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.