# BROADBAND



## CapTT (Mar 2, 2003)

Why is it so bloody difficult to get Broadband.?.

My local exchange was Broadband enabled on 22\11\03 .Until January I didn`t have time to consider getting it but in February when Freeserve started the Â£15.99p a month all in package I thought I would try it.

So I signed up on 8\2\04 and on 10\2\04 I had a visit from a BT engineer to check my line etc. out and he said everything was fine , no problems. I didn`t think there would be because my neighbour who is further away from the exchange than me has BT broadband and also half a mile up the road from me , further away from the exchange , is one of the biggest online retailers in europe who use broadband .

Freeserve send me the USB ADSL modem and so I install it all and just have to wait now the ten working days for the ADSL line to be enabled. 
So I have one green light and one green flashing light for a fortnight.
By the afternoon of the tenth working day I was sick of waiting for my line to be activated so I rang freeserve up and they check the system log and say that BT say I can`t have Broadband because I`m too far away from the exchange. I , baffled , explain about the BT engineer and my neighbours . Freeserve couldn`t give a toss basically and say they will send me a jiffy bag to return the modem and a number to contact BT.

So I ring BT for an explanation and they refuse to discuss it "Its against regulations" they say. So I put it down to Freeserve being crap.

So I try Tiscali . No chance you live in the country so F**K *FF they say.

And then I read glowing reports on here about Pipex . So I signed up with them 16 days ago. No problems they say.And I havn`t heard a word from them since.

What the F**K is going on ??.

To rub salt in to my ever increasing wounds every day for the last week BT have rang me up to ask if I would like to sign up for thier new Broadband package for the now bargain price of Â£19.99p a month all in "as they know I am interested in getting broadband". So I just tell them I`m with Pipex (Hopefully ?) and they say that thats strange and ring off.

What is all this about ??.

I`m getting sick of Broadband before I`ve even tried it. But I will persevere and see what happens. Might get it in for 2006 , who knows ?.


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## PaulS (Jun 15, 2002)

A friend of mine had a similar problem getting broadband - 'you're too far away from the exchange' despite the house opposite him having broadband.

I think BT use a postcode system to determine whether or not broadband is available, rather than a technical survey of the line to see if it will work.

In the end, he got OFTEL involved, BT relented, sent out an engineer to test the line, and he's now on broadband.


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## davidg (Sep 14, 2002)

Have you tried ONSPEED just tried thier free downdload :shock: it is a lot faster , then Â£28 per year until BB arrives  ,they quote bb speed on a 56k modem


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## jonah (Aug 17, 2002)

Had a similar problem when i signed up ! i origanally had ISDN which has a lower distance to exchange needed than BB. BT told me i was too far away, so i logged onto a site that tells you exactly how far away you are from you exchange and i was within distance which i already knew.
Called BT up and they said the noise on the line was above limits for BB, spoke with the ISP i was palnning on joining ( Vispa.com) they made some calls but with no success but kept me informed on a daily basis with calls and e-mails. Spoke to some friends who work for BT and they told me to call BT and have the gain turned right down on the line ( with 56k dialup turning up the gain will increase speeds but causes line noise which could mean the noise is too much for BB )
Anyway to cut a long story short BT turned down the gain and 5 days later i was on BB with Vispa.


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## garvin (May 7, 2002)

CapTT said:


> Why is it so bloody difficult to get Broadband.?


It isn't! To a large extent I had the reverse problem. When I signed up for Broadband the line was checked out 'remotely' without the need for any BT engineer to come to the house. Modem installed and broadband was up and running with ease and everything completed within a week of first signing up! Couldn't fault the process at all 

Getting rid of my old dial up account proved altogether more tricky 

Despite numerous calls etc I eventually sorted it by unilaterally cancelling the dial up subscription - that got their attention. They then kept threatening to disconnect my dial up account if I didn't resume payment ........ Eureka got there. Finally, they actually rang me up and, yet again, I explained the situation. Dial up account was cancelled ........... and they even sent me a refund for the days of the month that the dial up had run alongside the Broadband after it had first been installed


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## Dotti (Mar 9, 2003)

CapTT said:


> I`m getting sick of Broadband before I`ve even tried it. But I will persevere and see what happens. Might get it in for 2006 , who knows ?.


