BT's legal loophole! Broadband permanantly damaged.

[Weaselbunny]

Hi all. We had very poor broadband with Sky, only 2 to 3 mb per second, so we decided to switch to BT. When Sky switched us off, before BT switched us back on the same day, an Openreach engineer was working at the green box and took our line for someone else!

It took 3 weeks and 4 engineer visits to get broadband back and now the line we have isn't capable of more than 1mb per second and often is unusable or drops out altogether. There aren't enough lines coming into our village and Openreach have no plans to put in any more.

I went to the ombudsman after months of complaints and line tests with BT. They decided that BT are not to blame for us now having an even worse line as it was Openreach, a separate legal entity, who messed up our line. BT only has to send us a written apology and give us the right to cancel without penalty.

This means we are left with a very slow line and can do nothing about it.

Or can we? Is there anything we can do?

I have Amazon Prime but can't stream films and shows anymore and I have bought a different mobile package with a huge data allowance cos my broadband is so rubbish that when I work from home I need an alternative as I often can't even upload a 2mb file before the upload times out!

What would you do?

Help!

[charitynjw]

Re: BT's legal loophole! Broadband permanantly damaged.

Hi Weaselbunny & welcome to LB

Have you used a broadband checker to compare coverage for your area?

Or how about a WiFi Hotspot device? ( An example here )

(Nb I'm no techno-geek................just pick up the crumbs from our resident computer genius......my son, aged 13!)

[Weaselbunny]

Re: BT's legal loophole! Broadband permanantly damaged.

Hi Charity, thanks for your reply.

Sadly it doesn't matter which provider we switch to, the problem is the line itself. Our village is only on copper wire and there aren't enough of those. For a couple of weeks it was looking like we were going to be left with no broadband at all then the 4th engineer managed to find a free line in the green box up the street. No matter who we switch to our line is not capable of more than 1mb per second. The new mobile phone deal i have includes 20gb of data so i use that as a wifi hotspot when i need to.

Openreach won't roll out superfast broadband to our village until 2018, in the meantime there are too few lines and the one we have is next to useless 🙁

It's not like we're in the back of beyond. Just a couple of miles away you can get up to 100mb per second.

[Ripped-Off]

Re: BT's legal loophole! Broadband permanantly damaged.

I was in your boat, I know how you feel. Bloody Sky.... I was convinced they throttled my bandwidth but could not prove it. Changed to a different broadband provider in 2007, absolutely fantastic!! A bit pricey but I was paying for guaranteed bandwidth, unlimited and no throttling.

Between 2010 - 2015 when the fibre started rolling out, all my friends had it, raving about the speed, and there was I, with my 2MB line, because that is all we could get. I had considered satellite broadband and more recently a 4G dongle but they were cost prohibitive.

Long story short...last year BT finally got to my village and installed the fibre/copper hybrid system. Now the speeds are up to 80MB. I had almost given up hope of ever streaming video. Now we do it all the time.

Moral of this story...keep an eye on the openreach website to see when the new broadband will get to you. It will get to you eventually....have faith!

[AndyAndroid]

Re: BT's legal loophole! Broadband permanantly damaged.

I had a problem with BT where my Broadband ground to a halt - long story cut short but it turned out to be conjestion caused by contention (think that is the correct way round).

I spoke to A&A Internet and they said they would take me on and I could leave after a month without penalty if they couldn't fix my slow speed.

They have first rate monitoring equipment and told me what the problem was on the first day I was with them. Over 12 month now and not a single bleep with my BB.

They are the highest rated ISP's on a certain review site - well worth speaking to, you have nothing to loose.