The Horror Of British Telecom

MBCook writes "'Someone, raised amidst the elegant lattice of custom and tradition that serves as the foundation of English society, came up with a very elegant, very British, solution to broadband policy here. And it absolutely, positively sucks.' So starts an article by Mark Hachman over at ExtremeTech chronicling his odyssey to get broadband in his new flat."

Comments

Let's review...

[MaestroSartori]

"...let's review the procedure for obtaining broadband in the U.S. Step #1: Call up your cable or DSL provider, walk through the options, and decide what you want. Step #2: Receive and install the modem, or have an installer do it for you. Step #3: There is no Step #3!"

So, let's review the procedure for obtaining broadband in the UK:

Step #1: Call up BT, to make sure you have a line capable of receiving broadband. (Apparently everyone in the US can receive a broadband connection. That's what this guy says, anyway!)

Step #2: l up your cable or DSL provider, walk through the options, and decide what you want.

Step #3: Receive and install the modem, or have an installer do it for you.

Step #4: There is no Step 4! Unless there's a problem, in which case the useless bureaucracy of BT kicks in!

Seriously though, this guy's problem with "The Horror of BT" is just him making a lot of noise about nothing. There's plenty of room for more legitimate gripes about how BT run things - for instance, if you have a fault with a line, their engineers will only come out between 9am-5pm Mon-Fri. Absolutely useless for 99% of the working population! :/

Re:Let's review...

[PowerBert]

Actually I had a fault with my BT line a litle over a month ago. I called BT on Friday evening (from my mobile) and a BT engineer was at my house on Saturday afternoon. BT kept me informed throughout the process. At around 4:30 Saturday afternoon I asked the engineer what time he clocked off and he replied "When the lines fixed, I can't leave a customer without service."

BT's not all bad.

Should have checked his facts...

[taobill]

Which means that almost all of the ISPs simply resell the same BT service

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Check your freakin' facts before you go slagging off the rather elegant BT system.

The bit that is the same is the DSL connection between your house and the exchange, and the virtual circuit over BT's ATM network to the ISP.

It is then up to the ISP in question as to how they link you (the customer) to the Internet.

You can pay a pittance and get a shitty connection with a dynamic IP address, through a transparent web proxy and have your web surfing go down every few weeks (or whenever it gets really busy).

Or you can pay a few pounds more and get a static IP address (or even a range) and no transparent proxy, and loads of back-end bandwidth so that you get a very reliable service.

Although I am not surprised that a foreigner wouldn't know this because very few Brits are aware of these facts either.

Re:Poor article

[AdmiralWeirdbeard]

well...I've never had a phone line fault...

Besides the whole BT system sounds not so much quaint as uselessly fucked up. Why are you choosing to read criticism of such an assbackwards system as xenophobia against the brittish? If he wanted to do that, he could have just refered to the people he dealt with at the various isp's as being limp-wristed tea-sucking limeys--but he didnt. In fact there were no negative imprecations against britain at all apart from what he saw as the rather neolitic broadband situation, which seemed pretty well justified. In fact he started out by making sure that it was understood that he happened to like the place and that his was not a typical UglyAmerican tirade against a foreign country for not being america.
I think you're reaching a bit
chill

Re:What's taking so long?

[wsapplegate]

> Most of these problems would likely not of occured if they hadn't privatised BT .

I agree _in part_ with you. I've witnessed first hand the result of the deregulation of another telco market (the French one, with France Télécom as the Ugly Monopolist From Hell), and here's what happened :

• You can now transfer your local loop to another provider, either just for ADSL (in which case the signal is split at the exchange between voice--to FT--and DSL--to the competitor's DSLAM) or completely (in which case the entire pair is routed to the competitor's equipment--still not widely practiced). I understand that FT charges the competitors a nominal fee for caring over the physical loop)
• If you've a problem with your DSL (or, in the latter case, your entire line), you need to call your provider (FT won't process your call). This implies calling an overpriced hotline which often won't be open 24/7 (in some cases, it's a far cry from that). In turn, your provider's technical services will call a FT service called the GAMOT. This is a service which *only* deals with operators, not customers. The GAMOT will then dispatch FT techs to the exchange and report the tech's findings to your provider, who will (or not !) tell you what they found. If they weren't able to diagnose the problem, you'll be in for a wild ride, trying to get your operator to call back the GAMOT with more technical details, and hoping nothing will get lost in the process. The situation can even get worse if your provider uses the services of a third-party operator for hauling the traffic to their routers, since you know have *three* levels of indirection. And throughout this, you've no way at all to communicate with the guys who will really act on the field, or even their dispatchers, nor any way to know firsthand what they found
• To add insult to injury, some resellers practice slamming : they will happily sign you up for their provider (even if you said "no thanks"), thus grabbing some affiliate proceeds. Of course, since you aren't that interested in changing providers, you will need to get the slammed provider to retake the line, and make sure the slamming one understands they've acted on a false request and doesn't charge anything. In the end, you're sure to win (provided you weren't dumb enough to sign anything), but it's a time-consuming process
• Finally, there is wide confusion about what services exactly you're eligible to, especially since different providers have different standards, you'll maybe find that your line would support 2 Mbps with $provider_one but your $chosen_provider refuses to give you more than 1 Mbps. At times, the databases are also confused, your provider telling you initially you're eligible, then changing tune when they check with their operator's realtime database. Tiring. There even exists websites dedicated to checking the databases to find out exactly what you can get with whom.

On the other hand, before deregulation you would only get 1024 kbps at cut-throat prices. Now, most providers go up to 8 Mbps, and a few will even provide 20 Mbps ADSL2 with free national long-distance phone calls and TV service. So, I will stop short of saying "there shouldn't have been any deregulation", it was clearly good since it spawned a lot of interesting offers. But the way it has been done is quite stupid, especially the fact that you no longer get a free hotline in touch with the actual people doing the work. The market was stagnant, right. But the way it is now is more like "anarchy in the .FR"... I can see why they did it this way (avoid confusing the users with multiple points of contact) but the end result is that many problems take longer (in some cases *much* longer) to be solved. The most knowledgeable people still have a separate DSL traffic hauling contract with FT and an Internet service contract with a third-party provider that still does it (there aren't many that do anymore) for reliability (yo

The Psychology of Attracting BT Engineers

[evilandi]

>>their engineers will only come out between 9am-5pm Mon-Fri.
>Technically not true. They have early-shift and late-shift engineers, and the former can work pretty early in the morning. But you have to find your way through the incredible, Byzantine, almost unreal tangle of red tape

...or...

When you arrange the engineer's visit, insist that the operator puts "CUSTOMER WILL SUPPLY BACON SANDWICH" on the call details.

I have used this trick twice now. First call of the morning (08:30) every time. One of the guys actually drove a 30 mile round trip back to HQ to pick up a spare part and come back to me, after being fed a bacon sandwich and promised more.

Seriously, you have to be aware than BT engineers get allocated a whole heap of calls for the day, then they get to choose which ones to do in which order. The ones they leave until later will probably get postponed as they run late.

Therefore you need to make your call the attractive one which the engineer picks first.

All BT engineers like bacon sandwiches. There are NO vegitarian BT engineers. You need calories and protein to climb telephone poles.

Next, the most important question when the engineer arrives is "Tea or coffee, milk and sugar?". Once you have your engineer, you want to keep him on your side. Your anger with the bureacracy of BT means nothing to him, if you get feisty he can just pretend he doesn't have the part and will have to come back tomorrow (ie. you get marked as troublesome and always get picked last each day).