BT Reviews

BT are categorically the worst ISP I have ever had in my life. I've had Virgin and Tiscali in the past, hardly the greatest I know but leaps and bounds better than BT.

I'm bang in the middle of central London. You would think on BT's best package (Option 3 - 20mb unlimited) and at £30 a month I would have an internet connection that was not only super fast and reliable but could also make the tea!

It's so far to the contrary it's unbelievable. Their so called "unlimited" broadband option is subject to a draconian fair usage policy.

THE FAIR USAGE POLICY IS STRICTLY LIMITED TO 100GB per month. If you go over 100GB they immediately, universally limit your connection to 2mbps. Downloading HTTP the speeds are shockingly bad, averaging about 150kbps from a variety of servers, local and overseas. Even when I was not limited the speed was averaging around 300kbps with a maximum of 1mbps from one server which is nothing special at all.

WORST OF ALL THEY THROTTLE ALL P2P - I REPEAT AVOID THIS ISP THEY THROTTLE P2P!!! That goes for Bittorrent/Emule or any other file sharing. It's written in to their fair usage policy. The maximum speed I can get with uTorrent, all forwared properly on a torrent with 20,000 plus seeders is 30KBPS - I REPEAT MAX BITTORRENT SPEED IS 30 KBPS!!!! I think after midnight they reduce the P2P throttle but it is still only maxing at about 150KBPS download on a highly seeded torrent.

PLEASE, IF YOU LIKE YOUR P2P AND YOUR SANITY - REJECT, REFUSE, BOYCOT, AVOID THIS AWFUL USELESS RIP OFF ISP!!!!!

I understand the call centre is somewhere in India ? How can this be for such a megalithic monopoly ? Fortunately the set up has been stable enough to avoid contact so would have to give the half way balance of 5 out of 10 there.
Have to put my cards on the table and state i know very little about the world of computers and interwebbyness.
My previous first experience was with what has been called on here "AoHell" - a several pint job in a pub to explain in itself !
In my opinion BT excells in duplicated, slow, wooden complexity. There is this strange accolyte called "Yahoo" as if BT feels awkward, embarrassed or incapable of solely relying on it's very own mainpage.
It seems impossible to have more than one window open at any one time, unlike AoL even allowing for the seven year vintage of my Hewlett-Packard machine. There is the feeling a neighbour has lifted a manhole cover to dump a freshly bagged bulging dog turd down the four inch soil pipe but lo, there has to be a back bollocking pressure of more turd to instil any kind of speed into their wire system.
Then there is the clumsy enigma of the thing called "Outlook Express" which has to be gone through as like a split brain entity which devolves off the main page, in my opinion tediously. Hate to say it but AoHell was streets ahead on email for simplicity.

Most annoyingly, BT imposed what i think was called a 'fair use policy' on many subscribers after they signed up so the monthly payment became £20 rather than less on signing up.
To me this is far too much for the small use i place upon their service and pay rental for telephone line - which ought to have been paid for many times over even in the last decade !

No more big providers for me with hideously long contracts - had enough of that and am going to find a smaller ISP. If they take old fashioned cheques, that is even better.

I came to this site originally to see if it was worthwhile switching from BT to someone like Talk Talk.
Having read the Talk Talk reviews here I'm not so sure.
Mind you, I don't fully recognise the BT service that's been detailed here by other posters. I've been with BT for three years and I've been using the BT Home Hub 2 for the past year. Set up was easy, and I haven't had to contact the Support line yet.
But it's the speed that gets me. I work as a magazine designer/publisher, so the amount of traffic I handle is pretty immense and BT's 'fair usage' is 100 Gb per month. A few mags in and out plus the odd bit of I-Player and I'm way over every month. More particularly, the upload speed is pathetic; I've been struggling to get 30 kbps on FTP recently. Try sending a 64 page mag to a printer at that speed.
Should I change? Dunno. Should I stick with the devil I know? Dunno.
I'm happy with the price (£22 ish per month), I've given Support a middle score of 5 'cos I've never used them. but it's the s--p--e--e--d that kills me.

