BT hikes prices for third time in 18 months BT is once again hiking prices, with punters facing an extra £30 on their annual broadband bill in the new year. It seems standard (ADSL) and fibre (FTTC/P) broadband prices will now go up: you'll pay an extra £2 a month for BT Broadband copper and £2.50 per month more for Infinity from January next year. The price increase …
Meh! Not interested in Sport, on BT, Sky or BBC. What does piss me off is having to pay inflated phone/broadband price to subsidise BTs really, really bad deals for the rights to sport.
For real sport, stick to Grand Sumo highlights on NHK world website - next Basho starts on Sunday!
@Pen-y-gors
I think that was kind of his point. Bear in mind that a significant percentage of the 'millions of subscribers' they claim to have get it for nowt as sweeteners to other offers, it's the rank and file service users having to brunt the cost of their deal with the PL and UEFA
I think that was kind of his point. Bear in mind that a significant percentage of the 'millions of subscribers' they claim to have get it for nowt as sweeteners to other offers, it's the rank and file service users having to brunt the cost of their deal with the PL and UEFA
If you've got a motorised satellite dish then you can often find sport (not limited to football) on foreign satellites for free. I've never paid Sky or BTSport or VirginMedia or anyone else* for watching sport on my TV. I've got friends who pay a fortune each year to have every sports channel available. When I mention that I can often watch the same thing as them but for just the cost of the electricity I get scowls. F1 is available on German TV for free but not in HD. I can live with that when Channel 4 aren't showing the race live. If there's something on I do want to watch I will see if anyone outside the UK is showing it and watch it there. If not my local has a Sky subscription and if desperate I'll go there. In London you can avoid BT by using either Virgin or Relish (wireless broadband), I use the latter.
Some teams have a live video stream that you can subscribe to outside the UK showing the matches in real time. It's geoblocked to prevent people from just watching at home in Blighty but there are obviously ways round that.
*Excluding the licence fee which I do pay.
Ofcom rules require telecom firms to give customers 30 days to leave their contract penalty-free. "We recommend customers take this opportunity to shop around, or at the very least get on the phone to BT to see if they can negotiate a better deal,"
Of course it's likely that the other CPs will follow-suit but in that case maybe they are all the gift that keeps giving.
I hate football so I cant watch sport - having to pay for football via sky before I can have the privilege of paying for something I want. And now my fucking phone line and broadband are subsidising overpaid brownian motion. I'd go somewhere else but the all have to piggy back of these morons.
And just to rub it in I cant even get BT sport down my piece of wet string.
"they just offered me some more of their cloud storage (of which I have used 0 bytes)... Yeah... Right... "
haha, that disappointed me too - the mailer distinctly looked like it was going to offer me a speed 'boost', or rather bring my incredibly dire London line up to something like 'speed', rather than something that can barely handle two simultaneous low-resolution streams at the same time.
What do I pay so much for again?
Virgin will be offering a FREE increased download speed*, yes totally FREE. The price increase will be in 3 months time, but look at what we've given you FREE!
*speed increase is dependent on your current horrendous contention, bandwidth throttling and Superhub dropouts and latency.
** Upload speeds will are unaffected by this change and will remain utterly shit.
Here's a tip for VM.
I had a rubbish connection at peak time so I complained and was told they were aware of it and looking to fix soon so I got a credit on my bill, any reference to amount of bandwidth used was greeted with a reply of that's useless if I can't use my computer and let others watch netflix at night.
I got credits for 7 months, the last one gave me three months so I didn't need to keep calling.
Now I have a perfect connection so I could suggest that's linked to this.
Upload speeds will are unaffected by this change and will remain utterly shit.
Yes, but that's mostly not VM's fault. The poor upload speeds are part of the DOCSIS 3.0 standard (the technical standard for data transfer of cable networks), where the download potential is up to 1 Gbps, but upload a mere 100 Mbps. Diced and sliced to "per house" levels you can see that VM can't do that much to speed up the upload with DOCSIS 3.0. If you wanted to pay for commercial grade kit things are probably different, for home users that's how it is.
