Hey guys, My current broadband deal with PlusNet expires on Friday. Tomorrow is the last day of the BT Broadband Mastercard promotion. For those that don't know this is the promotion: 17mb Unlimited Broadband £23.99 a month x 12 + £9.99 setup fee = £297.87 -£70.00 cashback = £227.87 -£150 Mastercard = £77.87 || £6.49 a month (inc line rental+wknd calls) OR 52mb Unlimited Fibre £28.99 a month x 12 + £59.99 setup fee = £407.87 -£80.00 cashback = £327.87 -£200 Mastercard = £127.87 || £10.66 a month (inc line rental+wknd calls) Any reason I really shouldn't go for BT (can't be worse than plus net!) and any reason I should bother to pay the extra for Fibre (I never have in the past). Or any other good packages around I should have noticed? Thoughts welcome!
Fiber depends on your broadband usage scenarios. If you watch a lot of netflix or streaming in general its a huge quality of life to have. More so with multiple internet users.
The BT deal looks like a no-brainer. In my experience BT fibre BB is pretty reliable but, the speed you get will depend on how far you are from the green box and how good your line is as always. We get 24.6Mb approx. BTW, my cheesecake is mine, mine I tell you...
Go for it. My Mum did and she got a better speed of service (not talking about sync rate - I mean that during peak hours it didn't drag) and even though BT *say* and *legally* are not supposed to give you a better service when there's a telephone fault, they do. She ended up getting her master socket replaced (and moved since he was there anyway) due to poor quality cabling from the pole which increased her speed by 0.5Mbit and her old ISP wanted the £120 callout charge for it. BT just sent the engineer when she reported intermittent connection
Just go with whoever does it cheapest and doesn't impose usage restrictions, its all the same thing running through the same exchange down the same fibe cable and onto the same copper wire for the last hurdle.
BT are an absolute ****ing nightmare to put it lightly. The service makes sense... but oh my ****ing God. I cannot fathom how incompetent they are.
I'm in a similar boat regarding available broadband vs fibre where I am. I've toyed with getting fibre but can't justify the cost at the moment. As much as I'd like the extra speed of fibre (especially uploads) my broadband connection is reliable, fairly low latency and fast enough to do most of the things I want without feeling slow. Big game downloads take a while but that isn't something I do regularly and HD streaming etc aren't an issue. I'm sure 4k, an increasing desire for upload speeds and general data growth/bloat of will win me round some time but at the moment I'm okay without fibre. TBH I'm surprised you can't get a cheaper unlimited Broadband deal than that.
Their customer service is woeful and they've seemed like bullies at times when I've been their customer, however as Zoon says, whilst technically they aren't meant to provide a better repairs/faults service to their 'own' customers, they do. So it can make sense to go with BT, especially if their prices at that low.
Thanks all. I expected the odd customer service horror story, to be honest that's every ISP ever, you just have to hope you wont need them. The "green cabinet" is about 100 yards from our master socket, I assume that's why we get quite good plain BB speeds from PlusNet at the moment (8mb on speed tests). Do you think that makes cable more or less worth it? We use a lot of netflix and kodi, never really see any issues or stutters as is...I assume it's not going to improve the picture quality because of some clever netflix compression?
I do believe that you're the first to translate that in the 8 years it's been my sig +rep for you sir.
Yeah, my current deal PlusNet actually pay me £2 a month once you take the cashback into account! But alas there's simply no good deals around at the moment, must be the wrong time of year for big promotions or something!
Pretty much anything that isn't Virgin Media (DOCSIS run over Coax, don't be fooled by their 'fibre broadband' marketing ****) or a dedicate fibre rollout company like Hyperoptic, will be running over Openreach's network. BT, Sky, Plusnet, Talktalk, it's all Openreach that will be handling the link between you and your local exchange, and often between the local exchange and the backbone too. Speed is ultimately limited by that 'last mile' network, so speeds from different providers will effectively be identical.
Every single big UK ISP has it in their terms that if the fault is caused by anything other than them you will be charged for the fix. It is just luck of the draw with what the engineer tells his handlers. That said, I've gotten lucky with a BT repair as well, Engineer turned up the morning after I had filled in the fault report online and fixed the cable some builders had wrecked and I never got charged a penny for it.
That's because they're responsible for everything up until your house. I believe it is only once they have to change wiring within the home that they can charge.
I had nothing but good things to say about BT Infinity until I had to cancel due to moving. Then I had quite a few choice words that were not so positive. But I rarely had any outages, got more bandwidth than I should have done (paying for 72Mbps, got 73-78Mbps). I surely paid for it though; most expensive broadband I've ever had.
More specifically: if you remove the faceplate for the master socket, you will find that inside, the socket on the faceplate is actually plugged into a second socket inside the wall port. This second internal socket is the true 'demarcation point', the point between where Openreach owns the wiring and where you own the wiring. The upshot is: if you're having problems, plug the MODEM into this inner socket and confirm the problem still happens. If so, then the problem is with Openreach/your ISP. If the problem goes away when you use this socket, the problem is in your own wiring and callouts could incur a charge. It also means: don't mess with the wiring up to that socket, or you'll be on the hook for rectifying what is technically messing with their infrastructure.
Good to know, they should update the repair scheduling website then though, cause there they make it sound like they'll charge you for far more.
Had BT for almost 8 months now. Can't fault it. Have the full package (TV, phone, mobile and fibre). They sent me a £60 amazon voucher and a £100 cash back voucher as part of the deal. They did put their prices up (about £5 I think) but also offered me a way out of my contract at the same time if not willing to accept it.