i got the top pack 24.99 a month and that is for 8 mb there is no plans to upgrade to 20-24 mbs where i live not for bt any way sky/aol/talk talk ant the rest of the isp offer 20mbs for half of the price i put in a pc for a frend that lives 3x the distence from the exchange i live 300 mtrs from it and she got sky and i did a speed test it come back at 15mbs she paying 10 a month my speed test i get 4 mbs and i paying 24.99 both unlimeted
i think i need a calculator to see if im geting riped off lol

help call centers are india i might as well ring my nan for tec support pml

slow speed high price

home hubs keep braking iv got 4 dead ones in 18 months

thay will lie about the speed of oather isp can provide you in your area

but the biggest regret was signing up for the BT Broadband package, got my home hub and technical info through within days of signing up, nice and prompt service I thought :) A week passed and my broadband was to be activated but wasn't so I checked the website about my order to find it canceled, called the number given to be told there was no reason given it was just canceled and I would have to go through the sign up process again. I should have said forget it then ! However I signed up again, already got my hardware so no need for that, activation date came and went, called the number again to be told there is a problem with the activation process and that's it no other explanation, no email telling me about a problem, and to expect some info within 48hrs. In the future I will stay well clear of anything to do with BT as they seem to be incompetent

We live in a remote village on Exmoor and I'm aware that the telecoms infrastructure in these parts is poor. I had given up on the possibility of adsl until a BT rep. 'phoned and promised it could be achieved. I agreed and an activation date was agreed along with promises to let me know if anything changed. The date came and went. Their web site now suggested an activation date of 31 December this year. I contacted the original rep who told me it was nothing to do with her and I should chase it up with another dept. Decided life was too short and let the matter drop.

We were then contacted by another supplier suggesting they could provide ADSL. Willing to let them try we agreed. We then discovered that BT had a "lock" on the line and we could not use another supplier. Easy, we thought, cancel the BT order and we could try a reputable supplier.

Not easy. My colleague and I spent many hours of our time being shunted from one obstructive, incompetent dept. in their call centre before the order was finally cancelled. The full story is related in the BT section of the forums.

We are currently moving all services to our company that can be moved away from BT.

If I could have given a negative for services I would have. The same applies to support. I can't really rate speed as they failed completely to deliver a service. Can't rate value for the same reason.

Thank God we have a good wireless service and this was required as a backup only. I have immense pity for anyone who relies on this shower for a service.

After a long 'partnership' with BT my will to us it has been broken.

I have used BT since the days of dial-up but over the last 12 months the manner of their control over my bandwidth has become rediculous.

Their peak-hour control seems to start at 9am and stretch to midnight!

I signed up for 'un-limited' broadband but was 'punished' for using too much! Punishment meant a month a 1 Meg!!!!

Since then I struggle to get 2.5 meg.

My other crime was to invest in BT Vision. For that I'm tied to BT Broadband at its higher than average cost.

But even its on-demand struggles. So nights not even avaialble.

So what happens...

1. Downloads fail half way through - I use iTunes movies and TV series but after a long phone call that is deemed not 'fair-use'
2. I try to use BBC iPlayer and ITV player but both stutter
3. LastFM - stutters
4. ITV live - buffers every 10 seconds.


I live less than 1Km from a modern exchange and used to get 6.5 meg. When the BT engineers tested this week they reported 5.5 meg but said I should be getting more but the 'shaping' pushes me down. Of an BT Vision may be reducing it even though it is not supposed to!!!

Bye, Bye and good ridence I say!!!

