When I say BT is gone, it isn’t completely true yet.
I had to pay early termination fees, so I did.
BT Decided I had been over charged by a tenner, but that is OK, they will deduct from the next bill on a closed account.
They just sent me a returns bag for my phone equipment.
Its a VOIP service and I didn’t rent any of their hardware, sooo there is nothing to return.
However, never missing an opportunity, I am looking for the biggest box that will fit in the bag.
Then see how many of those annoying polystyrene chips will fit leaving room for a dead BT Dect phone and base unit.
Plus any other old shite, Micra water pump, Ashtray from a Rover Streetwise. . . and maybe a handfull of fun snaps
Looking at the top of this thread shows how far technology has moved on since 2011.
Bearing in mind that 2011 6Mb connection supported netflix and two people home working.
Our expectations were met at the time but three teenagers have a large bandwidth appetite.
Plusnet did provide Fibre, only to the cabinet though, still crusty copper this end.
This statement may be coming to fruition
“BT has lost the plot completely and I hope they get bought up by CityFibre”
My nearest wooden BT pole, the very one that the crusty old copper dangling from my house reaches to has a new feature, a spool of neatly coiled Fibre.
Openreach even have an installation date for go-live at up to but probably nowhere near speed of 1.6Gb/second in January.
January 2027 of course, subject to delays.
Currently on OpenReach based provider, so I get ok downloads and an anaemic upload as is standard with them. Earlier this year there was chaos as roads were dug up by Grain, whoever they are, to put in even more cables. Their salesperson turned up later. Looks like I can get 900/900 for similar rates to my current 500/70.
Continuing this use as an ISP rant thread, I’m currently with TalkTalk. Contract ends end of February, so I guess they’re trying to lock me in before I look at switching. Got a call to that effect. I question them on upload speeds. The guy kept drifting onto download, but eventually got a figure of 948/112 for their top service. I politely told them I’ve had offers of 900/900 or more from Virgin and Grain so I’ll not be renewing with them unless they can provide that. The guy then started to go on about wifi, it’s the same connection, and something about 5G. I then told them, don’t call me, I’ll call you.
Unfortunately their colleagues didn’t get the memo. I got two more calls from them and now they’re blocked. Even if they did have a symmetric service, I don’t want to use them now. On further research, apparently they can also use CityFibre instead of OpenReach where covered, which do use symmetric. Don’t think they’re in my area anyway.
They bought Pipex and tried to bill me for a years-worth of internet access.
Because my cancellation went to Pipex during the transition it got lost.
I think it may have been two years, I haggled them down to one month or I would make time for legal action plus costs for my time.
I’m still pleased with Zen even though its FTTC+1950’s copper.
The nearest pole is Fibre enabled and I could have the 900Mb service
…. So why haven’t I upgraded ?
The Fibre upgrade was done by an external contractor, pulling fibre to the pole and stringing interconnects off to residents.
Openreach then came back and made it work properly for some grumpy people.
I don’t know what the top of the pole looks like but the contractors did drive away leaving the Pit Lid off.
Getting fibre to my house involves getting these same contractors to run a fibre into the property.
You might think it would follow the same route the copper uses ?
No, they plan to drill another hole somewhere else for the wire and have to bolt a ladder to my house during the fitment, which amuses me.
How do you bolt the top of a ladder to a house when the ladder cannot be climbed until it is secure ?
The current Zen router has a BT phone socket, manages a Digital phone service through SIP and just works, legacy phone ported from BT and just works.
No mention of SIP on the 900Mb unit, I think they want me to rent a handset for just £9/month and keep nagging me about their any-room package.
TLDR; Slow and Stable is no hassle but Whizz-BANG may contain BANG!
Grain sales people came around again today and I’ve signed up in principle. £28pcm for the “900/900” service, which is less than I’m paying TalkTalk currently for slower. TT contract period ends late Feb so don’t need to deal with details yet anyway.
They do referrals. Spoke to neighbour 2 houses away who already had them installed to try and work out how to do that. They only had one outage of a few minutes in the whole time so sounds reliable enough. Speeds might drop below the quoted max and I’m seeing some posts online that some get max of around 800, but as long as it doesn’t get worse than what I currently have, it is still up. The router/wifi box is MASSIVE so I’ll have to give thought of where that’ll go.
Also turns out the guy is a PC gamer. I had interrupted him while he was playing AC Valhalla. Have to say, it looked great on his 55” TV. Out of interest, I asked if he knew what GPU he had. Words to effect of “some AMD last gen. Got it 6 months ago.” Ok, not deeply into PCs then? Showed me the box behind TV. Couldn’t see it clearly behind the smoked glass, but I saw clear enough “GEFORCE RTX” on the side of the GPU. Not AMD then!
Things are getting serious now. TalkTalk retentions left a voicemail. So I thought I’d use online chat to start the termination process myself. In short, which it wasn’t, took about 55 minutes before the 2nd agent scheduled a call with me tomorrow morning to process the termination. Said they can’t do it over chat. Usual tried to offer higher package. Just very slow - both the chat and their upload speeds. So have unblocked them on my phone and wait.
I had debated getting Grain to do the one touch transfer but it is another step that could go wrong and thought it might be cleaner to do it separately.
The end is in sight. I got the call back from TalkTalk on termination and they have processed it. This went smoothly and didn’t take long, around 10 minutes. If only I could have spoken to that department directly the pain would be so much less.
I heard funny beeps during that call. Do mobiles do call waiting? Never knew that. Afterwards I saw I had another incoming call from TalkTalk while I was talking to TalkTalk. They sure like to talk! Hopefully now I have the termination entered their loyalty team will stop calling, or is that too much to expect?
I left TalkTalk about 3 years ago as the reliability of my connection was progressively getting worse and when I contacted them about it they refused to accept it was a problem with their system. Switched to NowBroadband and got a more reliable connection with a much improved speed….
Have since quit NowBroadband and currently using O2 with an unlimited data SIM…..
The world may be a different place compared to the days of dial-up but the shameless ineptitude is still present.
I have FTTC, might even be SOGEA but the whole lot arrives on crusty copper and peaks at 67Mb.
Yes its better than Comtel/NTL days of 2Mb by some margin but the Barry Bullshit sales patter is still there even from Zen.
£33/Month Full Fibre 100 - (55 Mbps min)
£39/Month Full Fibre 500 - (250Mbs min)
£45/Month Full Fibre 900 - (500Mbps min)
Common to all of these is the router unit a Fritz!box 7530 AX
Wait!
What ?
Two packages support a rate that outstrips the router?
Surely thats a mistake ?
Zeni - In Hours
You’re correct that the FRITZ!Box 7530 AX is rated for speeds up to around 300 Mbps on its WAN port, so it wouldn’t be able to take full advantage of a Full Fibre 900 Mbps connection. If you want to use the higher speeds offered by Full Fibre 900, you would need a router that supports gigabit (1000 Mbps) WAN connections.
