Broadband Issues

[Ashley Burton]

Anyone else had problems with their Broadband dropping in & out? Mine sometimes goes down to 1MB

I'm currently using copper broadband, But tempted to change over to fibre instead.

This problem has been going on for the past 12 months +

My provider has raised an engineer visit as they have admitted there is a fault with the line

What sort of compensation would you expect with this type of problem & the time wasted calling them on numerous occasions?

Even my mobile internet is more reliable!

 

[gaz1]

sorry mobile internet is different

as goes for your wired service when did you first report the problem did they ever try to sort it out ?

for you claiming that its been 12+ does it coincide to the above

 

[Ashley Burton]

sorry mobile internet is different

as goes for your wired service when did you first report the problem did they ever try to sort it out ?

for you claiming that its been 12+ does it coincide to the above

I understand it's different, But surely a cable should be better than wireless!

I reported the problem over 12 months ago & have contacted them between then & now.

Yes it does

 

[gaz1]

no offense but at 1 month id have been elsewhere as there contract has not been fulfilled by there poor service supply

any broadband supplier has there own contract with you but you also have a get out clause due to there failures poor service with no remedy to the fault is one of them

so why have you stick with them for so long

 

[Migmac]

Ours used to do the same. Engineer came out several times over 18 months, eventually the whole cable from the pole to the house got replaced. It’s been fine since. We also moved supplier, went to BT.

 

[Ashley Burton]

no offense but at 1 month id have been elsewhere as there contract has not been fulfilled by there poor service supply

any broadband supplier has there own contract with you but you also have a get out clause due to there failures poor service with no remedy to the fault is one of them

so why have you stick with them for so long

Some days its fine, But today is a good example where it was 1MB this morning & now after having a phone call with the provider its 13MB

Depending on the outcome I will either stay or leave, But the line is BT related, So even if I changed provider there is no guarantee it would be any better

Could end up switching to fibre, As I don't think they would want to dig the road up just for one cable, Unless they can thread a new cable through?

 

[gaz1]

fibre isnt going to make a difference unless you can get a virgin account

by read of it you can have only one line a bt line to property would this be right?

if it is your going to have the same line problem as what you have no matter what supplier your going to go with

already been there and the amount of engineers out i had was enough in end found out the main problem too far from the exchange

as goes for fibre to your property you better check if they still only do it to the pole or the box not to your property

 

[MoreWellie]

most fibre relies on copper for the final stage to your house, if you decided to go cable then it would be different as it would be a whole new service

The difficulty is getting people to take responsibility when you get phone and broadband from two places. Last year I had a noisy telephone line but BT couldn't find it on their tests and the broadband people said its the telephone line. Eventually I managed to get a BT engineer to test whilst I disconnected everything apart from a single telephone plugged in to the test socket on the master plate. He could then see a fault in their equipment and it was fixed but that took months to find. I was just so relieved to have it working I never even considered compensation and don't think I would have got any anyway

I have now taken business phone and fibre broadband with the same company (zen.co.uk) and I have to say the experience has been brilliant. The fibre is pretty solid at 70Mb. I have had a specific issue with the way I configure the router but the support from Zen has been very impressive and I would recommend them to anyone

 

[Ashley Burton]

If I didn't have an issue with my line, Then I don't think it would matter what provider I was using!

It's just a very frustrating situation

 

[RonA]

I’ve experienced the same issue over the last 2 years with my Isp who used a certain high speed track star to promote their product.
My guess is they now have too many users & haven’t invested sufficiently in the infrastructure, hence the drop outs.
I have complained & received minimal compensation for lost service, personally I don’t think they care & customer service is bottom of their priorities
RonA

 

[armalites]

It does annoy me that they call it fibre but the reality is the cable to your house doesn't change it's still copper. The fibre feeds the exchange and the green boxes.

I went through a spell where mine would drop out 3-4 times a day a few weeks back and then it all settled down. This rarely happened before I got "fibre" it's not the end of the world but it can be annoying if you are watching live tv

 

[FergalFarty]

I live in a new-build which has Fibre To The Premises (FTTP), that is the fibre comes right in to the house, so there's no copper involved at all. The connection is fast and very reliable, and there is no contention, ie. I get 70Mb all to myself, I don't have to share it with my neighbours like an ADSL line. At first, there were a lot of teething problems as FTTP is still pretty rare for domestic applications and BT/Openreach don't seem to talk to each other.

