took far too many calls and emails for such a simple task that eventually turned out to have an unadvertised self service web page for customers to arrange it themselves, (which the majority of support staff had no knowledge of).

 

Having said that though, Talktalk's customer support was very poor too. When the speed degraded down to the unacceptable 256k  level, they still insisted that my equipment was at fault, and denied the cause as being "IP Streaming" which was the true reason, as they rented the lines from BT.

 

All Broadband support service operatives seem to treat all customers as complete novices, and go through the list of simple faults, never allowing for the fact that they are occasionally talking to someone who has more IT technical knowledge and experience than them.

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Hockham Admiral

Hockham Admiral

Posted
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I quite agree there, BT's "customer support" was quite useless for me too.

 

All Broadband support service operatives seem to treat all customers as complete novices, and go through the list of simple faults, never allowing for the fact that they are occasionally talking to someone who has more IT technical knowledge and experience than them.

Hear, hear!

 

Despite my ability (learned over many years of VHF/HF communications with them) to usually understand foreign accents I just can't pick up all of BT's foreign customer support teams' explanations.

 

This is not jingoism but I usually ask to be connected to a rep in the UK, which they will do immediately.

 

I too had Tiscali 'out in the sticks' and their service was even worse than BT's.

My download speed was frequently below 1Mbps and with BT it's usually around 6Mbps...

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