BT Broadband?

[ffutures]

NTL (Virgin) are REALLY annoying me, I think I need to look at another ISP. Since I now can't get the cheap light usage phone service, I might as well consider BT. Does anyone here use BT, and if so what have your experiences been?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Leaving aside BT as an ISP, have you considered BeThere?

I'm on their more expensive package (Be Pro). It's sort of like an ADSL2 version of Demon in the early days, in a good way: static IP, unlimited usage, no traffic throttling, intelligent staff who expect their customers to know what a router is.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That totals more than I really want to spend, to be honest. I suspect that the low upload limit might be a problem too.

[kit-hartford.livejournal.com]

I do, and in general I'm happy with them (certainly compared to AOL who I used before who got noticeably worse when they were bought by Carphone Warehouse). However, there does seem to be a variance in connection speed (a mix of line contention and packet-shaping I presume) that makes things seem sluggish at times. The cynic in me thinks that's becuase they want to push people toward their new fibre setup (BT Infinity).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I only have experience with Telewest/VirginMedia ... so what have Virgin done now to really annoy you?

I was annoyed that my connection was down for four hours yesterday morning, and then down again for about five hours in the afternoon ... but that appears to have been an area wide outage, possibly due to the very heavy rains? And each time I phoned their customer service number, the list of affected postcodes kept getting shorter, so I assume they were fixing things ... but still it meant that five hours of time I was supposed to be "at work" yesterday, I had no internet connection (having sent off my 3G dongle to deborah_c)

I could have tried configuring my mobile for tethering, but decided to do other things instead.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Very poor speed, said they would give me a £15 rebate and didn't, said they would give me a new modem and haven't.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

my speed does seem to vary a fair bit over the day ... at least according to my torrent download speed ...

I use speedtest.net and pingtest.net to check out my line speed and quality.

But I usually manage between ten and twenty megabits download (when I'm not being throttled) and six or seven hundred kilobits up.

Certainly recently, TV downloads have been zooming down :-)

[armb.livejournal.com]

I use BT, but more through laziness and inertia than anything else.
Connections seem to be less reliable these days (web browser pages timing out and needing retrying), but it could be something at my end.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's good to know.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Not personally - but D-d has used BT in the last two houses she's been in in York, after real horrors with Tiscali.

BT have been very reliable, and the odd couple of problems in the past two years have been sorted out within 24 hours - by people who seemed to speak good English and know what they were talking about - from what she told me.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks!