BT Broadband Prices

[NeilM]

I'm a BT customer and have been in all three of the houses I have owned over a period of 42 years.

Last year Virgin laid fibre down the road but as I was still in contract with BT I just made a mental note.

My contract with BT ran out a few months ago but the broadband speeds were OK and it was all going to be a lot of fuss to change, until yesterday when BT sent me an email saying they were putting my price up "in line with inflation" by £8.22 a month.

Looking on line at various options I found out that much like insurance companies BT DO NOT reward long term customers. The offer if I just type in my address is £27.99 a month and 16 - 29 Mb/m. If I then open my BT account the offer is £47.94 and 9Mb/m. Both of those are 24 month contracts. Well thanks BT.

EE is cheaper than BT by a couple of quid but the speeds are no better at 9Mb/m

As a comparison Virgin have a huge variety of packages but the 132 Mb/m deal at £15 for 6 months and £30 for 18 months would be comparable.

Looks like I need to make some phone call.

As an aside, ALL the web sites are shyte, with all sorts of information missing or only found if you dig down and down the page.

[pb]

Before you spend too much time looking at switching try phoning customer retentions with BT. I've been with TalkTalk for the last 8 years and every time my contract is up for renewal I phone them , tell them I am happy with the service and tell them I don't want to pay any more than I am paying at present, works every time. I'm still paying £25 a month for internet and anytime calls including line rental. 

[NeilM]

A phone call to BT is the first plan of action.

[Brockett]

Broadband services require a lot of electricity and energy costs will have trippled by April 2023 (thanks to previous government's policy on pricing) so price rises must be expected.   I was sleepwalking into a BT rip off for a few years before I woke up and changed to EE and halved my bills for the same service. Then EE was bought out by BT. I wonder why? ( no I don't) EE prices rose steeply after that and I switched to Talk Talk who proved to be hopeless at "listening". I am now with "Shell Energy" for broadband only. 

[timangus]

I had similar issues with BT, and am now with Plusnet for phone and broadband. My bill is around £30 a month.

[Barbel Mick]

It's your choice of course but be aware that most of these 'cheaper' prices are there to lure you in, then once your short term contract is up, the new contract will be very much the same as all the others. Then once you're with them no other company will reward long term customers!
A couple of the comments above have said, "ring BT", yes, do that. I do it every time my contract is due to run out & have always managed to get it cheaper....they want your business & to keep it they will charge you less. Be prepared with other companies prices & tell them the companies you are thinking of going to (but don't tell BT what the prices are, let them give you their 'best price' first!
A few months ago City Fibre put new Optic Fibre cables in on our estate & I could choose between three broadband providers, I went with BT as there was little difference in the prices after 6 months.
When you looked at the BT 'deals' did you notice that BT do broadband without a phone now? On their web page you can choose prices with or without a phone line. 

[Mr Nick]

I've been with Plusnet for my internet access for a long time, but had my line through BT. After finally resolving intermittent service issues, I swapped my line over as well, and my Plusnet bill is now pretty much the same as it was before, but includes my line rental now, due to promotional discounts. The adviser I spoke to even told me to call back when the 18 months of this deal is up and they'll sort another deal out then.
I don't have the Virgin option here, but the next town does, and people I know who live there and have Virgin speak of great speeds, but prone to being affected by the weather. Virgin is predominantly retro installed and their infrastructure seems to be susceptible to water ingress, especially with all the 'pepperpot' access points, and drainage isn't the best.

[Robotstar5]

The comment about Virgin reminds me of a chat I had recently with some Openreach blokes trying to replace some cables. He said there were some redundant cables in the ducting but Virgin couldn't be bothered to pull them out to make room for their own cables so just forced the new ones through which had jammed all the cables solid in the ducting and there was no chance of even pulling the redundant ones out now.

[Barbel Mick]

If you read my post above you will have seen that City Fibre contractors put some new Optic Fibre cables in on our estate a few months back. Well, when the first Openreach engineer came out to survey the job of getting my fibre to the house, (a new duct & cable had to be dug in from the pavement to the house under the front garden), he couldn't find the Openreach joint box that should have been in the pavement outside our house, it used to be, but somehow it got buried when the City Fibre contractors, re-laid the tarmac! Last week two more Openreach lads turned up with picks & shovels, found the joint box & laid the new duct & cable.
Unfortunately Openreach & a lot of other companies turned to contractors to try & save money a few years ago, in Openreach's case they have seen the error of their ways & are going back to in house engineers. Contractors created more problems than they fixed & I would hazard a guess that in Robotstar's case the Virgin 'workers' were contractors.   

