BT Reviews

Update 8th June - WATCHDOG form completed with the details. Anyone else with issues, don't just comment here, contact WATCHDOG - the more people that do, the more likely we can get their appalling service brought into the limelight. Day 7 and still no broadband and still no date for reconnection. Once again I am left with extra fuel costs and childcare costs by needing to work from the office. No call from BT, had to chase them - 2 emails not responded to and a phonecall. Managed eventually to speak to the 'bored' sounding executive customer support person, and told they will call me tomorrow when they have more information.

Update 5th June - day 4 with no business broadband - called back from customer services, the same issue persists, the engineers have not closed their part so the new order cannot be raised. But I'm assured it has now been escalated to the responsible team...only took 4 days to decide to do this! And 'hopefully' it will be closed today, so that the new order can go through on Monday and 'hopefully' some time next week I will receive the internet service (although they cannot promise) that mine and my partners business desperately need back again. Needless to say after this weeks saga I am not holding my breath. Please anyone about to write a poor review - share also with WATCHDOG. In the hope that getting BT to review their full processes rather than trying to fix individual issues will provide future customers with a better service.

Update 4th June - can it get any worse? Seems it can! After cancelling my broadband in error, and still on day 3 having made no progress to reorder. It (remember I'm supposedly on an enhanced business service), has just become worse when I came in from work to a bill for over £500 they are going to debit from my account in a few days. It appears this is payment for my unused contract liability seeing as my account has been cancelled WHICH I DID NOT REQUEST! So now I'm expected to pay hundreds for their error and I STILL HAVE NO BROADBAND and currently no hope! PS, BT man I spoke to about invoice said he'd seen a lot of these 'changovers' going wrong, and account closures that shouldn't happen!

Left BT for Andrews & Arnold after a 6month battle over sudden loss of speed in January. Over a few days i lost 10-15Mb of throuhput.

BT refused to accept there was a fault. I was sending them my Samknows logs which they didnt accept.

Gave up and left them. New provider managed to get openreach out whom found a junction box full of water. Since then the line speed has recovered.

Now trying to get money back from BT for the reduced service but they are still saying there was no fault.

Have now cancelled all other services with them so ive just got basic landline rental and will be seeking to shift that too.

Support is terrible, i probably need a new socket after how many times ive unplugged the router, likewise i have repetitive strain injury from pressing the reset button on the modem.

You can ask 4 simple questions in an email to them and not a single one of them will answered.

BT are best described as Evasive, Slippery & untrustworthy.

5 weeks of having BT infinity and I have had the hub replaced 3 times ..paying for 80 mb and avergaging 40 mb highest been 80mb lowest been 8mb

currently waiting for another engineer to vist

Definately been capped and too much traffic.....It might be something to fo with the offers they have on at the moment

I have been with Bt for years but Will definately be going elswhere.

had to buy wireless extenders etc ..when on normal broadband and hub 4 worked fine

very dissapointed at the moment

For many years, pretty much since the eve of ADSL services, I was on TalkTalk. Up until about 2008, it was more than fast enough, but their backhaul seemingly became more and more congested until dialup would have been a godsend; there were lost packets, during peak time especially, left, right and centre. Our line was tested and had no errors, so we just assumed that due to living in a rural area, this is what was available and that was that.

Fast Forward to Christmas last year, when I had two close friends over, both of whom were used to 80mbps+ from Virgin Media. They were pretty shocked and it was rather embarrassing to say the least, which prompted me onto this site, where I learnt that BT would, in all probability, be able to offer speeds (actual throughput) that my line could support, rather than their (TalkTalk's) reportedly mediocre backhaul provision! The migration to BT was very swift and I don't recall more than a few hours' loss of service. (As the exchange is BT Wholesale only, little physical work would have to be done, unlike in LLU cases.) Almost immediately, we got speeds of 7mbps day and night! Pretty astonishing when you're used to effectively no service during the daylight hours.

In terms of service, it varies between satisfactory and pretty amazing. When my line IP Profile dropped from 7mbps to 2mbps (possibly due to a storm), an engineer arrived at the correct time, about two days after first contact with BT Retail. He was very knowledgeable, almost surprisingly so, and performed all the necessary tests with the full speed restored in a matter of minutes. Furthermore, I have provided BT Care with all manner of inquiries and received appropriate replies in surprisingly short intervals. In a couple of cases, I’ve been so pleased; I made the effort to make my appreciation known to managers.

A matter of weeks ago, I subscribed for BT’s FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) implementation. I was migrated three working days after I contact BT sales, despite the service not being officially available! The advisor went rather beyond “Computer says no” and placed the order. With anticipation, the install date quickly arrived… I arrived home, connected the Homehub 5 up and within minutes, it was all running without a hitch! I live a substantial distance from the DSLAM cabinet, so was not expecting great speeds, but I currently attain round 8mbps down and 1.2mbps up, which for the slight increase in cost over my prior ADSLMax service, is very pleasing.
BT provides all the usual bolt-ons. Antivirus, family safety, email, even television and some other features to whom I only provided a cursory glance. I am only able to comment with regards to the email provision, as I have not utilised the others. BT now uses its own mail system, having moved from the BT Yahoo bond that never seemed to make sense nor work! The web app is rather basic, a bit like Outlook Web access in Lite mode, but with an even smaller feature set. No different to other ISPs I’ve witnessed though. As far as desktop use is concerned, it is an IMAPI account and functions absolutely fine with Outlook 2010.
BT Retail thereby excels in the key areas: speed, reliability and human customer service. I'm certainly never returning to the establishment professed previously.

Been with BT for a couple of years now on their Infinity 2 package, being one of the first in my area to have a cabinet installed, and be connected to it.