VM are due to start roll out of DOCSIS 3.1 at the end of this year (that increases the upstream capacity 10x) but I doubt that any existing VM modem or hub will be compatible even with a firmware upgrade, so you're waiting on a new VM hub (end of 2018?). And the real advance would be DOCSIS 3.1 Full Duplex. D3.1 FD would give the same upload speed potential as download, but no sign of that even being trialled by VM yet. At a guess, little prospect of that until 2019 or later, and even that assumes that there aren't problems of capacity with full duplex.
Having said all that (and adding that the VM "superhubs" are all rather crap), if you want a fast download, fairly solid internet connection, and you can cope with 20 Mbps upload, then VM are a good, if expensive choice. Few people will be seeing reliable 200 Mbps download connections via Openreach for a good few years yet.
Hey VM fanboy, it's totally VMs fault... they choose the technology that there business uses - no one else.
You're right. They could have invented a completely new, proprietary cable data protocol, and that would surely have been better and cheaper? Obviously not. But you stick with your Openreach dial up.....
Forget protocol. They rolled out/adopted a crappy coax solution - if they used/replaced with a true fibre solution they would have more options. Or even copper... BT have the tech to go faster than Virgin currently but haven't rolled it out on mass - because BT are BT... in the sameway because Virgin are Virgin.
Whether your a Virgin or BT fanboy - it doesn't matter - your getting ****** up the ass long and hard.
Enjoy that...
I must say that my experience with VM has been not far from the advertised, and no major problems with superhub (that's v3 is it). Yes, they do updates at silly hours (daytime), yes, monthly fee and yearly hikes don't make the service super-cheap, but I (generally) get the advertised 50 Mbps, which is the bottom service they offer, and I fart in the general direction of whever-other-crap telly-mob-whatever they try to peddle. On top of that I get this (really priceless) smug feeling that BT leech is off my back, so I'd like to take this opportunitey to say in public again: BT suck! :)
no major problems with superhub (that's v3 is it)
No problems that you notice. The faults with the Puma 6 chipset are baked in, and for casual internet use, or even heavy lift downloading it does appear to work fine - I'm using one now. But for real time gaming, or VOIP, or other time sensitive types of applications the Virginmedia Superhub 3 is a pile of shite.
Put any form of trace on it, and you'll see the latency spiking to 150ms frequently, and a fair amount of packet loss. You might not perceive these, but they are there, and in gaming it amounts to missed shots, jumps in position of players, or even being kicked from a game server. For VOIP it'll be missing syllables, jumpy video and the like. Some streaming applications appear to struggle with these problems as well. Even in day to day internet use you might see symptoms (eg timeouts) that you attribute to the Wild West Web, but could be that little grey box with Intel's garbage chip inside. I'd also mention that although the problems have been known for over a year now, Virginmedia are still shipping the defective product out, and still no news on the software fix that their supplier (Arris) have supposedly been working on for the better part of a year.
So I'd like to take this opportunity to say in public again, Virginmedia suck, just not as much as Intel suck!
you forgot to mention that the superhub is a freebie (well, not exactly, but on the face of it), and if it sucks, you can add your own hardware to de-suck its half-baked features (no sarcasm, just what I have always heard that you can substitute their hardware with your own, but not being an online gamer, i've never felt the need to).
I asked a VM rep in some shopping mall I was in if I could use my own equipment on their network. He said of course "your tablets, computers, Tv's etc. can all be used." My own modem? Nope you use theirs - non negotiable. Someone suggested that they use the MAC address to authenticate the superhub on their network. Therefore just change the MAC address to match the superhub they supply and it "should work". I wasn't willing to sign up just to test that out.
Therefore just change the MAC address to match the superhub they supply and it "should work".
It might work if your "pirate" modem is DOCSIS 3 compatible. But whenever VM try and remotely update the firmware, it'll either return an error message that you're using alien technology, or worse, it'll install VM firmware and brick your modem.....
Superhub is total rubbish, as is the packet loss at Smallheath and Manchester in the network, and the apparent loss of all packets as it leaves the VM core for Telia's cross-water links.
My SH3 craps out when certain devices join the network when there's a certain number of other devices already on the Wi-Fi. It then assumes an IP conflict on all wireless addresses, and loses the sync with the network, requiring a reboot. I haven't managed to figure out the combination required to cause the fault, and because off and on fixes it, Virgin don't regard it as a problem.
