Broadband and which ISP?

Be is even worse for having hold times on it's support line that run into 40 minutes plus, more than an hour in some cases and no one was able to give me the simple information that the'd fucked up and needed to start from scratch. Plus if I ever meet the pan pipe players who provided the hold music I shall shove them somewhere very uncomfortable.

Is a cease and reprovide order what you need to get out of your contract?

I've heard good things about Plus Net, 2Mb for £14.99 a month, I'm trying to get hold of a MAC number so I can get migrated ASAP.

The problems I'm having with OneTel are BT-related I think, what I'm wondering is if I migrate to another ISP am I still going to have the same problem with the line because it's going through BT?

Basically I get a CHAP authentication failed message, which apparently means my password is wrong. Except it isn't. And ISP support can't even see a login attempt at their end. BT deny there is anything wrong but generally after they look at it, the problem goes away and I can log in again.

Basically I get a CHAP authentication failed message, which apparently means my password is wrong. Except it isn't. And ISP support can't even see a login attempt at their end. BT deny there is anything wrong but generally after they look at it, the problem goes away and I can log in again.

Definitely sounds like BT cocking up somewhere - probably not connecting you to OneTel properly.

Onto a Routemaster?

NTL seem like the worst providers of the lot, if the tales of woe I've heard are anything to go by.

DO NOT DO THIS RUN A FUCKING MILE

Add me to the list of fools who left Zen.

There must be a cheaper option that doesn't totally suck. I don't give a shit about how many email/IP addresses or how much web space you get or any of that stuff. I just want an internet connection that doesn't keep fucking up.

Zen are expensive, but have by far the best service quality and support team I have ever dealt with. If you're out only for web browsing/email then Zen may be more than you need. But PlusNet are abysmal. I am on the verge of moving to Zen from them, due to the connection being the most woefully temperamental thing I have ever had the misfortune to pipe data through...

Apparently I can't get a MAC number for my current connection, so it looks like I have to cancel it and then sign up with another ISP so I'll be offline for a few weeks anyway. So pissed off with my employers right now...

(though it's always been very reliable for me and it's uncapped)

They continued to charge my debit card for 3 months after I cancelled my dial-up account with them and refused to pay me back. Ignored my emails too. Fuck AOL.

People in my office are trying to help me but they're not getting anywhere either.

Ha! TRUE!

Trouble is my SHITTY current provider OneTel won't give me a MAC number to migrate so I have to cancel my current service and then apply to the new provider so I'll have no internet for at least a week, which isn't that big a deal to me cos I can use it at work but my wife will not be happy. Oh dear.

Can I just say again OneTel broadband are fucking SHITE. Thankyou.

1) Took 7 weeks to get broadband in the first place as they lost my order due to a computer error.
2) When time came to cancel broadband, spoke to three separate people on three separate occasions who really couldn't comprehend basic english. Asked them to cancel my broadband 10 days later [really stressed this point: Please. Wait. Ten. Days.] and lo, broadband was cancelled less than an hour later, leading to £££ in dial up costs and seething rage. Oh and it was cancelled two days into a new payment period, meaning I paid £25 for less than 48 hours of broadband.

Also avoid UKonline:
1) Again, took around 8 weeks to get broadband. Placed my order but it turned out my phone line wasn't strong enough. But they didn't tell me. Two weeks after I should have received it I began emailing them, waiting over 30 minutes to get through to customer services then hanging up as I ran out of credit. No response at all. Desperate, I took a day off work and waited 50 minutes and finally got through to someone. Found out about the phone line problem, they said 'no worries, we'll fix it'. Two weeks later still nothing. No email, no phone call. Rang again: "Oh yeah, you need to reorder from scratch." Took another 2 weeks after this. Emailed a letter of complaint as the dial up fees were monumental, no response, no compensation. Decided to give up as I finally had broadband and didn't want to keep reviving my rage at them.

2) Broadband is far from perfect. Supposed to be 1mb but is really less than 40k/s. I grit my teeth and ignore it. Broadband cuts out regularly, usually more than twice a day. I have to reinstall the whole program and install the modem from scratch each time. Again, teeth gritted.

3) Then, after three weeks of flawed shitty broadband it finally cuts out for good. Won't reinstall, nothing works. I ring up. Again, wait an eon. Get cut off from one call. 60 minutes later after going through dozens of useless tests (twice!) the guy tells me "I really don't understand, there's nothing I can do" and puts a memo through to some super special team and marks it urgent. A week later, I've still heard nothing. Still no broadband. I ring again. Wait an age. Polite woman looks into and says "Well that's odd, I don't know what's going on. I'll send a memo again."

