Outrageous difference in Infinity pricing (Business v Home)

[Chris-BTuser]

Just a bit of background for you all......

I am a sole trader working from home and I have had a BT Business phone and broadband package for over 10 years, as well as a BT residential phone line for 14+ years.

Because I have two separate BT lines and numbers, I have been receiving lots of promotional material lately, (e-mails, letters and phone calls), regarding BT Infinity on both lines since my area was upgraded a few weeks ago.

I've always been a great supporter of BT Business, but after looking at the Home BT Infinity literature and both websites I am baffled as to why there is such a huge difference in the pricing.

Comparisons and prices accurate as of 14th June 2012, (I have put all prices as being VAT inclusive just to make a direct comparison)........

Cost for BT Infinity Option 2 unlimited usage:

Business - £48 per month

Home - £20 for the first 6 months, £26 thereafter

Length of contract:

Business - 24 months

Home - 18 months

Calls:

Business - non included

Home - Unlimited evening and weekend calls subject to line rental, (but being a BT customer I already pay this anyway).

Other:

Business - an extra £6 per month for a static IP address

Home - a £50 Sainsbury voucher if ordered online.

Total cost for contract term:

Business - £1,152 for 24 months, (£1,296 if static IP address option taken)

Home - £450 for 18 months

So the bottom line is that it would be several hundreds of pounds cheaper to have 2 broadband accounts on BT Infinity Option 2 in the same property than just upgrading the BT Business Broadband line that is already there.

I couldn't believe this crazy situation was true, (especially seeing it wasn't as if I was dealing with two separate companies and the same engineer wouldn't be sent out to do exactly the same job apart from put the new wires/hub etc. in a different room), so I've spoken to both Business and Home sales teams.

Business sales team response - "Those are the price configurations for Business, and you do get extra support"

Home sales team response - "We can do everything except offer a static IP address. There *shouldn't* be any loss of quality due to contention ratios because the junction box is less than 150 metres from you and all is 'pushed' to the junction box from the exchange by fibre optic cable so there is no degradation at all to there".

I was hoping when I rang that BT Business would convince me why I should spend the extra money and upgrade solely with them, but seeing as they didn't really want to know I'm not so sure now - especially in these financially tough times.

I wondered if anyone had a similar experience of having the same situation, or if anyone can help me justify spending over twice as much for essentially the same service?

Alternatively I can wait for a while, but doea anyone know if other companies will be able to take advantage the BT Infinity infrastructure like they already do with standard broadband?

If so, any idea when this will be?

Looking foward to your comments.

[celavey]

So does **bleep** mean you would choose BT over PLUSNET? Is it worth purchasing?

[btnotverygood]

If i had known that BT business was so poor I would have not gone with them. What enticed me was the guarteed 16mbit and the apparent improvement in support and quality of service. hahahhaahha I could not have been more wrong. The support although they speak english compared to the home support. They aer most certainly as imcompetent if not more so than their indian counter parts on the home service. To add insult to injury they also extremely rude and arrogant.

If i had known before i went with the 24 month contract. I would have most defintely selected the home offering which has by now the free upgrade to 80/20 available on the website? Us poor business folk who pay the extra money have to fight and argue with the imcompetent business customer support team to get it.

At the increase cost of £65 total and mistaskes on ordering, installation, delivery, service offering, billing. They did not manage to not cause an issue with one aspect of the process. Every single part of the process had issues and 1 year later I am still having problems.

If you have the money go with ZEN internet or another supplier. You might not get as much download bandwidth for the cost, (due to bt state enabled monopoly), but you will get quality customer service and quality service delivery.

[Chris-BTuser]

Hi everyone,

Thanks again for taking the time to join this discussion.

I've checked out PlusNet and Zen, (thanks for the hints), and although they have reasonable download speeds, they don't match BT for upload speeds. So for now, BT is the best/fastest for uploads and as I upload very large files it is that speed rather than download that interests me most.

Plus, it seems that the 'unlimited usage' that BT offers is truly unlimited and not capped like most others I've seen, (even if they advertise unlimited usage there is usually a cap which is therefore limited).

