I have been trying to get my service stable now for 4 weeks it ranges from 0.5 down to about 13 Mb/s up with similar swings in the upload speed. BT Open reach engineers (Good guys) have been out weekly to prove the line is fine and capable of full speed. The Broadband help desk (Good guys) have worked hard to find out the reasons for the appalling service being provided. That leaves BT wholesale who are responsible for configuring the service delivered (The bad guys) . They are invisible to the customer and apparently answerable to no one but themselves. My belief is that the bad reputation that BT has at the cusomer level comes from that BT company and is letting the other BT companies down massively (They are officially seperate companies and cannot talk to each other at the day to day working level without lots of process in the way). I would like to hear from others who are having problems with the new service as to their experiences with sorting it out.
My operational interest in feedback is on the following levels
BT support : your experience
Speed delivered : is it what you are paying for and consistent enough for purpose
Access to web sites : I sense that BT have a web proxy server behind the scenes that slows down access to web sites and often cracks up completely thus preventing access altogether. ( I have had to switch to a non BT backup ADSL service on bad days just to work properly)
Static IP addresses : As part of sorting the service issues I have found out that BT do not actually give you static IPs. They give you sticky IPs and your actual router is always a dynamic one and they have some fancy mapping system that is supposed to make things work. I am told it is done this way to make it more convenient for BT to administer their support. As far as I can see it is a totally non standard solution unique to BT. I have yet to test if this works properly for busines purposes, if I ever get a stable speed that allows us to continue with this service.
Apologies for the long post but it has cost us in excess of £2000 of time to establish if we have bought a fit for purpose solution that should have worked out of the box. Your feedback will help us to make a decision on whether to stay with the effort.