I have spent days of my life listening to the lies and incompetence from BT. I have been told an engineer is to come to sort out a fault. He must be coming from Mars it is taking that long for him to get here. I have been told that I will receive a call back from a UK centre that can advise me on the problems that I am having. I have taken afternoons off work to try to speak to someone in the UK because speaking to India is so frustrating. Eventually, after about 5 hours this week alone on the phone to them, someone let slip that there was a cap on my usuage. They are completely disingenuous when you phone up to say that your speed is poor. I am sick to death of trying to deal with India. All that they do is lie to you and stonewall. I am changing my provider today and sincerely hope that the reviews on this forum (for which I am very grateful) are accurate as I will be basing my choice on those reviews. O points for service, -10 for support and speed. On that basis -20 for value. Why can't we show 0 as a review? Even better minus quanties.

In my opinion the broadband service offered by BT is extremely poor. BT tell me that I am connected at 3mbps, and a simple speed test tells me that my download bandwidth is 2.45mbps. If this sounds a tad slow to you then read on...

If you are a 'heavy user' of the internet then BT is not the ISP for you! They operate very aggressive bandwidth throttling policies which will slow down most forms of traffic (except plain web browsing) throughout the day. Furthermore, you will feel the wrath of these draconian bandwidth throttling policies even if you are way below the limits of BTs acceptable usage policy.

Streaming is slow, and it'll take you more than 24 hours to get the latest copy of Linux via bit-torrent.

Having said this, if you are an extremely 'light' internet user then you will probably be happy with this service, although in my opinion you should avoid 'option 3' because it's simply not worth the money. If you want a truly 'unlimited' broadband service you should shop elsewhere.

You should also be aware that BT are very keen to lock you into a long contract, so give it some thought before you sign on the dotted line...

I've been a BT broadband Option 3 customer for 15 months, and I've been throttled heavily for 14 of those months. For the first 6 months my connection speed was just under 6Mbit, which was thottled to 512K in the evenings after the first month of being connected. (Between the hours of 6pm and midnight.) In a house with five Internet users, speeds in the evening were unbearably slow for web browsing, let alone bandwidth-intensive applications like BBC iPlayer. During the second month I monitored my usage heavily, and found that on average we were using around 55GB each month. Nowhere near what I anticipated inappropriate for something advertised as an “unlimited” service. 6 months later I moved house to where I am now. My connection speed is 3,700Kbps, with my evening speeds being throttled to 1Mbit. Still, it’s painfully slow for everyone in the house.

Amazingly, over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed that throughput will never exceed 220KB/s - regardless whether I’m downloading during peak times or not. (I’ve confirmed this by temporarily switching to a router that uses dd-wrt custom firmware, allowing me to monitor bandwidth usage across the entire network.) Could it be that BT are starting to limit bandwidth outside of their stated peak time throttling, or is it a symptom of ever increasing traffic on their network? Regardless, this further drop in speeds was the final straw for me - I decided that I didn’t care how much it would cost me to get out of the contract early, I’d pay it. After a call to BT customer services (who surprisingly put me through to a British call center after requesting a MAC code), they informed me that the early cancellation fee would be around £35. (£11-ish for each month remaining on my contract.) I snapped up the opportunity and requested my MAC code.

A few words about the hardware. The BT Home Hub is a router that is severely lacking in most areas. Large file transfers over Ethernet usually result in a full router reboot within 20 minutes, causing said file transfers to fail and restart. Often the device will restart itself at random times throughout the day, taking up to 5 minutes to reconnect. A nice little quirk that I’ve never experienced with any other router is the inability to use Steam to download games, doing so will disconnect every other user from the network until the application is closed.

The entire service is a disgrace. BT will sell you a service as “unlimited” and throttle you to the point of making your connection unusable in the evenings. The hardware is poor. The service is poor. The customer service is dismal. Usually I dismiss reviews that issue an ISP with 1 star across the board out of hand, but companies like BT make me understand how such scathing reviews are warranted. If you’re thinking of signing up with BT broadband, don’t. It’s very likely that you’ll regret it.