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.