Don't give up hope . We had to wait down our road for years for it sadly, even though my neighbour over the back got it. Then all of a sudden one day I tapped in our phone number on to their website and hey presto our road qualified. There and then I jumped in the air with joy and signed up. 8)

Like you I got really fed up with the wait, but now, it was really worth the wait as I can download and send files so efficiently no matter how big or small and stream videos. It's so cool. . I'm sure you will get it soon .


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## uppTTnorth (Jul 5, 2003)

AOL 512K     , no problems.


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## JonW (Feb 1, 2004)

So BT say that 85% can get broadband :!: Well like all above I am one of the 15% and like the similar comments above no one will tell me why.

The excahange is enabled, when I check on the BT website, it says ok for 512 connection, subject to final check. Fair play to BT, i applied via Virgin at 9pm one evening, BT had rung me by 8am following motrning and been to the house to line test by 12.

Great I thought, BT engineer left saying no probs. Email that evening, too far from exchange. So what can I do, in common with everyone else BT will not explain, what do I do just keep applying, that should really piss BT off.

what is the criteria for distance from exchange? Can I check it ? Is there anyone who knows, surely there is someone here who knows, what other options have I got?


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## bajers (Nov 22, 2003)

JonW said:


> what is the criteria for distance from exchange? Can I check it ? Is there anyone who knows, surely there is someone here who knows, what other options have I got?


Jon, I am a manager at Kingston Communications in Hull and I am responsible for our broadband provisioning in the city. We currently have around 15,000 customers subscribed to our ADSL service.

Not sure of B.T's policy, but this is ours.

We will provide a guaranteed minimum of the 512k service up to 3.5km away from each of our 15 local exchanges. That covers up to 85% of our licensed area (approx 230,000 customers).

We will provide broadband service up to 5km from our exchanges on an 'extended reach' basis. This covers around 90-95% of our customers, but we cannot guarantee a full 512k download, although the system is clever enough to adjust upload speeds to get better download speeds on a continual basis.

To qualify the line, we use a line test system called Teradyne (an American company that tests the line for short circuits, earths etc). This system automatically gives us a 'line length', from which we base our go/no go policy. B.T use this for standard line tests as well.

B.T use a variation of this system called Celerity and this uses various tests to look at the lines suitability to carry the higher range of frequencies to support the ADSL service. This is far more sophisticated than our system and costs B.T millions of pounds per region to install.

With our service, we provide 90% of lines on a self-install basis (modem through the post with microfilters) and this is within 6 working days.

The rest are installs carried out by our engineers and are done within same timescales.

If we have customers 'on the border', I will always dispatch an engineer to carry out a detailed line survey and instruct him to carry out remedial action on the line to provide the customer with service if we possibly can.

We get few of these, but it is worth doing as we sign customers up for 12 months so we get our money back in the long term.

Current price for our service is Â£28.99 per month and generally, our customers are very happy with it. It is contended at 50:1 as is B.T's I think.

Trouble is, ADSL is not an exact science as 'reflections' in the cable can attenuate the far end signal. Provided our engineers can obtain at least 2Mb at the customers premises, we will do the install.

Cable reflections can be down to all sorts of things like adjacent pair interference, bad cable joints etc. Even changing cable pairs can help here. For engineers tests we use a piece of kit called a Sunrise tester at Â£5k each. This will give us 'acheivable' bandwidth measuremnts at various points in the underground network so we can see where most attenuation is and fix the problem.

Regardless, line length is the biggest attenuator of the signal. The further you go, the lower bandwidth you will get.

Anybody having trouble getting connected, ring B.T and ask them to do a Celerity test and a line length test on your line. If you are within 5km of your local exchange and it is ADSL enabled, they CAN install you. I even think B.T are pushing it to 6km now.

Or, move to Hull and give me a call and I (almost) guarantee we will be able to switch you on....

Bit radical I know but it's good to talk


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## christtopher (May 7, 2002)

Have you tried the 17070 test?

Dial 17070 then options 3, then 1, then 2 (I think) and it should ring you back with a line length. I'm not sure how accurate this is, and it doesn't always work, but worth a try.


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## JonW (Feb 1, 2004)

Bajers

:shock: :? :shock: :?

