I've been with TalkTalk for some time, and on cable (copper wire into the home) for some time and get about 36Mbps; I get phone, broadband and TV (Freeview, with a box to record etc) from them for £23.50 a month + line rental (reduced if you pay upfront). The only SERIOUS problem is if I need support as their call centres are overseas and (1) I can't understand most of the operatives (2) they can't understand me and (3) they get shot if they deviate from their scripts by as much as a comma. In short, use a comparison site and go for the cheapest. And gird your loins.
there you go johnv, the perfect excuse, yes officer eh i was looking for a eh um telephone exchange. yip thats it a telephone exchange.
so what about this getting yer interweb via satalite, i am told it's more expensive to instal but better, than i will ever get up here.
BT are the most incompetent untruthful over promising under delivering bunch of twats ever to be in business, if they didn't have a monopoly on the lines they would have gone tits up years ago. I hate them with a passion just writing this is increasing my anxiety levels. I despise the way they do business the way they lie to customers, i hate the incompetent call centres whose staff are all called tracy and dave and yet english is their 2nd language, i hate the management the engineers in fact if you work for BT you are a lying cheating conniving twat. If you have the chance of taking your money elsewhere do it. Me I am stuck with them. Morons.
My sister uses satellite broadband in a rural setting, it is expensive and relatively slow. She has had it for some time so it may not be the latest technology so I guess it would be worthwhile to look at who is offering what at the moment.
Our 'cabinet' is at the end of our street. About 100m away. 20.88 download, 8.78 upload. Fine for what I need.
Boots I presume that you have a 'fibre' cable going into the 'cabinet' from the exchange , but do you still have copper wires coming into your house, or do you have 'fibre'? I recall asking an engineer working on a 'cabinet' that is situated very close to my house, if, and when would I be able to take advantage of all this fibre optics technology. He said "he didn't know anything about it mate" I'm an electrician, and from what I could see in the cabinet it looked like all the old fashioned multi-cored cables joined up into a junction box. I would like to know if there needs to be Fibre optic cables going into the cabinet for me to stand a chance of getting these high speeds?
If you have fibre provided on your local exchange there will be 2 cabinets close together. The newer one obviously has the fibre from the exchange and basically it replaces the old broadband equipment in the exchange with some at the roadside thereby eliminating a great percentage of the line loss that you get with normal broadband. Very few people have fibre to the premises, it's only provided on really new developments, most connections are via fibre to the cabinet. If you live in a large city you might be able to get cable TV from Virgin, but they don't have anything out in the sticks. If you are with Talktalk, Virgin, Sky, Post Office etc, then you are using Openreach lines and just paying your money to your supplier who is renting the line from Openreach. It might be cheaper, but that's only because the regulatory body forces Openreach to let the other operators have the line at a cheaper price than they can charge! Please don't get me started on the offshore call centres that Openreach use as they are the biggest source of complaints to the company, but we are told that the move to bring them back onshore has started. I'm sorry if any of you have had bad service from Openreach as most of the guys I work with go out of the way to provide you, the end user, with the best service they can. Sometimes it's out of their hands when it comes to cable renewals as that's from a different budget, they will have requested a cable length renewal, but someone in an office has said " Sorry that costs too much". It's very frustrating to continually be called back to the same house/street knowing full well what is wrong, what it needs to put it right, but being told " no can do" and then getting abuse from a customer when you have done everything you can.
That was the experience I had with the engineers. Most were pretty demoralised and embarrassed at having to go through the same pantomime of fault finding which half a dozen of them had done before just to tick a job box when we all knew what the real problem was. My impression was that they were treated by the management with the same contempt that customers received.
Openreach have been great for me, out here in the sticks. They know exactly where the cable joints are buried underground (which drops my speed if they get wet, from usual 6.8 Mb/s down to 0.1 or so) and often have to spend a happy afternoon digging them up. Dunno about BT though, as I've only been with them for s few months-still better than EE.
When it is wet and windy my broadband goes slow, I assume it is some underground cable / junction box getting flooded.
Johnv, do you have any overhead cable in your route? And by that I mean the larger cable from pole to pole, not the single cable (dropwire) to the house? It could be something as simple as the cable rubbing in trees. If you have a completely underground route, don't forget our network of ducts is probably larger than that of your local water company! It only takes a small hole in the cable sheath for water to penetrate and that's the start of a host of problems.
