The other day I had a cold call from BT inviting me to find out about their broadband packages. When I said I was happy with my current provider, they wanted to know who I'm with and if I had a fixed contract. Obviously I have no intention of taking up their broadband service as I have a faster connection than they can offer, at a better price than their inferior products, not to mention that BT will be rolling out Phorm to monitor everyone's traffic in the future.

Anyway, my question is whether BT are allowed to promote their own broadband service like this. I remember some years ago they got into trouble for contacting their phone customers as it was an abuse of their position as a monopoly. But perhaps they are no longer considered to have such an unfair advantage.

jrawle wrote on Jan 7^th, 2009 at 10:57am:

Obviously I have no intention of taking up their broadband service as I have a faster connection than they can offer, at a better price than their inferior products, not to mention that BT will be rolling out Phorm to monitor everyone's traffic in the future.

I thought speed was how far you were away from the exchange rather than the provider's ability.

I guess everyone's traffic will be monitored in future.

I had a couple of guys come to my door from Npower yesterday and told them I was not interested. They then asked me who my electricity supplier was and I told them it was none of their business. Not telling them stops them trying to switch you without you knowing, as I have read in the press that this does indeed happen.

sherbert wrote on Jan 7^th, 2009 at 11:17am:

I thought speed was how far you were away from the exchange rather than the provider's ability.

I'm on ADSL 2+ with Be. BT don't offer this service, as far as I can see, and if they did it would only be selected exchanges. I get 13Mb/s download. The most BT could offer me with conventional ADSL would be approx. 6.5Mb/s.


sherbert wrote on Jan 7^th, 2009 at 11:17am:

I guess everyone's traffic will be monitored in future.

There is a government proposal to store certain details on who you e-mail or what sites you visit. But Phorm is another whole level of monitoring, a private company monitoring exactly what you look at so as to sell targeted advertising to websites. As well as the privacy implications, it's likely to slow your connection down, and adds an extra point of failure. BT is the only one that's definitely going to implement it and has already run trials.

See this article:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3825-bt-trial-of-phorm-ends-successfully.html
and many others on the same site.

sherbert wrote on Jan 7^th, 2009 at 11:17am:

I thought speed was how far you were away from the exchange rather than the provider's ability.

No sherbert this is not correct as distance from the exchange only determines maximum possible data sync speed with the exchange and not actual data throughput speed.  So with TalkTalk you might be 50 metres from the exchange and theoretically capable of getting 20Mbps on their new speed boost products but in reality at most times of day (especially evening) you will be lucky if you get 0.5Mbps because TalkTalk does not have enough backbone capacity beyond the exchanges in their network to support full speed for their customers at nearly all times (other than may be from 1am to 6am).  Whereas if you go with www.newnet.co.uk or www.idnet.co.uk they guarantee that you will get the full speed your line is capable of at all times.  But you will pay considerably for that privilege.

Broadband is not like electricity or gas where the product is the same no matter who you pay your bill to.  With broadband the service beyond the exchange varies hugely between different broadband providers.  That is why TalkTalk, Tiscali and most of all Virgin ADSL can offer their cheap and shoddy products at such low prices.  I believe I have tried to explain this to you before but you still seem to think that switching broadband supplier is like switching gas or electricity supplier.

I definitely wouldn't go with BT broadband (expensive and very poor quality customer service based in India) but their wholly owned (but quite separately operated) supplier Plusnet is currently offering an incredible deal for anyone on an exchange with no LLU (Talktalk, Be Unlimited, Sky etc) providers.   This works out at less than £5 per month on top of line rental cost in the first year for a 10Gb per month broadband allowance.  Unlike Tiscali, TalkTalk and BT Plusnet repeatedly get decent customer broadband satisfaction ratings.

See www.plus.net/residential/broadband/broadband_with_homephone_us.shtml for the Plusnet special deal through Uswitch

and

www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php for customer satisfaction ratings of different ISPs.

Thanks for all that NGMsGhost, I really appreciate your response and very useful information. That is why I joined this site, because of the informed advice that is given by you and others and in return (as I have time on my hands) I try and look for geographical numbers for others who can not find them and offer what limited knowledge I have.

Thanks again, I will look at those links you provided.

For further discussion of the Uswitch deal with Plusnet for line rental, 10Gb broadband and free evening and weekend calls see the separate thread I have started on this at:-

www.saynoto0870.com/cgi-bin/forum/YaBB.cgi?num=1232384727

I do hope sherbert does not feel I was being in any way unduly critical as I know you are a staunch supporter of this website.  But in summary you may not notice the slow speeds delivered by Talktalk, Tiscali and especially Virgin on ADSL if you only send email and browse the internet but if you download large tv video files or use Voip etc then you are likely to notice that inferior data speed (on the same phone line connected to the same exchange) pretty quickly.

NGMsGhost wrote on Jan 19^th, 2009 at 5:11pm:

I do hope sherbert does not feel I was being in any way unduly critical as I know you are a staunch supporter of this website.

Not at all, I took it as some very useful advice and again I thank you for it. :)

BT are offering me a 12 month rolling contract, (like the land line deal) for Broadband bringing the monthly charge down by £2 to £12.65 for Option One.
I started paying £17.99 a couple of years ago, so good to see something come down in price for a change. :)

As I have said previously, I have never had a problem with the Broadband service so far.

I expect they are only offering this cheaper deal to those on larger phone exchanges that are de-regulated for pricing if its anything like the new segmented pricing of their other broadband company (Plusnet).

BT consistently have the very worst scores for broadband download speed and customer satisfaction but for some reason some of you seem to have this warm fuzzy feeling about always staying with the direct successor to the former GPO state monopoly. :-/