Ta for the info, I'm gonna have to move to Hull, knowing my luck I'll still be one of the 10% 

OK so there's more to this than I thought. Trouble is am about 3.5km from exchange by straight line, but who knows what the cable length is.

I will now go off line and do the 17070 test as suggested by christtopher

Bajers, after all that info I feel bad about outbidding you on those McGard bolts, have you got some yet? Hopefully less than the Â£99 you were threatening to bid


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## bajers (Nov 22, 2003)

Jon,

Way to go m8. If I hadn't been such a tight wad, I would have upped my proxy bid by another quid and I would have got them :?

Sorted though, but at a cost. Finally went for some Evo 5's which are supposed to be ok, but cost nearer Â£40  

Not aware of this 17070 facility, but it's probably another thing that we use in our System X exchanges called SALT.

This stands for Subscribers Apparatus and Line Tester and is not that acurate, but it's better than nowt...

I would have thought that if you ring B.T and quote your number, they should do a line test for you foc and give you a line length.

You are right about cable length. Obviously the cable is not laid in a straight line, but I would have thought, if you are radially within 3.5km, you should be well in up at 5km. In that case, B.T should provide service.

Hope this helps and no hard feelings m8. That's what makes bidding fun :lol:


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## scott28tt (Jul 30, 2002)

We have exactly the same issue at our place, BT web site says OK, BT themselves say 'too for away from exchange'.

Tried to speak to the muppets at BT Broadband to find out about line lengths (our exchange supports up to 6km) but have yet to find out how far we are away from exchange.

I came away from the whole experience scratching my head as to what to try next, and with a strong hatred of bloody BT :evil:


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## JonW (Feb 1, 2004)

scott28tt said:


> We have exactly the same issue at our place, BT web site says OK, BT themselves say 'too for away from exchange'.
> 
> Tried to speak to the muppets at BT Broadband to find out about line lengths (our exchange supports up to 6km) but have yet to find out how far we are away from exchange.


Have you actually managed to SPEAK to someone at BT. How? Will you publish the number? I need this experience. 

Sent them an email, using address they had written from, and got a load of C**p back, seemed like perm any three from the list of excuses. They even left the excuse reference numbers on the email.


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## Dont I Recognise You (Oct 10, 2003)

best thing to do is set aside 3 days of your life.

start with the number on the BT website for broadband connections.

wait on hold after navigating 5 levels of 'press 1 to wait. press 2 to enter a queue of 500 people. press 3 to commit suicde. Your call is important to us' drivel.

give up

call in a fault

get fed up waiting for them to call you back.

go back to BT website and pick random numbers.

when you (randomly) get through to ANYONE, appologise profusely for accidently coming through to the wrong number, and ask for a direct line to someone in broadband.

repeat the above until you get hold of someone.

It does work - I have a list of about 20 numbers somewhere that I called before finally gettting someone to admit that actually, despite the web site saying it was line length (it's not), it was actually the noise levels that were the problem.

Which I'm still working on.

(I daren't get them to reduce gain until Easter Break when missus will not need diall up for a while - she's convinced I'm gonna break it - can't think *where* she gets that idea from....)


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## groganp (May 20, 2002)

A word of warning; do NOT sign up to that crappy Â£19.99 per month BT offer. Like all BT products, they are way behind the market. That particular product limits you to 1GB download per MONTH (check the small print). You think that sounds like a lot? Believe me, it's not. When you discover broadband, you'll chew that within a few days.

Personally, I'm with Freedom2Surf for Â£22.50 per month and I'd recommend them to anyone. Or if you live in a cable area, use the cable operator (I used to have Telewest before I moved and was very impressed). Just avoid BT.


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## ANT (Oct 2, 2002)

I have just changed from AOL broadband (who kept dropping the connection :x )and now we're with BT no frills 1 GIG Broadband. Truly very quick!!!!!  Lucky my workplace pay for it tho'  :?

ANT


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## garvin (May 7, 2002)

ANT said:


> ........... with BT no frills 1 GIG Broadband........


1 Gb .......... per second  ............... almost warp speed ............. where can I sign up for this :wink:


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## ANT (Oct 2, 2002)

Yup it's great! :wink: up to twice the speed of Broadband  Think it's Â£38 per month, but it's just a connection. So we go thro Internet explorer and Outlook for the emails.
Telephone BT BROADBAND helpdesk on 0800 800 060. Found this service much better than AOL as no more connection dropping!!!!!!!!
Cheers
ANT


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## garvin (May 7, 2002)

ANT said:


> ......... up to twice the speed of Broadband.........


