Be Excellent To Each Other

BT infinity has been installed in the village, so thinking of moving away from sky, incluiding my TV. It is not worth £40 a month to keep watching sky atlantic.

Anything bad I should look out for with BT?

The only problems I had were huge delays and confusion about when it was going to be available as they kept pushing the date further and further back.
Since it's in, it's been great.

Only problems I've had with fibre broadband are that my connection drops whenever someone calls my landline (even with no phone plugged in) or I make a call out from it.

I doubt that's a problem specific to the fibre broadband though.

Rang Sky to cancel, they have just offered to knock off £25 quid off, if i stop


Although I rang Sky last week to reduce my cost and they only offered a £5 reduction.

I will still leave I think, and go to BT.

Nope... I've read it twice and I still didn't get it. Who's offering what now?

My 'Kovacs to English' translator indicates that last week he phoned Sky to see what they could do for him and they only offered £5 a month off his bill; but now that he's closer to leaving they're offering £25.

Not that this service is only in beta so quality of results is not guaranteed.

Edited.. sorry brain was filling the gaps

spot on

Had Infinity for 3 years now, its been rock solid and BT are true to their word on unlimited downloads.

I have a separate "modem" type box for mine that the router (not theirs) is plugged into. I'm now hearing that they are not providing this anymore and just do it through the socket. If you do get set up with the modem box, never turn it off. I used to do this when my speed drops and what happens is they have an line training profile set up on your connection, so when you reboot the modem it sees that as a problem and drops your speed, it then takes a good 4 weeks for it to increase again.

The main problem with BT is that their support is all in India and its a nightmare, so if there is a problem is can be hard to get resolved, I never had any major issues with anything so not had to call them thankfully.

If you do go to them and get issues you can go here (assuming your online!) and there are admins that will escalate and help with problems

https://community.bt.com/t5/BT-Infinity ... BTInfinity

EDIT Now that you have Infinity enabled on your exchange it won't be long before SKY offer it as well, so might be worth waiting to see if the overall deal is better? BT do offer TV via Youview and the offering is not that far off SKY with all the bolts on but not sure if the TV is cheaper than SKY although BT offer SKY Sports and Movies now

That's actually one thing I can say for Sky, their tech support is fucking awesome. I had a few line speed issues and their first line support were quick to escalate it rather than bog me down with bullshit question. When escalating they took my number and had the second line support guy phone me back rather than make me hang on hold for ages. Then, when it was obvious there was a physical issue, they had an engineer out to my flat the very next day to investigate and ultimately replace a section of cable outside my flat. And all of this was done with British staff who were efficient and intelligible.

Sky support is very good.

Pretty sure sky does the fibre to cabinate / infinity connection too but under another name. Fyi

Could I just add that I disagree in the strongest terms possible.

Sky couldn't get *any* internet working at our property for almost two months. During which time multiple (outreach) technicians just didn't bother turning up. They were horrendous.

They then threw a hissy fit when I suggested that I shouldn't pay for the last two months bills for my fibre optic because I didn't have fibre optic. Or broadband. Or even dial up.

Eventually their support reduced to 'we don't know why it's working, we don't know when we will fix it, but you still have to pay'.

We left and went to BT who installed fully working Infinity Fibre Optic within about 10 days.

I should also add, eventually they relented and said we would get a refund, and not be charged a future payment.

They never gave the refund, and they took the next payment.

As we didn't have a land line at the time (they couldn't get that working either) I was phoning through a mobile, and just gave up.

Sky are scum.

Assuming you mean Openreach there that's actually a division of BT rather than Sky so possibly not their fault if the engineers kept fucking you around.

They did piss me off when they just decided to shut down UKOnline as an ISP

I was paying them £15 a year for an email address and they just gave me 30 days notice and shut it all down.

Granted, but charging for a service they're not providing is a bit shit.

Although BT were told a long time ago to cooperate with service calls from other ISP's I think its safe to say that a BT ISP call probably gets done quicker than one for anything ISP

Yeah I meant Openreach. Sorry.

They both used Openreach to install their network (I believe Openreach is independent of BT proper), but from the feedbackk I got from the Openreach engineers that did show up, Sky were neither telling them of the oppointments they were making, nor were they passing on any details of the case, so each turned up and repeated the same thing as the previous.

I didn't even mention the worst part. I was a happy BeUnlimited user. but Sky bought them. And told me nothing would change. Then they said that 'just the name of my bills would change' but the price would stay the same. Then they put the price up. Then they said I needed a new Sky router, but plugging it in would be fine and nothing would change. Then they said they would switch networks, but it would happen seemlessly and would only interupt my connection for about 5 mins, but no more than an hour.

Then they turned my internet off and couldn't get it to work for months (at which point I left).