[purplebikeunicorn]

Beware of what service you're actually buying.

Virgin (if in a Virgin area), offer fibre broadband. You'll get a much higher speed but may pay a little more. Normally includes a phone line I think? I think they only offer services over their own network, so you have to be in their catchment area.

FTTP (fibre to the premises, anything from 150mbps to 1gbps+, I.e. fibre run right to your house) is getting more common, have a search round. You may be restricted to one company for a little bit til they sort out the sharing/leasing details, but the start prices seem pretty competitive. You will almost certainly lose your phone number unless you transfer this to a VOIP company (or continue paying your line rental to someone for your phone line). This isn't a concern if you don't use your landline.

If getting FTTC (up to approx 80mbps) - the line is generally leased from Openreach (regardless of which provider you go with), therefore the MAX speed you can ever possibly get will be the same for all providers. The individual companies switches/infrastructure/packages then limit your speeds further... I pay £21 per month for TalkTalk 80mbps FTTC, and have done for the past 18 months, with £20 per month for the 18 months before that. Expect this will rise to like £24-25 on the next bill due to CPI increases. TalkTalks customer service can be very hit or miss, but the service I've had has been nothing but perfect, and when I reach the end of contract I just ring up (ignoring the "deals" they send) and say I'm leaving, and they match, or close as damnit match the other price. Last contract end deal was £27.99 per month, and they dropped it to £21pm to match Vodafone. If you have speed problems with your current broadband caused by a line fault, this may transfer to any other provider that you go to.

Finally, some companies still offer plain ADSL2+, normally at the same cost as the basic FTTC packages, but there is absolutely no reason to get this unless you don't have any option for FTTC.

[NeilM]

Thanks for all the input and suggestions.

I spent a bit of time digging around BT's web site yesterday and found that I have a 14Mb/s minimum guarantee. A test showed at best I am currently getting 12.3Mb/s ( this used to be 20 +) and according to BT there is a fault with my broadband.

The fault is most likely the cable in the road that was laid when the estate was built in 1973. It has never been replaced, water ingress has damaged sections which have had new lengths of cables patched in, both council workers and the Virgin contractors (a right bunch of cowboys who cause havoc wherever in the town they were 'working') have severed it in multiple places.

BT have on many occasions notified me of an impending 'fibre upgrade' but when I check my address on their web site, it always comes back with 'no upgrade planned for this area', so any provider who is using the existing copper infrastructure is going to struggle to get anywhere near the speeds offered on Virgin Media's brand new fibre network.

Having spoken with my wife, we have decided we no longer need a landline, the only people who ring us on a regular basis are caught by our call blocker facility, even my wife's sister, who is stuck in the early 1980's has started to ring my wife on her mobile rather than the landline. So I am looking at a broadband only deal.

My daughter is with Virgin and seems more than happy to recommend them, my son is with EE, pays less than me and gets higher speeds, but we are back to copper cables, so....

I will start the phone calls today. It all feels more than a little bit like car insurance renewal time.

[Brockett]

No full fibre for me because between the street, which has a newly laid fibre cable, and my bungalow, there is a short unadopted lane and so services will never be offered to me.  However, every month or so I get a flyer in the post offering me "full fibre". Additionally I think TalkTalk jacked up my broad band charges to try to induce me to take up their super fast offer, which of course I couldn't.  .  It is very difficult to talk to TalkTalk about anything other than charges or faults so the invitations came in thick and fast until I changed providers.

[NeilM]

My late Father in Law was with Talk Talk. He was always moaning about them... and British Gas... and Bristol Energy, the water board, Post Office..... 

When he passed away in August it took us three or four attempts to shut the account and even once shut they sent us a bill for something silly like three quid.

Not a firm I'm inclined to look at.

