It might be just me, my misperception, or the fact that I haven’t quite understood yet what “support” means in this country (I think it might be arguable if it means anything at all). But I have the feeling that ISPs in the UK have no clue what they are doing! Let’s hope they don’t do that on purpose…
When I moved in a year ago, there wasn’t a broadband connection in this house, but there was a phone line — with BT apparently. So I went for the option, which I hoped would be the quickest (in terms of getting connected): BT. 8meg sounded ok to me, and I didn’t want to use 3G all the time (although I had a lot of traffic allowance on my contract).
We were in fact online after a couple of days. However, we did not get 8meg. We were around 6meg first, with a rather ridiculous upstream speed:
But, as we all know BT, things never get better. They only get worse… This year we had “impressive” results, especially in the evenings:
This picture might look like an exception, but it’s not. Towards the end of the contract things got even worse:
I’d like to point out again, that this connection was supposed to be a 8meg connection!
Even my T-Mobile 3G connection could compete with that:
We were told that our line quality is too poor to offer higher speeds. And the exchange was too far away, they said. In fact it’s only about 300m down the street! Plus, one might wonder why we got 6meg downstream half a year earlier then? Why did it constantly get worse, especially in the evenings? Right, because the uplinks from the exchange onwards are blocked. They connect more customers than they actually can handle. Should introduce Congestion Charge there, seriously! So, probably it doesn’t surprise anyone that we did not stay with BT.
Virgin Media’s fibre optic offers were very appealing. Our neighbours next door have it. Our neighbours on the other side next door can have it. And even in the same house, our neighbours upstairs can have it. That’s what the online availability checker said and still says. Guess what? Right, we cannot have it!
I thought a support call might actually help discover an error in their database, and in fact we can have it, too. Well, I thought. Obviously every man-hour is way more expensive than the monthly fibre optic rental customers are being charged. So they showed little to no effort, and told me that I can’t have it, because that would be technically impossible. Why? The cable is out there, and my neighbours upstairs can have it. Why would it be technically impossible? The sophisticated answer was: I don’t know. The system shows it’s impossible and wont change in due course.
A second call, hoping to talk to someone who’s a little bit brighter, didn’t make a difference. Other words, same meaning.
People recommended Be* and reckoned that they had a good customer support, too. Interestingly they estimated a possible line speed of 19meg! Wow! To be fair, I would have been happy with anything beyond 4meg, which wouldn’t drop in the evenings.
Only one week after we decided to switch, we were connected with Be*. There was only a 3 or 4 hours gap on the day they switched the line. While I was working from home, I could fill that gap with T-Mobile 3G.
One of the first things I did after we got connected was, of course, to verify the line speed with Be*. Here’s the first result:
Yay! But…wait. Didn’t they say 19meg downstream and 2.5meg upstream? So we only got half of the promised speed. Hmm. Of course, still way better than BT ever was — on the same physical phone line! However, we are humans… we always want more, especially when someone promises to give more. So I quickly changed my mind and decided not to be happy to have 4meg or more. That’s probably because I somehow expected that the line wasn’t capable of offering more than the 6meg we initially got from BT. But as it was, I became greedy 
After a couple of support tickets and two weeks later, the best results we ever got (relatively stable) were these:
Be*’s support turned out to be good with simple things, and total failure with difficult things. Arguable if support is the right term then. Actually their user forums were more helpful than their paid staff. Ping here, traceroute there, connect via Ethernet rather than wireless… Also they didn’t really read the whole trail of the ticket. Just the last message. Which, obviously, resulted in the same questions being asked over and over again — and a solution being severely delayed.
The funny thing was that the BeBox (the provided DSL router) synced with different speeds on every single re-connect. Plus, it started to reboot randomly, dropping the DSL connection for 5 minutes each. Sometimes 4-5 times a day (probably more often, but we didn’t notice). How would a ping or traceroute help to solve this? (Yes, I have been asked a couple of times to provide pings and traceroutes to google.com and the BBC!)
Anyway, let’s continue…
Be* offers three different DSL profiles (sync setups), which customers can choose from:
- optimised for speed
- normal
- optimised for reliability
Plus, you can opt in for the fast path option, which gives way faster round trip times at the cost of reduced error correction.
The BeBox was using the “normal” profile without fast path. We did try the “optimised for speed” option, but that made things worse. The disconnects really bothered me, but I didn’t want to reduce the speed further. So the picture above shows the maximum we could get through the line using a BeBox, and accepting a couple of disconnections a day. I wasn’t impressed.
In different forums I found people complaining about the BeBox, describing similar symptoms. So I thought: Let’s just try another router, for whatever it’s worth.
I ordered the D-Link DSL-2640B (£50). When it arrived, it took me about 30 minutes to get it running (20 minutes to get the DHCP lease renewed, 10 minutes configuration and reboot). And here are the very first results (still with Be*’s “normal” profile, and without fast path):
Did you notice? More than 3meg more downstream with exactly the same line and cabling, just a replaced router. And this was an average speed test result. (By the way: I did not only use speedtest.net with their Maidenhead server; I double-checked the results with other tests, too — all of the reported results in this article)
But it gets even more interesting: As the D-Link apparently can deal way better with a below-average line quality, I wondered if I could push it a bit. Today I asked Be* to switch to “optimised for speed” and activate fast path on my line. And now watch this:
To digest this article… On the same physical line, I got:
- 6meg initally with BT
- dropping down to 2meg with BT
- 11meg with Be* and their BeBox
- 16.5meg with Be*, optimised settings and a D-Link router
Using Be* with a third-party router can result in 10.5meg more bandwidth than BT said would be possible on that phone line, and even 5.5meg (50%!) more than Be*’s BeBox can achieve on that line.
The D-Link router didn’t show any uncorrectable errors so far. No disconnects. No other unexpected problems. But very good performance!
Why the heck do the ISPs bundle crap hardware with their offers, causing unnecessary support inquiries? And why do the ISPs not have support staff in place, who are actually capable of dealing with the increased support load then?
Or in other words: Why does the customer have to spend lots of time and a bit of extra money to figure out and solve the issues on their own, while all they requested was to get what they actually pay for?
[ Update: I just realised that Be* switched the line back to the normal profile without fast path active. Sync speed and throughput went immediately back down to the old values. Let's see how long it takes to get my preferred settings activated (and hopefully persisted!) again. I'm getting slightly mad at them. And the option on their "website" (quotation marks on purpose -- see youself!), where I could in theory choose the setting myself, is broken, too. So I have to wait for their support to do it... ]
[ Update 2: About one hour later, I'm back to the desired settings... Let's see for how long. They claim it has been changed on the member portal. I wish I could do that, but firstly it's broken there, and secondly I haven't touched it at all... Funny people. ]