This is balanced, mostly, by the service being fairly reliable, and reasonable stable latency-wise. Although, 50m/s to Munich is a bit leggy by modern standards.
>if it wasnt for the fact that most of our Internet comes from BT anyway, I would change ISP.
The announced price increases only apply to retail customers, not to wholesale customers.
So you can change from having BT as your retail phone and broadband provider to someone else - such as EE(!) who will charge you BT wholesale prices plus their mark up.
"We know that no one likes price changes, but this allows us to upgrade our services and give you more. Every customer will see improvements to their products and services alongside these changes."
I wonder what percentage of their customers actually asked for these forced "upgrades" and "improvements"?
Surely it would be better to offer these as opt-in upgrades and improvements, rather than charge everybody for them regardless of whether they wanted them or not?
TalkTalk did the same a while back for me. Put the price up, and when I asked why they said it was for service improvements and upgrades. I said I'm quite happy with my current level of service, I haven't asked for anything better, but they wouldn't allow me to stick with my current service for the current price.
I was with BT until a few months ago. They upped my bill from £32 a month to £41 with very little notice (a sneaky email in amongst the crapton of marketing emails they usually send). Considering my service couldn't get a connection for about 50% of the time, the 'service improvements' excuse that BT's various drones kept spouting didn't exactly go down well.
I'm with Zen now. Haven't had a single connection issue since the second the service went live. No throttling. And they're charging me £17 a month (to go up to £32 after the first six months). In all fairness, I can't say how good their customer service is. I've had no need to call them.
I'm with Zen now. Haven't had a single connection issue since the second the service went live.
That's great and Zen is undoubtedly a better ISP. However unless you've moved from ADSL to FTTC (or vice versa) your physical connection won't have changed so the number of connection issues cannot either.
Zen broadband do offer alternative backhaul providers but all FTTC connections rely on openreach hardware in the cabinet and switching providers does not require any changes in the cabinet. It's just a routing table and/or RADIUS update. In fact your modem will likely remain synchronised throughout the switching process.
If you're still on ADSL it could be a switch to an LLUO's hardware though.
However unless you've moved from ADSL to FTTC (or vice versa) your physical connection won't have changed so the number of connection issues cannot either.
No, however, if you take a Zen business rental, they will guarantee you a reasonably performant line speed based on what the BT Wholesale checker says. Also from my experience from migrating clients to Zen over several years on both ADSL and FTTC circuits and comparing them to the original BT ISP the service does seem to be more reliable. I suspect because many of the 'performance problems' generally experienced are more to do with the IP service management (ie. contention ratio, DNS, router performance, backhaul) and not the physical line and associated driver cards.
Otherwise yes, whatever line speed you are getting today on your BT ADSL/FTTC/FTTP service, you will get the same with Zen/EE etc. - just that with Zen you'll probably be able to make greater use of it due to lower contention ratios etc...
@AndrueC
You're correct in that the hardware to the exchange should not have changed. Indeed, BT serve all of the infrastructure for my area.
I suspect that the reason that we experienced so many connection issues (here defined as us not being able to load websites etc) was either due to some kind of bug in BT's home hub router, or some kind of aggressive throttling at the exchange. The behaviour of BT's customer service when attempting to diagnose the problem, coupled with the fact that myself and my other half are fairly heavy internet users in an area where the typical speed is 1.5mbps (no fibre available), make me inclined to believe that we were being excessively throttled.
Openreach which is a seperate entity....
but merely operates the network assets which remain fully owned by BT, not Openreach. And the BT accounts will continue to fail to show a fully disaggregated set of regulatory accounts. Funnily enough you can easily find those for an electricity distributor, a gas distributor, or a water company, so BT evidently have much to hide.
We are using A&A at work. no complaints, as its only gone down once or twice in two years, Once due to a failed power supply on a firebrick and that was replaced in 24hrs. Great customer service with named individuals who actually know what they are talking about. Expensive compared to others but worth it when things go wrong.
Depends on where you live!
Gigaclear and other alt ISP's might be in your area, just that if you simply use the mainstream broadband availability checking websites, you would never know they exist.
