BT ADSL service in the shires: still an absolute  disgrace

Whilst we accept the challenges of delivering ADSL over ancient bits of wet copper, when one customers (Entanet reselling BT) gets 487kBits, and the neighbour on BT gets 1800kBit, is it unreasonable to demand an explanation, and a fix? Especially when BT apparently now has a £billion or so to spend on football TV rights.

As usual all attempts to get BT Wholesale to accept responsibility for the problem and investigate and fix it are countered by the usual check list - starting with "Is it switched on?" - to which we are tempted to respond "has anyone at BT got a brain and an ounce of integrity?"

Is BT Wholesale giving preferential service to BT customers at the expense of their resellers? Is sure looks like it. The BT speed checker says:

BT Total Broadband of course issues this qualification:-

The speed prediction we have provided is an estimate, however download speeds can vary and the actual download speed will fall between a range. This is generally within 1-2 Mb higher or lower than your estimated speed quoted.

So that means the customer could be getting MINUS 500kBit? Typical BT weasel words!.

This customer is in a rural location and some distance from the exchange. However, he has achieved 1.3MBit for a period in 2011 after years of nagging and begging for someone to take the matter seriously.

2011 September - a fault was reported and and fixed, but then we had no service for a month - service resumed some time in November  2011, after which service was briefly Ok, however the customer was absent all December - and in January measured 82.5 kbps. More testing!

ISP Entanet do their best in tricky circumstances. They obviously rely on BT Wholesale for a lot of "products" and are not inclined to join my idea to sue BT for theft over the disgraceful way that the charges are the same regardless of the quality of their effectively monoply  service.

Thank you for your e-mail.

I can see the line is rather lengthy, so is therefore always going to struggle to get good speeds. I can see the loop attenuation is fluctuating aswell, which is probably not helping things either.

On the good side though, the line is currently stable, and the BRAS profile is now at 750k, rather than the 350k one the customer is currently connected on. The sync speed is currently just over 1 meg, which going from the attenuation of 67db is pretty amazing. At lengths like that, we would usually say broadband would not be feasible at all.

I have restarted his session, so the customer is now connected at the faster speed. In all honesty, there is not a tremendous amount we can now do. Although fibre would likely help, as it lowers the loop significantly, we are in the position of waiting for BT to roll this out, and even then, it depends on whether the customer has a local cabinet, and its enabled by Openreach.

I know this is not much comfort for you or your customer, but at this stage, I cannot see what more we can do in this situation, simply because of the length of the copper line.

If you require any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact support.

Kind Regards,
Technical Support

This situation is not a one-off.  We have 5 DSL services here with rates from 8MBit to 0.9MBit and BT is not the slightest bit interested in finding out why the 0.9MBit service is a fraction of the best.  We are aware of another location similar issues arise where two BT lines from the same exchange deliver wildly different data rates. And BT does not care.

So what's the next stage for a fix? Clearly BT must be required to refund all customers who have been mislead in this way over too many years now. It will run into many millions of pounds that they have apparently pocketed under false pretences; and maybe then they will take their responsibility as the monopoly provider of services more seriously

FRIDAY 15th June  2012  21.20hrs bandwidth reading is 

which means you can download at 61.64 KB/sec. from our servers. 

SATURDAY 16th June 2012 06.15

FRIDAY 15th June  2012  21.20hrs bandwidth reading is 

which means you can download at 61.64 KB/sec. from our servers. 

SATURDAY 16th June 2012 06.15

Sunday June 24th:  started off in Norfolk this week with

Your current bandwidth reading is: 13.00hrs 19.06.2012

953.30kbps 

Then it Dropped out

No service from 18.00 bhr 1.06.2012 until 08.00 22.06.2012 THEN 

Friday evening from 6pm 22.06.2012 OFF

then 

23.06.2012 early am

Enta were unable to offer any more suggestions, BT are stonewalling and clearly bith just wish this would go away and stop being a nuisance.

And so the NR12 0QL customer decided to test BT and ordered a new line from BT with BT broadband to see if BT did indeed provide a preferential service to its "own" customners, in  apparent contrvention of their obligation to act "even handedly" with the reseller's customers.

A new line from BT was duly installed - and on July 14th

BT at  1.43 Mbps 

Same as the neighbour's service, and in line with BT predictor...

July 18th - Your current bandwidth reading is:

Enta 118.10kbps  8.30 pm  18th june

BT running at 1400kbps

And here's a typical connection log for the Enta line:

On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 8:12 PM,

Advice from Enta continued to be supine:-

"Unfortunately with a long line issue being identified it becomes very difficult to resolve issues with DSL connections affected as part of this.

As you will likely be aware there is only so far from the exchange that DSL can be provided with little to no disruption, the further the line reaches the more likely there is to become some disruption.

This coupled with other factors such as old copper, degraded cables can soon add up to a troublesome connection.

As BT have advised they are more than happy to cease off the connection should the customer find it unusable with no additional charge. "

No mention of a refund for the period of unacceptable service.

The matter continues - and is heading for http://www.ombudsman-services.org/communications.html