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.