Live in a recently built (last 10 years) house, FTTP might be an option.
Otherwise your choice of ISP really is down to what other services you need: Static IP address, IPv6, uplink speed, VPN supported, no traffic shaping or management etc.
I've found EE to be reasonable (apart from the few well publicised service outages when the Three mobile broadband has kicked in) and have when necessary been able to talk directly to the network engineers. Obviously now EE is part of BT, this situation needs to be monitored.
NB. I assume you currently have a home broadband connection, so the business can expense the upgrade to a business service (or check your employement T&C's as if home working is expected/permitted you will be able to expense some of the home costs).
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For the last week I've been trying to get someone at BT to let me have FTTP (Openreach have finally wired us up) - both Biz and Rez seem to have difficulty with the concept. Maybe if they let people buy their 'premium' products they could keep prices down.
(FYI - BT Biz want £150 + VAT p.m. for 300Mbps FTTP, BT Rez will do 'Infinity 4' 300Mbps for £60 including VAT special intro offer (£80 later)- but they seem to have difficulty working out how to transfer me over)
If you move to FTTP and don't have a copper line as well as fibre you will be given a new phone number. BT are breaching Ofcom rules because they can't transfer numbers from copper to FTTP or vice versa, nor can they transfer numbers between FTTP premises even when both locations are on the same exchange.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/bills-and-utilities/broadband/switch-bts-ultra-fast-internet-and-lose-phone-number/
'The firm justified the increase by saying it is "making some great improvements to your service" including protection from nuisance calls with BT Call Protect and answering more calls here at home in the UK and Ireland, along with a range of broadband upgrades.'
Improvements to your service are necessary evil for any company and make you more competitive in a given market, oh wait.
"We know that no one likes price changes, but this allows us to upgrade our services and give you more. Every customer will see improvements to their products and services alongside these changes.
While we still make record profits and give you terrible service.
I'm a few weeks off my 11 month anniversary with them before my intro offers runs out just prior to Christmas. I'm looking at around twenty quid a month increase allowing for that £5 hike, up to around £65 for the package.
So I have to either get another tie in with them, move to Sky (shudder) or BT (never). So I'm pretty much limited to the no-brainer choice of VM then. Fingers crossed they do something decent to convince me stay
I have to say I have no complaints about Virgin Media Ireland (formerly UPC).
Their *entry level* 240Mbit/s package. (Next residential tier is 360 and Business is 400)
Seems Liberty Global (UPC) did a better rewiring job over here than the previous incarnation of Virgin did in the UK. Fingers crossed their upgrades over there deliver similar results.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/6770238819.png
(with wifi overheads)
Their *entry level* 240Mbit/s package. (Next residential tier is 360 and Business is 400)
I'm routinely getting 221 Mbps with a UK VM 200 Mbps package, but note your linked image and my speedtests are against fairly local servers, and I suspect VM prioritise Ookla traffic for those. I get somewhat slower speeds by selecting servers that VM wouldn't expect me to use, although those tend to be more distant.
And according to hearsay, that 10% extra speed "free" I seem to be getting only comes if you are enrolled in VM's wifi hotspot scheme.
Fingers crossed they do something decent to convince me stay
If you lean hard on their retentions team they'll do something, but those people have been told to try and avoid giving in too easily. If you're on a higher speed package then there's not much competition and you've got to persuade them that you're off because poor value trumps the higher speed benefits (I'm assuming you're on cable).
Also, if you're on a 150 Mbps package, that has been "delisted", so you only continue to get that speed if you're allowing the contract to roll over to whatever they want. Otherwise, if you negotiate a new deal it will have to be at either 50, 100, 200 or 300 Mbps, so be very clear on what want, what they are offering, how much you're prepared to pay. If you're taking phone and mid to high speed broadband package, then you should hope to get about £9-12 a month knocked off.
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I've done this with my Energy Company. A small supplier that has a fantastic online portal. Not the cheapest, but near to the cheapest, but so much less hassle. Easy to contact, well laid out documents. And no, I'm not telling you.
I've been through a few suppliers, all of the big six.
The Worst: CoopEnergy by a long way. Totally incompetent, their CRM is a waste of space.
Scottish Power next worst, but pretty much the big 6, all have problems/issues. Wouldn't touch any of them.
