BT Reviews

As above. 2 years of decent enough speed and engineers were quick to fix the two landline faults that occurred during that time. Then the same fault happened a third time and took out my broadband. And so began a cycle of the most dreadful customer service I have ever experienced.

Despite repeated assurances from Mumbai or wherever that my line in quaintest Wiltshire was functioning at 5.5 MBps three seperate independant speed tests returned a result of 0.13 MBps. Having confronted BT with this I was told that their tests were the only ones they could take data from and that as their test showed 5.5 they would take no further action, so closed call number 1. Call number 2 resulted in a promise that the engineers would try "some new settings" to rectify the problem. When these magical settings did not work I was told that the line would even more magically fix itself within 24 hours and they would ring back to check it. No ring back and no improvement. Call number 3 passed the case to the "Extended service team" who promised a call back the following day by 12 midday. Next day, no call back. Call number 4 was to complain about having wasted a working morning waiting for nothing to be done about my problem, and I was then promised a call back by 5pm. Again no call back. As of today the fault still remains unfixed, and no departments have contacted me in a week to update anything. Clearly they have not the ability or the will to fix it, so a new ISP beckons.

The operators were faultlessly polite but also utterly ignorent of computing terminology "what do you mean upstream?" being one of my favorite quotes.

The plan I was on was missold as it did not meet my usage requirements and with BT you pay £5 for each portion of every 5GB you go over your (pitiful) 10GB usage allowance. Result: £15 extra on every bill I have ever paid.

My opinion is that BT are fine for phones as that's what British Telecom do. For broadband they are dreadful. The vast difference in helpfulness and competency between the broadband and phone teams is bewildering and frustrating.

I have moved my business elsewhere (to the tune of 50% less than my BT bills) and would urge anyone who has above minimal usage of broadband to look to other providers aswell. Thouraghly cheesed about the whole ordeal.

Bt customer service in india do not listen to what you are describing, they talk over you and sometimes are impossible to understand.My last problem (very slow speed and no upload) took 10 days to fix.Bt openreach engineers are pleasant but do not appear to be fully up to speed technically. Bt billing took almost a year to get my bills correct (trying to charge me for a line I do not have). All ISPs should be forced to use transparent and independant speed and useage monitors/meters. When my contract is up I will change.

Performance wise BT Infinity has been solid, no speed issues whatsoever, currently I'm on 37Mbit down /8.5 Mbit up, but there is something to take note of, when I got Infinity I found out that despite BT calling Infinity option 2 "unlimited" there was in fact a 300 GB usage allowance imposed per month, this was not published on BT's website. BT have agreed to remove this cap in April 2011

At present under normal usage during peak periods everything's fine, you can stream video, game, surf, email .etc with no problems . But BT do have quite a restrictive traffic management policy regarding P2P & Torrent use. Upload speeds on torrents seem to be throttled around the clock. Download speeds on torrents are throttled during peak periods 4pm - midnight weekdays. BT can also identify the "heaviest users" on their Infinity network and throttle back their speeds using traffic management, there is no allowance for downloading during off-peak periods, everything you download on Infinity counts towards your total monthly usage and its your usage that will, or will not trigger traffic management throttling. Unfortunatly BT do not give subscribers any guide lines as to how much it is safe to download before getting throttled. I cannot recommend BT Infinity Option 2 (unlimited) for heavy downloaders but for normal usage (probably in the region of 300GB per month) it's fine.

footnote: regarding phone support. If you call early in the morning 9 - 10 am you're more likely to get a UK operator, if you call afternoons & evenings, more likely to be an overseas operator

footnote: regarding the cooling-off period, in a nutshell, there isn't one. On the day your BT connection is activated you are locked into an 18 month contract.

I have been with BT for many years but things have got so bad that I have decided to move to another ISP.

I had been getting decent performance and over the years the download speed has gradually risen to 5.5Mbps with hardly any downtime. I would have been happy with that.

However, on one of the anniversaries of signing the contract I got a call from the BT Indian Call Centre asking me to sign up for another two year contract. I refused as I was considering moving and wanted the existing contract to roll on. However, I found out much later that they had signed me up for a new contract and moved me from unlimited to limited download terms. I only noticed when I started getting huge bills for exceeding the limit. They also throttled my speeds to 128kbps at various times.

The Indian call centre also had a habit of calling me to offer me BT branded credit cards and other services that I didn't want.

Final straw was when they charged me £100 for exceeding a download limit for a month when I was working away from home and nobody had access to the very secure router. They refused to acknowledge that they had made a mistake.

I've signed up with BE, so I'll see what they are like but so far they've kept me well informed about the progress of my order and the router arrived the day after it was ordered.