And that's where I'm at now. Freelance work and college work both shafted royally by lack of broadband, no solution in sight, massive phone bill from ringing tech support and dialup internet.

Maybe I'm just ridiculously unlucky but anyway, I say AVOID UKONLINE! Avoid them! REALLY avoid them! Avoid them so much that you email in to tell them HEY FUCK YOU IM AVOIDING YOU.

Are there any trading standards people I can contact who can ring UKonline and order them to sort it out? What does Ofcom do? I'm some little minor minion here with zero powers, paying £15 a month for the privilege of being enraged on a daily basis.

So anyway:

1. I got broadband in, like, August with Bulldog. It promptly didn't work for months, DSL light constantly flashing, despite me attempting to connect through every phone socket, with microfilters in each.

2. I get hugely pissed off, cancel Bulldog and migrate to freedom2surf. On the day I decide to migrate, I discover a hidden socket in my front room. The cable from the router plugs straight into it, without a filter. DSL light comes on constantly. Bugger, I've just cancelled Bulldog. I try and connect but my connection is being refused by remote computer.

3. Migrated to freedom2surf. It's supposed to have been moved over by now. Can't connect to remote computer at all, from either set of sockets. I'm now really confused as to what this last socket has that's different from the others, and if it's even connected to the same account at all. Whatever, it seems to be not working in a different way to the others.

What's going on? My username and password are correct. As far as I'm aware the migration's gone ahead, unless bulldog have been fuckwits and forgotten to cancel it. I've been emailed a set of IP numbers from freedom2surf - should I be doing anything with them? The computer is recognising the router (SpeedTouch 380) both through wireless and ethernet, so that's fine, it's just the connection I can't work out. Argh.

I've had nightmares in the past with both UKonline and OneTel but please share your experiences and suggestions here.

what's the situation with line rental etc in the uk? as i understand it you need a phoneline to have broadband, but can you just pay line rental and not actually have a phone available for calls?

in my flat currently me and one flatmate basically don't use the phone, and are willing to sack it off, the third flatmate does use it but it's in my name so i want her to have to sort her own bills etc if she wants to keep it.

can i keep paying line rental to bt and just get the phone element of my bill disconnected?

Unless you have a broadband supplier that will also give you a phoneline (or cable broadband) then yeah you need it. Dunno, the easiest thing would either be to transfer the bill over to your housemate's name and just pay her a bit for line rental, or just unplug the phone and keep using the line for broadband.

you can opt for the barest bone plan which is £11 a month iirc.

I mean, it's not an issue of "getting the phone element of the bill disconnected", it's just an issue of you physically removing the phone, then you'll only be paying line rental anyway.

yeah prob a case of just changing the name over. i just don't want a bill in my name whereby i use 7 quid's worth of calls every 3 months and have to then ask everyone to itemise the bill when someone else is running up 40 quid in that time period.

Is BT's broadband still shit, incidentally? Moved into a new flat and will have to get a BT line installed anyway, and that's free if you tie yourself down to an 18-month contract with them, as opposed to £130. But I'd really prefer to use Be Broadband on a BT Line, which I've never had issues with before.

My ex had BT with the Home Hub and on-demand telly and what not and I was really very impressed with it. One day it wasn't working and I rang the customer services on her behalf and the most amazingly efficient woman talked me through all the troubleshooting and steps to get back online.

We have BT Infinity at home and it's generally lovely but has been cutting out and completely going down at random points for the last few days.

bt's ok, i get a steady 11mbps on a normal phone line

nb i use my own router not the dodgy home hub. only problem we had was when they were 'upgrading' stuff at the exchange

think it depends where you are

really want that virgin fibreoptic thing. i tried it at a friend's house and it is wheeeeeeeeee

virgin media are arses

My main worry with BT broadband was bandwidth throttling...

Is BT's broadband still shit, incidentally? Moved into a new flat and will have to get a BT line installed anyway, and that's free if you tie yourself down to an 18-month contract with them, as opposed to £130. But I'd really prefer to use Be Broadband on a BT Line, which I've never had issues with before.

― Matt DC, Friday, 1 April 2011 16:33 (1 week ago) Bookmark

did the previous occupants not have a phoneline?

No.

only got throttled here when i went over the usage limit but then i should have had an unlimited deal <---cheapskate

so there are no telephone sockets al all? iirc all telephone providers (except for virgin cable) still use the bt phonelines and the £130 fee is for physical (re)installation

when i moved into this place bt wanted me to pay that cuz they insisted no phoneline had ever been installed there, had to go through various helpline monkeys until finally someone discerned that there had been a line connected at some point

There had been a line connected at some point but not any more, but in any case I got them to connect for £30 anyway.