I'm loathed to upgrade with BT Business purely because of the incompetence of billing over the last few years. No matter how many times they say I'm on Business One Plan, (that is one contact, one bill for everything etc.), I still get multiple bills after 3 years despite talking to multiple contacts over the years.

Shame this forum isn't visited by any BT staff - would be interested to get their take on this.

[sej7278]

yes the many screwups i've had with my account (from getting two lines installed instead of one, to confusing my oneplan unlimited account with oneplan inclusive and billing me for calls i pay to get free!) are half the reason i'm not going to move from adsl2 to infinity2, i really don't trust bt not to cancel my phoneline or something horrible.

it does seem this forum is pretty pointless now though, its just full of complaints and no staff.

[Jdatkin]

BT Business Infinity Problems,

                                          you lads are only playing at it im afraid!!!

Id love to say that the difference in price is due to the absolutely fantastic backup service you get as a business customer, but im afraid i have quite the opposite opinion.

You have my sympathies, i truly understand, if you read a cuple of my previous threads, you will see just why i am approaching the conclusion that the only way may be to abandon this fast sinking ship!

Of course i would be delighted if BT came along and sorted it out, id truly love to be able to sing their praises, but i fear it just ain gonna happen?

GOOD LOOK

[bombinho]

Not sure where the idea with the better upload comes from. This only applied to me for BT Residential as they throttle the lines as if if it is meant to strangle the things. Every one else seems to offer what is there. They usually plug their own cards so you are not getting throttled more than the line requires.

I regularly get phone calls of BT Residential arguing with me that my line would not allow more than 400Kbit up the way. How wrong they are.

I am sorry to say that but I have pretty much the same speed as Jdatkin just over DSL2+.

The only thing is that Fibre is in accordance to BT years away from our place. I am now hoping that one of their competitors comes along. I find them offering better service at much better prices. And except with BT I am still due to get told that it is tea time and my hours long wait in the queue was not worth the money as they are finishing and I have to wait till past the weekend before someone will speak to me.

If lucky, never mind getting the problem sorted as this is the other department but definitely not this one. But the other department is actually not the right one either, its a third one. Which actually says "No no, definitely the first department is in charge"...

Been there myself. Just not so lucky as Jdatkin. I had no services at all. Not even a phone line. But I had at least promises. Plenty. And advice how to proceed. Not in my favour at all as it turned out. But you can not have everything.

[dwil]

I went with Business because I thought I'd get better service if it went wrong.  I also have a residential service.  When the residential line had a problem that they took 10 days to fix, I was grateful for the Business support I thought I would get.  The Business line failed 3 weeks ago due to an internal BT configuration issue, and it is still not fixed.  I cannot imagine any company could give worse service.  They are beyond incompetent and seem to spend most of the time trying to agree who should be fixing the issue.

[deasmi]

One thing no-one seems to have mentioned is that with business you also get 

10 Office 365 Outlook e-mail accounts

50MB Web hosting

24/7 tech support 

Guaranteed throughput

0800/0844 number for 12 months

8 business hour fix.

Now I'm not going to use any of these in all probability with the exception of the 16mbps minimum, ( and hopefully not the 8 hour fix ) but it's not really the same product, hence the difference.

Office365 accounts alone would cost £25 seperately

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/office365/exchange-online.aspx

EDIT: Formatting 

[CDC]

I run a small business with 2 retail outlets, 6 computers, 5 phone lines and standard broadband on 2 of them, plus computer work from home.

Yes - when I first heard about BT Infinity and found it was available in our area I immediately got it installed at home and apart from the very reasonable installation charges it only cost about £1 / month more than the previous standard broadband, but all inclusive package so can't exactly separate the charges.

So once it was up and running at home (less than a week) I said I wanted it at the 2 work locations - immediate problem - about £30 / month each more expensive than we are currently paying! absurd. Supposedly extra cost is for immediate maintenance if needed ... but that works out at £360 / year which I can't justify.

So when all the different sales people ring about switching us to a different phone company I say yes if you can get us a BT Business Infinity package at a reasonable price ... so far ... no joy.

They do it cheap for the home package because they want people to buy and watch films and things over the internet, and whereas we don't need high data quantities at work, because of higher bandwidth everything should be smoother than normal broadband.