We questioned BTInternet about recent problems with their service

If you're a BTInternet customer then you can't have failed to notice a lot of problems surrounding the service. Today ISPreview spoke with David Hilton, a manager at BTI, about the complaints we had received and some general issues around BTI.

He said that they had underestimated the increase in usage that would occur when BTI went fully unmetered, they expected it to double, but in fact it tripled. This usage growth triggered a number of problems.

Support

The complaints we have received about this are the cost and the engaged tones when ringing. The reason why people are getting engaged tones is because it’s a premium rate line, thus you can't be put on hold, so the call has to be either taken or rejected. The call is only taken if there is a person available to answer it. BTI are currently recruiting more staff to cope with the demand.

Apparently support phone charges cannot be lowered, as it isn't commercially viable to run support on a national or lo-call system unless the subscription price was increased. A lot of things aren't commercially viable, but some services simply shouldn't be charged for and technical support is one.

Connectivity and Speed

The next item to be discussed was the problem connecting to BTI, there are two issues here, the first is a small problem with connecting to ISPs at a local level in the exchanges. This problem is affecting nearly all of the major ISPs, yet should be solved when DLE is introduced into the exchanges, this will mean Internet calls will be routed over an IP network, which will ease congestion. Most exchanges will be DLE enabled by October'2000.

The other problem is the fact that BT just doesn’t have enough modems for people to connect with at peak times (8 pm - 10 pm). He said this problem is being looked at, new modems are being added quite frequently and this problem should hopefully disappear in a few weeks.

News, E-Mail, Web:

These services have suffered the most problems recently, particularly the mail server during the end of June. He told us that this had been because of lockups on certain accounts, which prevented them from accessing the mail. This caused a backlog on the service, which took a long time to clear. He also acknowledged that the news server had been slow recently but said servers were being added to keep with the huge demand.

I also questioned him on problems with the 62.7 IP range and was told that this was a problem with a router, which connects to the hardware where the 62.7 range is allocated. So in conclusion, all is not well at the BTI camp and they are trying to work things out, yet the big question remains; will they make the same (over subscriptions) mistake again in the future?

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