FWIW I am really resenting the previous tenants for their non-landline using ways as it seems to take ages to get set up in the first place.

Thing which annoyed me recently:
I signed up for a BT line, blurb said that there would be a cancellation cost if I cancelled within the first year of my contract.
I thought "hooray, so after a year there will be no cancellation fee."
BUT! in fact every year BT renew you onto a new annual contract without telling you, so you are always in the first year of your contract.

Guy on the phone said the only way NOT to pay a cancellation fee was to cancel exactly 1 year (2 years, ...) after first being connected. Suspect that if you try this everyone at BT does their best to make sure your request isn't dealt with until it's too late.

Having some dilemmas abt whether to go for Infinity/fibre-to-the-kerb when it's rolled out here. We are 3 miles of shitty copper wire from the exchange and so get 2mb on our 8mb ISP subscription. But our ISP (Be) doesn't offer an Infinity package yet, and the ones I have seen are mostly expensive and have tight usage limits.

Just going to go for Be I think, given I've been with them for years and never had any complaints at all.

I've moved into two separate places in the last couple years that haven't had (accessible) phones lines. This is a massive 'wtf??' sort of thing to me. It's a pretty basic amenity... why wouldn't people have had these things installed at some point over the last 40 years?

One place had a line but for whatever reason the socket had been covered up with a hole-less piece of plastic so we couldn't plug in the phone in (and BT tried to charge us like £200 after a dude came around and spent all of 10 min replacing the bit of plastic). The most recent place simply didn't have a phone line at all.

I think in the 3-ish years I've used Be it's only once gone down for a long period of time, and they were nice enough to warn by email first. I had a slight issue with them when we moved for the second time in a year (through no choice of our own) and they tried to charge us a £25 'moving fee', but that was sorted with a good old fashioned complaint letter to customer services.

I have had one Be outage of about half an hour.

The next day at about 3pm I got an SMS from Be saying that my broadband was down but they were looking at it, so I told the bf about this via Google Talk, and then he pointed out that, duh, I was on Google Talk, from the flat, so clearly it was not very down at all.

(Be's own modem/router does keep shitting itself and needing a reboot though. I tried swapping it for my old one which worked perfectly on another ISP and that seemed even worse, so I don't want to spend money on another in case it doesn't help.)

be are chill

their helpline ppl are rly good too

I like be a lot, but their router does if I open my ut0rr3nt connections too much. Its old and knackered but if I ask for a new one I can't say that I've been downloading too much granny p0rn music.

Interesting you mention ut0rr3nt, because 90% of the time when we reboot the router it is still working fine for my laptop (not t0rr3nting) or the linux box (running rt0rr3nt) but has stopped talking to the bf's PC (running ut0rr3nt)

...not that we are a household of compulsive downloaders or anything

i've moaned about the bt rolling contract before. there was some talk of offtel taking them to task about it but i can't find anything.

however, there is something in the contract about you being able to cancel without paying the penalty but only after they've announced changes to the system. and it could be that them putting up call charges* counts as a sufficient change to allow you to cancel then.

* especially as one recent change went from calls being 6p for up to an hour to 4p a minute, something like a 1000% increase

Got this today, thought it was going to be an apology for being utterly shite all week:

Important price update
On 28 April 2011, we're making some changes to the prices of our products and services.

We're increasing our line rental by 30p a month, as well as making changes to the cost of daytime UK calls, call set-up fee, calling features and Standard Broadband Option 1 pricing. To find out more, visit bt.com/pricechanges

We appreciate that price rises are never welcome, which is why we're reducing the price of some of our products and services. For example, BT Vision is now at a new low price of £12.50 per month. And, from 28 April 2011, we will cut the price of our Unlimited Anytime Plan from £5.00 to £4.70 per month.

cowardly of them to put the increases on the website, not in the letter.

(usually they print them on the back, in smaller type)

We have BT Infinity at home and it's generally lovely but has been cutting out and completely going down at random points for the last few days.

― James Mitchell, Tuesday, 12 April 2011 13:30 (3 weeks ago)

lol

http://i.imgur.com/VIY2f.png

Amazing to report that I get home from work and it's still not fixed, one hour on the phone to the helpline later and the result is that they've booked another appointment for an engineer to come around tomorrow between 8am and 1pm, and I'm taking a morning off work - again.

Mumless cunts.