And still owe me £80 for the pleasure.

I would imagine that you have lost the will to even deal with SKY now, but there was something on the BBC yesterday saying Ofcom had bought in new rules for this, where is the speed is crap or none existent they can't charge for it.

Also stuff like rip off charges for leaving a contract early are going to be changed. So might be worth calling them one more time and trying for you money back?

Well it changed over without a hitch..

Sky router stopped working, swapped over to the BT hub, 1 hour later. BT infinity working.

SKY are now requesting an OFCOM enquiry into how bad Openreach are

https://corporate.sky.com/media-centre/ ... estigation

Openreach are really bad, we have to use them for work..

The whole concept of an arm of one ISP being responsible for servicing the infrastructure of customers of other ISPs is just fucking weird to start with. They'd have been better off making it a completely separate organisation with no ties to BT at all. Although, to be fair-ish, any issues could be as much down to general incompetency/inefficiency as it is to some kind of monopoly bullshit on BTs part.

It was a result of the unbundling. Other ISPs had to have access to the exchanges and the cabinets to be allowed to service the customers, but the exchanges and the cabinets were all still owned by BT. Unless every ISP laid down their own national infrastructure in every street in the country, there wasn't really much of an option but doing it this way.

to be fair to openreach, I don't think it is them favouring BT, more they are just shit.

I've been downloading a couple of 1TB plus sized torrents for most of this week

I've noticed that my speed has gone up from about 7.8 to 8.3MB, not sure if hammering your link for days on end makes the line training increase the speed!?

It depends whether you mean your actual tested speed has gone up or just your download speed on these torrent. In my experience with big torrents your speed starts off shite and seems to increase as you get more of the file. Whether that's some genuine quirk of the algorithm or just confirmation bias on my side though I'm not sure.

I thought it was just an error in the torrent, but I also get the faster speeds on NG downloads. My reader shows an average its 8.2 now which is around 4-500K more that I've ever had.

There was some activity around the green street box a few weeks ago, but the guys doing told me that was to put an EEE mast in not anything to do with Infinity.

You'd be better off doing some kind of actual speed test, downloads from various sources are always going to be subject to variations.

Just did that now. Its showing 69.30Mbps where as before its always been around 64 so its defiantly gone up!

Those things are also fairly unreliable.

There are too many moving parts involved for anything like that to be accurate.

Not least the proliferation of Flash/video ads that seem to be plastered all over those speedtest websites that continually refresh with new ones, despite the speed tests saying that you shouldn't have anything using the connection while testing.

Which is also practically impossible.

Indeed.

My parents live in the a remote village in the Yorkshire dales.

BT have been pissing around doing repeated surveys that contradict each other for the last year with a view to getting some sort of Infinity service into the village no doubt on the back of the pile of government money they got.

So finally its all sorted and in a village of 45 houses everyone has got Fibre to the house so 330Mb down 20MB up .

My Dad went for the 76MB package as he said the 330Mb was more than he needed and obviously cost more.

He was at the village summer fete at the weekend and half the village is now writing to their MP complaining that they can't get the piss cheap 2MB service any more and that the fibre packages available are more expensive!

I got BT Infinity, and for the first week or so it was fine, then it all went wrong. I was woken up at about 3am by a strange sound coming from the living room, a sort of scratching sound.

I go to investigate, picking up my trusty hockey stick on the way. When I got to the living room, the BT Home Hub wasn't in its usual place, it was sitting in the middle of the living room floor.. it was... Chewing. There was blood leaking out of it's ports. I gasped in terror, and it turned, it's LEDs glaring at me malevolently. Before I could act, it scuttled out of the room into the kitchen, leaving bloody streaks on the carpet.

I eased open the kitchen door, my hockey stick gripped tight in my hands.

I scanned the kitchen carefully. I found the source of the blood, an unrecognisable pile of gore and organs in the corner by the washing machine. As I approached, I felt the soft touch of a Cat9 cable brush my shoulder.

I looked up in panic, as a black shape fell upon me. I swiped at it blindly, catching it with the crook of my weapon, and it hit the ground hard. I followed up with a frenzy of strikes, shattering plastic. I caught my breath...

I poked at the remains, plastic crackling, and gasped as I spotted the distinctive faceplate of a US Robotics modem. I snapped my head around towards the open window.

I caught a glimpse of the unholy power cable slipping out, leaving streaks of blood on the glass. I sobbed quietly, it had sacrificed one of its own to escape. I'm so sorry. People have been disappearing without trace, the police say it's unexplained, but I know the real reason.

But other than that, it's been pretty reliable.





Oh god, oh god, my WiFi has just connected... It comes...

*applause*

Good work.

Brilliant....

Superb!