Ditto your comments about this site, particularly the last few months.

With the giant providers like BT, Virgin, Sky, there's no access to a basic "Floor level" service because they got huge great corporate structures and salaries and the shareholders to support, so you have to buy the service with the expensive wiz-bangs. And their fixed charges for landlines are ludicrous as far as my usuage is concerned. I'll have to look around to see if there is a simple simon BB provider (Perhaps with access other than by LL) and ditch the LL for phones for a mobile provider.

Maybe that opportunity will present when the leccy start installing the smart meters ?

Nick

Nick

 

Havent you heard?? BT have you by the short and curlies, there ARE "no voice call" line rental plans, but BT charge more than TWICE as much for them as having a voice line.

 

BTW, my line rental is £13.99, and hasnt gone up in 2 1/2 years; go for an ISP that offers line rental, and internet (and perhaps calls), is far cheaper for the phone side of things; I pay 5ppm to UK and many international numbers (including mobiles in China) WITH NO SET UP and TERMINATE CALL fees. So if I make a 1 minute call I pay 5p, not ~45p as with BT. My call charges last month were 15p, as I use my mobile for nearly all outgoing calls (bundled minutes - even then I barely use a 3rd of them).

About £42, incl weekend plan calls.

 

 

That  seems expensive - I pay  £30 incl Line rental, anytime calls, 1000 to mobile minutes  and international calls - 38max (get 30) down and 10 up.

That  seems expensive - I pay  £30 incl Line rental, anytime calls, 1000 to mobile minutes  and international calls - 38max (get 30) down and 10 up.

 

Ever had your line go down, or suffered a strange connection issue?? THAT is when the expensive/cheap equation goes out of the window; in the last 2 1/2 years I have had less than 5 minutes of downtime - and THAT was caused by a BT engineer unplugging the wrong line last week.

 

My personal experiences are - cheap ISP - get the run around and little or no action for a week or so MINIMUM; good, but expensive ISP - immediate action, comprehensive line testing by the help desk guy (who knows what he's doing), and LISTENS to your description of the fault; if he thinks an engineer is required he books it THERE AND THEN, while you are still on the line.

 

After TT stole my phone line a few years back, I had to arrange for a new line and number; the ISP I chose charged the O.R fee for the new physical line (ie HALF what BT charge), and booked the earliest available appointment on the OR system (ten days). They then got back to me a few hours later and said a cancellation had occurred and was I happy with a date in SIX days (of course I was).

 

Now it is stupid, but you cannot have fibre installed at the same time, and by the same guy fitting a new line, so a 2nd appoint for fibre had been made for the day after my original appointment date to do this; following the bump from 10 to 6 days, the ISP also rearranged the fibre appointment and got me online on the 7th day.

 

Everything basic up and running, but IPv6 wasnt working, so a call to the tech guy and he talked me through the settings on my new router, and hung around for 20 minutes AFTER his normal finish time to check the IPv6 connection was working correctly, and I had no more issues.

 

Try getting this from a cheap ISP.

Ever had your line go down, or suffered a strange connection issue?? THAT is when the expensive/cheap equation goes out of the window; in the last 2 1/2 years I have had less than 5 minutes of downtime - and THAT was caused by a BT engineer unplugging the wrong line last week.

 

My personal experiences are - cheap ISP - get the run around and little or no action for a week or so MINIMUM; good, but expensive ISP - immediate action, comprehensive line testing by the help desk guy (who knows what he's doing), and LISTENS to your description of the fault; if he thinks an engineer is required he books it THERE AND THEN, while you are still on the line.

 

After TT stole my phone line a few years back, I had to arrange for a new line and number; the ISP I chose charged the O.R fee for the new physical line (ie HALF what BT charge), and booked the earliest available appointment on the OR system (ten days). They then got back to me a few hours later and said a cancellation had occurred and was I happy with a date in SIX days (of course I was).

 

Now it is stupid, but you cannot have fibre installed at the same time, and by the same guy fitting a new line, so a 2nd appoint for fibre had been made for the day after my original appointment date to do this; following the bump from 10 to 6 days, the ISP also rearranged the fibre appointment and got me online on the 7th day.

 

Everything basic up and running, but IPv6 wasnt working, so a call to the tech guy and he talked me through the settings on my new router, and hung around for 20 minutes AFTER his normal finish time to check the IPv6 connection was working correctly, and I had no more issues.

 

Try getting this from a cheap ISP.

 

Yes but I'm not a business and don't need all that.  It's not the end of the world if I can't watch Netflix Besides I wasn't commenting on your setup more Nick's BT one.

Yes but I'm not a business and don't need all that.  It's not the end of the world if I can't watch Netflix Besides I wasn't commenting on your setup more Nick's BT one.

 

It's not just for business, I pay most of my bills online, and use online banking; several times, with my old ISP, the line would go down due to a stupid, repeating fault* that would take them a week to fix; and it regularly did so JUST as it was too late to manually go pay the CC bill, so I would incur charges, or have to race around to find somewhere I could borrow a connection.

 

*DSLAM in the cabinet would randomly lock up, but remote report it was operating fine, it took an onsite on/off cycle to fix, BT wouldnt HEAR of replacing it though, nor would the ISP take note of the fact it repeated every few months, so they went through the whole fault script every time and drove me to screaming fits with them.

 

The final straw was the clusterkitten that saw my phone line given to TT, but my connection reconfigured to a BT log-in, (my ISP denied both occurrences were due to them); I was leaching an unsecured wifi connection for 6 weeks trying to get them to sort it out before switching to Aquiss.