Have used BT before and they have always been very poor. Rented a place and had to use them again! I am within 2 miles of the exchange and only get just over 3Mb speed. My daughter lives up the road within a bout a mile of the exchange and she gets nearly 12Mb speed from another popular isp.
To make it worse, this speed I am getting is an improvment over the original speed! I was getting just over 2Mb speed! This was after constant phone calls to BT, and after about 2 months this was the result!
When I first complained I was told there was nothing wrong with the line....Ha Ha. It took 3 engineers to get this pathetic speed increase!

Sadly I allowed the claims of BT Broadband to lure me into a contract. Before I took up with this ISP I ran their line tester over several months and always got the response back that we should get 13 Mbs which I thought a quite acceptable compromise for a service of 'up to 20 Mbs'. In reality the best we get 5 or 6 Mbs although when we first started it was close to the expected 13 Mbs. It's almost as though someone has gradually turned down the speed to the point where we scream!

Unfortunately the BT Broadband support is generally less than effective; often with people in an overseas location whose first language is not English. Understanding in both directions is difficult and has so far proved a complete waste of time and effort!

I've been a BT phone customer for more than 30 years and a BT broadband customer for about five years. I live within 50 metres of the exchange and I pay for Broadband option 3. Allegedly up to 20mb/sec.

I am a heavy broadband user who consistently downloads hundreds of Gb every month on this supposedly unlimited service. I generally fall foul of their Fair Usage Policy (License to steal!) within a week or so of each month and have my usage throttles at times of peak usage. In theory this is most afternoons and evenings. In practice this seems to be 24 hours a day!

In addition I have noticed that I now lose adsl synchronisation with the exchange on an almost nightly basis. Requiring repeated restarts of my router.

My personal experience of BT customer services is that when I reported a line fault last year, it took repeated calls and BT nearly a month to send an engineer to check the fault. My broadband was unusable during this time and the crackling on the telephone line was so bad that BT support had to repeatedly call me on my mobile phone. Upon investigation it was discovered by the engineer (who was very good!) that during previous work on the line that the insulation had been damaged significantly and that water was causing the problem.

I never received an apology from BT for their awful service or a refund for the month of lost telephone and broadband service.

Considering BT's long history and monopoly on the network infrastructure I can only describe their service as dismal and in terminal decline!

If I could find an ISP that delivers a reliable, suitable service for me locally I would switch in a moment. But finding a hi-speed, unrestricted, reliable, affordable non-cable ISP in my area seems to be nigh on impossible.

If you have alternatives in your area, use them! BT are effectively robbing their customers blind. I cannot recommend them.

My review here is not directed at BT per se, but rather at Broadband speeds in the UK generally.
I think i've worked out why we in the UK and Western Europe have such crummy speeds. And the answer lies over the Atlantic in the USA.
If you check out almost all broadband suppliers over there, they are even slower than ours or the Europeans.
So what i think is going on is this:
Because it was largely American money that got the world out of the financial schtuck 2 years ago, they have requested that the rest of the world do not upgrade their broadband networks before the Americans have upgraded theirs, thus not given us in the UK and Europe an unfair competitive advantage, as we all struggle our way out of reccession.
I can't prove any of this naturally, but it does seem rather strange that we in the West all suffer from atrocious speeds, while those lucky folks in South Korea, Japan and even Eastern Europe, have broadband speeds that we can only dream of.
This might be a bit of a conspiracy theory, well actually a lot of a conspricay theory, but i wouldn't mind betting that as broadband speeds start to increase, that we in the UK, Western Europe, and the USA will all receive increased speeds at roughly the same time, and of course it will all be due to 'advances in technology'. Yeah right.
If that were the case, why is it that Germany which is sitting on pots of money and no longer in reccession, still has lousy speeds and is no where near installing fibre optic networks.
This is all politics, and a bit of Ricardian economics thrown in to wash it down, all nicely masked under the chocolate topping that is technology.
Who says there are no smoke filled rooms left in the corridors of power ?
Of course there are.

So, based on this, when can we expect fibre optics here in the UK as standard?
Well, given that the Americans will first have to replace about 5 trillion miles of copper wiring first, i would estimate that we will be getting FTTC around about 2050. LOL.

Moved from ADSL24 expecting better results on 21CN though BT but no good really bad, moving to BE unlimited from next week.

My experience over the past 2 weeks with BT (time-wasting, lying etc) has driven me to review BT Total Broadband.

I am getting 1.1 now, although I was previously getting 2.7 for months without problem.

There is no way you can talk to anyone sensible at BT tech support and they will tell you any lie to get rid of you.

Fuming.