Err ...... umm........ that'd be a maximum of 4Mb/s rather than 1Gb/s .............. 1Gb/s would be be up to 500 times faster than 'broadband' and 2000 times faster than a normal 512kb/s broadband connection!


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## Dont I Recognise You (Oct 10, 2003)

1Mb/s maybe?

which is still pretty darn fast!


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## groganp (May 20, 2002)

> which is still pretty darn fast!


Yep. That's about 11GB of data per day!![/quote]


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## ANT (Oct 2, 2002)

SORRY it is 1 MEG, not 1 gig, just had a look at the brochure! :roll: 
ANT


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## p6cko (Mar 25, 2004)

gull


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## JonW (Feb 1, 2004)

Definitive answer from BT. I can never have broadband. Oh how I enjoy surfing at 45.2Kbps :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:

I'm going to have to get a village GB on a satellite broadband system


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## christtopher (May 7, 2002)

How about finding someone in the village who can get it, and setting up a wireless link between your houses? It's worked for some and doesn't have to be as complicated as this. http://www.d128.com/wireless/


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## CapTT (Mar 2, 2003)

As previously mentioned I signed up with PIPEX for broadband on 25\2\04 and I heard nothing at all back from them for nearly 5 weeks so last friday I gave them a call and after 15 mins in a holding pattern I eventually talked to a clueless customer support representative who told me bugger all really. But we did discuss the fact BT are messing all internet companies about to try and gain more market share for themselves which was interesting. On monday morning I had a round of golf with a friend of mine who is in charge of business developement regionally for the district council and will be a candidate to be an MEP at the next election and we discussed this topic in depth. What he told me was very interesting. On monday afternoon he rang me and told me to contact PIPEX again and resubmit my order and he had been talking to BT about broadband locally. Today I recieved word from PIPEX that my ADSL line will be enabled tomorrow 2\4\04. So is this an april fools prank by PIPEX ?. I sincerely hope not !!!. But until it actually works I won`t believe it I`m afraid .

So it seems the moral of the story is that BT just say whatever suits them and will do anything to con the public and try and gain a large market share for themselves. If you had the problems I did getting broadband make enquiries and take the matter as high up the ladder as you can. If you persevere it seems that broadband isn`t as difficult to get as we thought . (touch wood , fingers crossed !!!) :roll:


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## groganp (May 20, 2002)

I really don't know if BT are trying to carve the market or if they are still simply monolithically incompetent.

On the plus side, I've just had my first video NetMeeting via broadband with a friend in Amsterdam (try explaining that to the wife; a video chat with a "mate" in Europe's porn capital). So no more international phone bills! Awesome


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## bajers (Nov 22, 2003)

We have just launched a 1 meg residential service in Hull which is proving quite popular, but we have had this running for a year or so for our business customers together with a 2 meg service for them.

Guys, it's not difficult to provide. Providing you have the hardware (we use Alcatel DSLAM's) and you have the network infrastructure (which B.T certainly have), all that's left then is the front office processes.

Perhaps this is the bit where B.T are going wrong.

Not sticking up for them, but I don't really think it is a protecting their market share issue, because they wholesale their network out to Pipex et al at a nice profit, so they gain whichever way they turn.

I have a feeling it might be front office problems. IVR, the automated answering system is the first ball ache which we resolutely refuse to use in our C.Services team. We also use a fully automated scripting process linked to our engineering systems so when one of our call centre consultants takes an application for broadband, it is literally follow the script, tick the boxes to the answered questions and the systems do the rest.

It's not perfect by any means, but it generally gets the job done.

Just a bit of an insight to our operation.


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## CapTT (Mar 2, 2003)

Hooray !!!. It wasn`t an elaborate hoax thankfully !!!.
I have Broadband up and running nicely @ 576 Kbps. I finally got time to wire it all up this afternoon and its a huge improvement over dial-up.
Thank You Pipex. I am now fully into the 21st century .
I am now going to download the 47 recommended updates that I have never bothered to get from Windows update because of the 26 day expected download time on dial up. Lets see how long it takes .......


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