Seemingly trivial things that elicit an emotional response of some kind

[First Aspect]

BT make it quite hard not to have a landline of some sort.

 

[briantrumpet]

Had a sesh looking at alternative offers, and most of them are adding £4 per month for each of two years' contract, so roughly a 20% increase in two years. Makes my current TT tariff look passable, TBH.

 

[First Aspect]

It's not, but it depends on who you get through to. What we do in tech support tends to be a lot more involved than switching it off and on again, but again it depends on who you get through to.

The only other technical support I've had is to switch to a slower frequency, tell me , that I have too many devices (everyone has too many devices according to BT, and did you know the internet seems slower if you are streaming on every single one simultaneously?) or assure me there is no fault at all. Then if I point out the router is blinking orange they run tests for 45 minutes to confirm that there's no fault, before telling me Openreach will be sent out and since they can't detect a fault I WILL be charged.

I had this for years at the old house, and the fault was always with some ancient wiring somewhere half way across a field.

But hey. My time is free.

 

[AndyRM]

The headline figure was pretty much similar, not enough to to be bothered switching (£1-£2). Unless you are struggling financially.
Trouble was once I added on the extras that I use for the landline* and wifi coverage which BT either include or charge less for I ended up with a total package being £10/month more.

*Yes, we are old with old friends and relatives who insist on still using landlines even if we do not. I'm paying for them?

What extras are you being charged for?

 

[First Aspect]

Had a sesh looking at alternative offers, and most of them are adding £4 per month for each of two years' contract, so roughly a 20% increase in two years. Makes my current TT tariff look passable, TBH.

It depends whether you get a price hike at the end of a deal. The isps are now going down the "mortgage deal" route to ensure people are always tied in.

The price hikes aren't inflationary, they are just the price. Think of it more as 1. introductory offer, 2
the price, 3. the price gouge to claw back the introductory offer.

More or less, the real price is 2.

 

[AndyRM]

The only other technical support I've had is to switch to a slower frequency, tell me , that I have too many devices (everyone has too many devices according to BT, and did you know the internet seems slower if you are streaming on every single one simultaneously?) or assure me there is no fault at all. Then if I point out the router is blinking orange they run tests for 45 minutes to confirm that there's no fault, before telling me Openreach will be sent out and since they can't detect a fault I WILL be charged.

I had this for years at the old house, and the fault was always with some ancient wiring somewhere half way across a field.

But hey. My time is free.

Like I said, it depends on who you get through to.

If it's blinking orange you need a new hub.

 

[First Aspect]

Like I said, it depends on who you get through to.

If it's blinking orange you need a new hub.

Yeah I think my issue is I was always sent to someone at BT.

My experience was tainted by being one of the last households in Scotland not on fibre. The price for 3-5mbps was about 50% higher than 150mbps if you had fibre. And it was horribly unreliable, but BT took the view that if it worked at all at any period within the test, being thrown off the internet 20 times a day was not a fault. I spoke to tooany people to be persuaded now that this was anything other than the policy.

I did however co firm on about 10 occasions that the 6 inches of wiring I was responsible for was in fact fine, and was never charged by Openreach.

BT will be no better or worse than any other provider. However their market dominance is a legacy of being once the nationalised telephone provider, and has no relationship to quality.

In fairness they do seem to be the only provider who can effectively liaise with Open reach, so tend to be the best option to connect initially.

 

[briantrumpet]

It depends whether you get a price hike at the end of a deal. The isps are now going down the "mortgage deal" route to ensure people are always tied in.

The price hikes aren't inflationary, they are just the price. Think of it more as 1. introductory offer, 2
the price, 3. the price gouge to claw back the introductory offer.

More or less, the real price is 2.

Yeah, more obvious in some than others that the first price is under target. The prices at the end of contract are silly.

I remember a cattle cake salesman I knew expressing his dislike of having to find excuses to jack up the price of cake for loyal customers in order to pay for the discounts he had to offer to disloyal customers to keep his tonnage targets on track.

 

[AndyRM]

Yeah I think my issue is I was always sent to someone at BT.

My experience was tainted by being one of the last households in Scotland not on fibre. The price for 3-5mbps was about 50% higher than 150mbps if you had fibre. And it was horribly unreliable, but BT took the view that if it worked at all at any period within the test, being thrown off the internet 20 times a day was not a fault. I spoke to tooany people to be persuaded now that this was anything other than the policy.

I did however co firm on about 10 occasions that the 6 inches of wiring I was responsible for was in fact fine, and was never charged by Openreach.

BT will be no better or worse than any other provider. However their market dominance is a legacy of being once the nationalised telephone provider, and has no relationship to quality.

In fairness they do seem to be the only provider who can effectively liaise with Open reach, so tend to be the best option to connect initially.

Sounds about right company policy wise unfortuanately. A large part of the issue is that they have this fibre dream and don't understand why it doesn't work in rural areas, or many areas outside cities, and neither do a lot (most) of the call centre staff.

 

[Pross]

The only other technical support I've had is to switch to a slower frequency, tell me , that I have too many devices (everyone has too many devices according to BT, and did you know the internet seems slower if you are streaming on every single one simultaneously?) or assure me there is no fault at all. Then if I point out the router is blinking orange they run tests for 45 minutes to confirm that there's no fault, before telling me Openreach will be sent out and since they can't detect a fault I WILL be charged.

I had this for years at the old house, and the fault was always with some ancient wiring somewhere half way across a field.

But hey. My time is free.

My experience changed massively when I moved to whichever package had a UK call centre and they gave refunds for any outages. Prior to that I was geting regular problems with the internet dropping out and would have to deal with the Indian online helpdesk. My favourite rsponse would be them running a test and confirming the connection was working then failing to understand that of course it was working as I had to wait for it to come back online so I could contact them. I also had the "we'll send out an engineer but you'll have to pay if they find there's no fault". Surprisingly they came out and discovered a fault that was fixed quickly and efficiently. I seem to get crap internet everytime I've seen someone in the exchange at the bottom of the road. I'm convinced that with so many competing providers they move you to a working socket and someone else gets chucked on the dodgy one.

We recently moved to EE and the main issues I have are they said we wouldn't need an extender with their hub and if we did it would cost extra (BT provided one free). For some reason we've always struggled getting signal to the garage conversion where my office is set up and where the TV my daughter streams all her programmes is located. We get great signal at the far end of the garden and on the street at the front of the house but this one area is very hit and miss. Unsurprisingly without the extender I'm quite often getting dropouts when working and the daughter gives up trying to watch anything. It's made worse by the fact that for some reason I can't access my broadband info on the EE app, it seems like it isn't linked to the account our mobiles are on.

 

[CXRAndy]

You need a professional grade setup for seamless wifi roaming.

I setup up a system for my mates long thin house with multiple access points. Centrally cloud managed with capacity for future easy upgrades.

He had been running two Internet providers for a long time. I suggested he could be better off after 6 months investment in a new system

 

[AndyRM]

Our whole support system has been down this morning until now, so today is going to be fun!

I'll stop rambling on about the whole BT/EE thing on the thread now, but PM me if you do have issues and I'll do what I can to help.

 

[First Aspect]

Our whole support system has been down this morning until now, so today is going to be fun!

I'll stop rambling on about the whole BT/EE thing on the thread now, but PM me if you do have issues and I'll do what I can to help.

Have you tried calling AWS technical support?

 

[Ian H]

Have you tried calling AWS technical support?

A bloke called Bezos will arrive super-fast in his rocketship, and squint at the problem.

 

[First Aspect]

A bloke called Bezos will arrive super-fast in his rocketship, and squint at the problem.

How many devices have you got connected sir?