The main problems I had with WiFi etc, were due to the POS router BT supply. As soon as I binned it and installed a decent Asus router, everything's been fine. I would love to switch to another ISP as BT are awful, with the worst customer service I have ever encountered, but they have a monopoly on my estate and I'm stuck with them.

If you can switch to fibre it should be faster and more reliable as the quality of connection is not so dependent on distance from the exchange and the state of the copper cable. Also ditch the router the ISP supplies as they are usually crap and a decent replacement will be more secure and reliable. For example, the BT hub they supply leaves ports open, even though they claim to be closed, so that BT can remotely connect to your home network. They say this is to make customer support easier. If you're ok with that, fine. I'm not.

Also, with their supplied hub, all DNS queries have to go through BT servers which are slow and unreliable. I wasn't happy about that either.

 

[Ashley Burton]

Might see if I can upgrade to Fibre as compensation for the poor service I have recieved!

Currently paying £18 a month, Fibre is £25

 

[octo0072000]

im on fibre but copper to house still get drop outs no matter what been on plusnet, talk talk, BT, sky, all the same get odd drop outs normally between 11pm to 1am but liveable just got fed up of complaining had engineers out etc loads of times just a waste of time

 

[WorkshopChris]

If I didn't have an issue with my line, Then I don't think it would matter what provider I was using!

It's just a very frustrating situation

Have you noticed ant pattern in relation to service drop out and the weather? Worse in the wet or windy?
Do you have any noticeable line noise when you make a phone call?

 

[500e]

Been with waitrose\plusnet for some time we have fiber to the cabinet, 1\4 mile exchange another 1\4 mile running at minimum of 30 Mbps dov=wn & 8Mbpd up
Running 35.5 \ 8,75 Ping 58.5ms at present present connection time 56days 3hours 40 sec
Ping always seems slow
We had a O Reach engineer about 2 years ago who replaced all connections as far as the nearest chamber then disappeared to cabinet, all of the splice connectors were corroded, he was a really helpful chap went above the call to get it correct.
@WorkshopChris
That line noise was what he worked hard to eliminate
Found WR\PN help line good whenever I have a problem.

 

[Ashley Burton]

No relationship with weather & service

It just needs a good engineer that knows what he's looking for & can find the problem with our issue

 

[armalites]

I can't fault Plusnet, the helpdesk is very good.

Even though we are rural we are very close to the exchange and our cable is a direct connection. There is a new development next to the exchange and when we had a spell of regular drop outs I did wonder if it was when new connections were going in. The issue is you are never going to find anyone who will tell you for sure, when I switched to PLusnet an engineer actually had to go to exchange to physically switch ports. I had assumed it would all be done logically.

Another thing I've found is sometimes when I've run a speed test and it's slower than normal I've rebooted the router and it's fixed it. I then discovered that just disconnecting from the WiFi and reconnecting also cured it. I discovered this as I had a laptop connected via a cable and it was showing 20mb faster than the Wifi connected. After a reconnect they were both the same.

Sadly if you are on a line that has issues it's all down the to engineer to comes to look at it. We have a friend who was being told she couldn't have fibre. She got chatting to one of the Openreach guys and he showed her the connection in the cabinet and confirmed 100% her line was fibre capable but her provider weren't having any of it.

 

[Wendelspanswick]

There are to types of fibre services commonly in use:
FTTC = Fibre To The Cabinet which uses fibre to a green street fibre cabinet you may have spotted on street corners, easy to distinguish from the normal street distribution cabinets as the FTTC cabinets are vented. Your connection and reliability is very dependent on the distance and state of the copper line from there to your property. You can improve this somewhat by fitting the latest Mk4 NTE 5C master socket.
FTTP = Fibre To The Property is less common and it's unavailable at present to a high proportion of the properties in this country. It's also quite expensive as it involves running a new cable to your property but it carries data further so the line length degradation is not so critical.
First thing to check is it's not an issue on your property, disconnect everything from the NTE and either fit a brand new filter (we used to have about 5% of ADSL filters fail every year before we started used the Mk4 NTE) or fit a Mk 4 NTE and run some speed tests from a laptop making sure nothing is running in the background.

 

[Wendelspanswick]

As an aside the whole data network can grind to a halt every time Windows release an update, I think the last one was about 4 GB in size!