Initially had an issue with the installation by a contractor, but a call to BT and an Openreach engineer sorted it. The support line was very helpful.

The connection has been very reliable since installation, and have had no issues with it at all. I'm using the provided ECI B-Focus modem connected to the Huawei cabinet, with my own router. (Got a HomeHub 3 delivered, but didn't like it that much).

Very pleased with the 74 Meg Down/20 Meg Up I'm getting, making it incredibly fast. The great thing is that I get these speeds at all times without any lag or congestion. A 15ms ping is also a bonus.

I don't know how many other premises are connected to the same cabinet so far, but it seems ok for now.

As for the extras (like BT Cloud, BT Sport, McAfee, Parental Controls etc), I don't really use these, but it's nice to have plenty of extras there just in case.

I honestly can't fault BT. I certainly hope it continues this way.

<Start rant about BT>

So I was with BT, the internet was not too bad, some small problems with laggy connection and a few down times for a whole night once.

Then I moved house, giving them a week or so notice of this, they said it'd be activated on the Monday when we moved in (13/10/14)

The Saturday we moved into the house and the Monday it was activated, joy.

Later that night, it was switched off!! we rang BT, they said they messed up and didn't cancel the internet from the previous house so they had to cancel it again and it'd take a week (20/10/14) to get it back on because we had been put to the back of the que. So, they messed up, entirely their fault, and we don't get put on some sort of priority list, not so good now BT, but still, a weeks not bad I guess, I can live with that, everyone makes mistakes.

So today arrives (20/10/14) and I woke up thinking the internet would be on at some point, then, I got a TEXT message saying the internet wont be on till NEXT Monday (27/10/14)

So I rang them up to complain, the jist is...

Look, we rang you two weeks ago to inform you we're moving house, you activated the internet on Monday when we moved in, then you made a mistake so disconnected it, then said it's gonna be another week, and now you're saying one more week and you inform me of this by a text message? So that's 3 weeks in total from the date I phoned you, and two weeks late (at the minimum, who knows if it would even be activated next Monday) even though it's already been activated once, so now I'm using a dongle and paying excessive internet costs because of your mistake.

In the end, I cancelled it. After speaking to 4 people at Mumbai call centre who tried to persuade me to stay, they FINALLY put me through to someone in England who actually cancelled my internet for me. I'm going to go with Sky. It may take two weeks for Sky to activate my internet, which is possibly a week longer than BT if I stayed with them, but it's the principle isn't it?

Bad form BT.

</rant>

The short of it is we put in an order on the 23rd of May

The connection date provided was the Friday 13th of June which was 3 weeks from the order but it was an acceptable date for us.

We received no communication but the day rolled round and we found our connection date had been changed to the 25th.

25th, no one shows up however they sent the Kill order to the current ISP - so we lost internet

Spoke to people on the phone who I could barely understand and it was clear they didn't understand me.. told us we would get a call on the Monday

on the 28th we get a call and are told that the order has been cancelled.. which we never told them to do

we get the order set up again and are told 16th of July

16th roles round we are told 23rd of July

In the meantime sent a second router and a second different set top box...

23rd roles round and we are told 6th of August

We have emailed and complained but nothing was done.

The only thing we were told was we could access the BT Wifi network for free - which is no good to us as there isn't one local to us, and when we finally did find one the login details provided by BT didn't work.

Not only have I been unable to run my online business for over a month but we are receiving charges for mobile internet use, and we have been unable to access the internet for a month and they want us to wait a further 2 weeks!

If all you want is ADSL go with XILO (my previous provider before I moved in with my flatmate who had SKY, and equally poor company) or if you are looking for Fibre go with Zen.

What you get with BT is a shorter life, because when your time comes to contact them or to get the most simplest problem sorted you will be in a world of hurt dealing with this bunch of inconsiderate below standard outfit.

your be speaking to someone in India that will be hard to understand, so if you then decide to try posting on the BT forums they will move your post around or even delete them altogether so others cant read them. they are a very nasty and disrespectful company that feeds on greed.

I'm leaving BT next week and will not leave anything in their hands.
I will move the lot, my bb, my phone account, my line rental that BT will probably still get via my new phone company but that's out of my control.

If you try and fight it out with BT your probably end up speaking to a mod that all seem to be Irish and will just ring you every 2 days to say we are waiting for a update and your be stuck in a never ending loop until your fight to cancel your account.

Switched to BT due to quality issue when Pipex brought out ISP Freedom2Surf. I can't say I have had any issues with them, they only once contact me when I transgressed the then 100gb fair usage limit, now consuming 300gb+.

Always find that the usual renegotiation at contract renewal time gets the cost reduced by at least 25% and a new Home Hub if one has been released since the last time I renewed.

Without any issues to resolve I can not criticise the service. I am based in a village with a local exchange which means I have standard ADSL (6-7 mb/s) so speed is subjective works for me.

I pay for upto 16.0mb from BT I receive only 1.0mb I have also lost broadband completely, so the last thing I would do is go with this company.

I understand that every area and exchange will differ in its output, but BT have spread themselves very thin and as a result there is a massive number of congested exchanges, so at peak times 6pm - 11pm and all weekends you will be in the slow lane.

They are not easy to contact and once you do get through to someone you can understand they are bordering on being rude and sarcastic.

If you try and be herd via their forums then forget it as they have that base covered also,
They move your post around in their forums to suit themselves and to hide your complaints with-in a web of old post.

They also use India call centres that will send you mad if you ever do have to phone them.

The worse thing I ever did was to let this cowboy company be my isp. all they provided me with was a headache and frustration.