I sat and realised something recently.
Whenever I stream a movie on my phone, it's often better to just turn off the wifi and rely on 4G. Less buffering, unscheduled stops, etc. I'm not the only one, either, XKCD even has a cartoon about it. At one point, yes, Wifi was the best available but nowadays I'm not so sure.
And I can get large data packages for 4G really cheaply, and even routers that can load-balance / failover to 4G, and even multiple-4G connections.
And then I consider how much I actually need the low-latency of Wifi for gaming, etc. and wonder whether that's worth paying for at all. I can't think it is.
And I'm perfectly happy with 4G streaming of a movie to my phone / tablet and/or re-offering the phone connection over Wifi. And I'm already paying for it. And it costs less than my broadband as it is. And doesn't need separate (hidden) line-rental, TV, etc. packages.
I think, given 4G coverage, I could be more than happy just sticking a 4G dongle in a decent router or bouncing my phone's 4G over Wifi for just about everything I do. Hell, I often log into work over RD, or do Amazon or grocery shopping, via my phone, so I could certainly do everything I would *need* to.
It makes me wonder what the fixed-line broadband people are playing at and what it will take to actually get them to move.
And, hell, if I'm not happy with one provider? Buy a different SIM/dongle and even share the traffic between them as necessary to stay under the limits.
I had paid up front for line rental saver a few months before BT last hiked their prices.
When they upped the broadband price, I terminated the broadband only, and kept the landline - and had an assurance (in writing, from the chat guy in India) that I could later terminate my landline with no penalty.
About a month later, BT then tried to tell me that by removing broadband from my package I had entered into a new minimum term contract for calls and line rental (at £0/month, but with the implication that I would have to start paying line rental to BT again once my line rental saver expired).
I argued the toss, and eventually got their CEO's complaints team to agree that I could indeed terminate with no penalty.
I terminated my line rental with BT when the line rental saver was up and moved to the same provider as my broadband. BT then tried to charge me for early cancellation of the contract. I kicked off again, and got the full amount refunded eventually.
They are twats. But if you stick to your guns, threaten to take them to court, and don't ever back down, you can walk away from your contract without losing anything (apart from a few hours of your time - but for the principle, it's worth it...)
...for my rather slow and unreliable broadband, if this allows BT to spend even more money paying way too much for football matches that I will never watch because (a) I hate football and (b) my broadband is too slow to reliably stream the games anyway. At least with the Home Hub 6 I have the 'best ever WiFi signal compared to other big broadband companies'.*
(* No I don't. The Home Hub 6 is shit at WiFi, just like every other Home Hub variant. Wobbling a baking tray sends a stronger, faster and more reliable signal out than the Home F**king Hub.)
I actually like the Infinity service but I'm sick of the price rises. However, all of the other providers don't seem any cheaper once you add in the line rental and activation fees. There's also no Virgin Media or FTTP to where I live.
Remember when Internet was very expensive when it was first available but gradually came down in price, I long for those days.
For those unfortunate enough to be on FTTP only (without copper) and having to use Fibre Voice Access (FVA) for voice telephony, you can't change provider because BT are the only provider to support FVA. In my opinion, from the emails I've seen between BT and Openreach, this was and is deliberate market manipulation to give BT a monopoly on provision of service.
As a user of the Vodafone broadband service I have to say it is rock solid - no outage so never had to call their support number. A solid 60Mb download and 19Mb upload and I get this at any time of the day or night with no download limits. I have just signed up to a new contract for 18 months of the Fibre 76 product for £30 a month including line rental which I consider quite the bargain.
However their router is utterly crap with poor wifi coverage - I have Ethernet cables running off it to the rest of the house and a range extender that has much better wifi coverage than the router. Factor investment into a better router/range extender as part of any decision to move to Vodafone.
Maybe it's time to change to a broadband provider that keeps the price the same for the length of the contract. Apparently, both the Post Office and TalkTalk offer this. As for watching BT Sport, according to https://broadbandinterneuk.com, BT broadcast around a dozen Champions League/Europa matches for FREE on their Freeview channel. Worth considering, then watching MOTD and paying now and again for Sky Sports day passes via NOWTV
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