[Barbel Mick]

Dave, in most, if not all cases, any FTTP providers will have to change any copper cables to the premises. So, if your current telephone service is supplied using underground cables, a fibre-optic cable will be installed between a nearby underground chamber and your premises, or if your telephone service is supplied using overhead cables fed from a telegraph pole, a new fibre-optic cable will be installed between the telegraph pole and your premises.
Is your telephone wiring fed underground or are you fed overhead? (I would imagine only Openreach would provide overhead fibre cable but you may still be able to use that with another provider as you do at present.
I would contact your present provider & others & ask......"Can I have full fibre?", explain your circumstances & see what they say. 

[purplebikeunicorn]

If your minimum speed is 14Mbps on FTTC then something is very very wrong. If you still have a few months with your current provider I'd get them to log a fault and have an engineer out to see if they can fix something up for you.

My place has underground cabling, installed when the estate was built (some 50+ years ago), and it's supporting 80Mbps quite happily.

FTTP or Virgin will use separate cables to the copper phone lines anyway, so any fault on the Openreach network won't affect them. They'll run their own cabling in to your house if its not already there (in the case of Virgin).

Some of the switching sites (like uswitch) are now getting full fibre suggestions correct, just search for broadband 100mbps+ to find providers in your local area. It suggested BT to me, along with Vodafone - BT isn't quite here yet, but Vodafone is. Zzoomm, Gigaclear, etc are all names to check too.

[Brockett]

@ Barbel Mick- Overhead wires strung on poles.

[Mr Nick]

I was stuck with 20Mbps FTTC for quite some time and Openreach weren't able to find any faults when they came & tested it from time to time, and it was put down to the distance from the cabinet to my house. Openreach then transferred me to a new cabinet they installed much closer, but there was no change, but I was able to get by with that speed anyway, so I never pushed it.
I then had it fail completely and they found a section of wire which had failed: they had used aluminium wire when they built my street and it had just corroded away. Once they fixed that, I was suddenly at 55Mbps, but the engineer couldn't figure out why the testing hadn't identified any higher resistance until it crumbled away altogether.
Not long afterwards, I started getting intermittent dropped connections and still couldn't find any issues on the line. After a number of engineer visits, they'd re-done my connection in the cabinet, found a spare line in the bundle heading for the new houses down the road & swapped me to that, replaced the master socket in the house twice, I'd replaced my router, yet still the dropped connections kept happening and the speed capped. Eventually, I was talking to yet another engineer and we went over everything that had been done, and the only bit left was from my house to the junction box across the road. As a last thing to try before trying to rewire that, he swapped the connection to the other pair of wires and everything has worked flawlessly since then. The four wires all reported the same results to every test he did on them, yet one pair kept failing.
Now I'm sitting with 77Mbps all day, every day, so it's worth getting Openreach out to properly check things out & try swapping some connections over.

[NeilM]

The best we have ever seen with BT was about 21Mb/s and that was a couple of years ago. I don't know when the speed dropped, I have for some while blamed my ageing Mac mini, I am now wondering if the BT line has been the issue all along.

Our nearest cabinet, which was completely renewed a few years back is at the bottom of the road, about a half a mile away, so between me and it, is a whole bunch of 40 year old, patched together cables.

I have in the last couple of days checked almost all the names suggested above, every time I am asked for my postcode and phone number, except Virgin who just wanted the postcode. All the providers like Vodafone, Plusnet, EE etc, who assume are going to use the Openreach network, come back with speeds from between 9 to 14 Mb/s, which tells me the BT infrastructure is shot.... and for this I am paying £47.90 per month..... but not for much longer.

[Brockett]

My Broadband speed as tested today shows:  10.24Mbps Via wires on a pole although I don't have a landline phone. And a letter yesterday says it's going up by £3 per month from April to a cost of £27 pcm
 Average for this area:  64.5Mbps
 Range for the area is: 49 to 80 Mbps
The street at foot of the lane has fibre cables.
According to Open Reach there is no plan to bring fibre to my property which is IRO 30 meters from the cable under the street. But Open Reach cannot actually reach that far. Good old OFFCOM (I don't mean that)  maximising the profit for OR by allowing them to cherry pick the easy ones.

[Ianmc]

   Slightly off topic,this is a speed test on my Virgin copper cable to a box on the corner of the street.Good service until someone else local to me goes with Virgin and an engineer has to delve into the box to connect them and cuts me off 😂…………it has happened twice now.