Business Phoneline and Broadband

[Brian]

I'm doing my 'every couple of years am I on the best deal' check on my business phone and 'net connection.

 

I work a lot from home and currently have...

 

BT domestic line for home

BT business line for work

Net connection (business grade) from Demon which sits on the BT business line

 

By having the net connection on the business line it gets fixed quicker than if it sat on the domestic line.

 

A couple of years ago I was tempted to swap the business line to an all-in deal which looked very attractive BUT, once they had my order (surprise surprise), they seemed incapable of doing anything else, like bothering to send me the paperwork to read, and in the end I cancelled which took some doing as they weren't interested and it took a call to a helpful person at BT to unwind the migration instructions.

 

So, I am biased towards staying with a reputable company.

 

On the net side I want a reliable connection with unlimited data and an equally unlimited ability to connect to what I want however I want. It's not that I want to run a darknet server or similar but I am totally opposed to any form of net censorship.

 

BT regularly offer me a package of line rental, free calls and business broadband for what looks like a good price but I have no experience of their net service.

 

 

So, my question is, is anyone in a similar situation and who do you use/recommend?

[paulears]

I have been with BT for ever. I work from home, and have two business lines, and BT broadband and if it wasn't for being locked into BTs email on one dedicated BT address (on an old server they keep open for legacy customers) I'd move.

 

I have two lines because BT Wholesale couldn't get broadband working on the original line. I use the new line just for broadband. I don't think I've noticed any diference in service at all - as BT wholesale provide the service for everyone. My unused business phone actually died - Broadband was still fine - but it took a week to get it fixed. If that had been the one I use for calls ........

 

For the expensive price I pay, I don't even get access to the new BT sports (I hate sport, so not an issue - but as a point of principal, it stinks).

 

I have nearly got my old btaddress contacts clear. An old problem with auto connecting systems where the people who run them don't know how to change the old addresses. At some point, they will install new gear their end then I can dump my old btclick address.

 

I intend moving from BT as soon as I can. They offered me business fibre at an extra £30 a month. I need a phone and a broadband - that's all, yet I'm maying £45 a month for service identical to my neighbour who pays a third of this. BT are simply hopeless. To change provider means changing my main number to the newer number, then getting broadband installed on that - a process I can see going horribly wrong!

 

If you find a good non-BT provider, I'll swap in the next six months,maybe. The working broadband line comes into the extension buildings at the rear, so connecting that to the phone line in the rest of the house will be tricky, I just need to disconnect from the BT line intake, and then reconnect to the rear of the building - but concrete floors present some snags.

 

 

I can find no reason at all to think there is a service difference between domestic and business. All I actually get is a hosted website and email.

 

BT even changed my main email address to the website title, without asking - mail to the old one internally being redirected, but my outgoing email has to be sent to the BT system on the website username - which I never ever use! Complaining was a waste of time! So over the years I was ZXY@btclick.com, then @btconnect, and now they've used (without asking) paul@mywebsite.org.uk.

 

Worst of all is I have to log in with a wrong spelling of my surname, which is what BT put on my bills, and they cannot change it - I've asked many times, and the person always says "of course we can change it", then they call back and say sorry - my account name is fixed! I had one BT business contact who was good, but he retired and now it's a lottery at the call centre. If the service I get is the double price special service for business customers, I hate to think what a BT domestic customer gets.

[Owain]

Generally I've been very pleased with both Claranet and Plusnet in the past. Gradwell also have an excellent reputation.

 

I long ago stopped using ISP email addresses and got my own domain. Everything is auto-forwarded to two webmail services (one is Gmail) so I can check mail even if one webmail service is down, and have back-up and IMAP on Gmail). ISP web hosting is usually pretty limited too and well worth a few quid a month to a proper hosting company.

 

All my phone numbers are now delivered through VoIP so are physical carrier independent. My former BT landline numbers were ported in. If the physical carrier goes down I can get all my voicemails on the VoIP provider website; they're also all forwarded to email (redundant webmail services, remember) and I can retrieve them by phone as well. If Sipgate goes down then I'm fairly confident that their upstream number provider (Magrathea) will have a number porting/migration arrangement.

 

The only thing I use my landline for now apart from IP is free inclusive evening calls, power fail and 999 backup.

 

 

[musht]

Think it partly depends on how much bandwidth you use day to day,people like graphic designers, sign makers and collaborating musicians may transfer multi meg files many times a day and a reliable fat pipe is neccessary for continuity and worth paying for.

 

Here am on dome3stik Virgin cable at lowest,cheapest speed, its gone down mebbe 4 times in last 12 years for longer than 5 minutes , during monsoon rain conditions, apart from that my I.P. appears to change about once a decade.

 

Premium business service would not have got physical rain induced faults cleared any quicker.

 

What has proved to be one of best ever investments was a Fon Fonera router:

 

https://shop.fon.com/FonShop/shop/GB/ShopController?view=product&product=PRD-022

 

This allows access to Fon spots worlwide, in U.K. BT supplies wifi routers with Fon enabled by default, which means that Fon WiFi is generally easy to find, there`s a lot of BT wifi routers out there.

 

Next layer of backup is 2 3G mobile phones on different networks, easy to tether for full meal deal internet.

 

Personal predjudices:

Vodafone data, and coverage in general, is a bad joke , left when couldn`t get a data connection in central London looking at the BT Tower out of my window.

Plusnet are decent people to deal with.

Always select , `yes I want to take a short customer survey `when dealing with BT on the phone....

[sablednah]

Unfortunately whilst BT has always given me adequate service, they are the first to jump on-board any censorship legislation. And Cameron's recent censorship rollout was agreed with BT, Sky and Talk Talk so you'd prolly want to keep in mind those ones if net-neutrality is important to you.

 

 

I work via 2 locations, one has 2 lines, one on Eclipse internet, the other with BT for backup. The other location has "just" a virgin cable line.

 

Eclipse internet (http://www.eclipse.net.uk/) have always served me VERY well, esp their new fibre services (AKA FTC / Infinity). And as musht recommended above, I have always gone for Virgin Cable whenever its available in the area. They have some minor DNS issues sometimes - but just add in Google's public DNS servers on your router (8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4) and voilla - fixed.

 

As it appears you've already noticed, ADSL lines are fixed by OpenReach whoever you pay for the calls, and just as BT Business get fixed faster, so do 3rd parties like Eclipse. In fact - IME I find faults on the Eclipse lines are fixed faster than the BT ones.

 

Hope this helps a bit ;)

[themadhippy]

so you'd prolly want to keep in mind those ones if net-neutrality is important to you.

Theres always ways round censorship ;).Recently moved away from demon after many years of excellent services,pity they were bought out by that bunch of tax dodgers voodofone

[the kid]

With out going too far I did find a couple of months back a ISP who was very small but getting bigger and was being all "freedom of the net" etc, the service looks very good and had a good speed. Not a clue what it was called but I guess a google around the open rights site might help.

[bigclive]

Whatever provider you use, I recommend using a non-provider specific email address like a Google gmail one. That way you can't be held at gunpoint by a service provider with the threat that you're going to lose an established email address. When I left Virgin (because they systematically increased the monthly cost to see how far they could go) the service representative tried to stop me leaving by threatening that I was going to lose my virgin email address and web space. I could actually hear the disappointment in her voice when I told her I didn't use them... And then I left despite the sudden price reduction offer.

 

With an independent email address and domain host you can chop and change providers with ease.

[Brian]

Thanks for the ideas so far.

 

A few answers to points raised...

 

1) Email address - I have a couple of domains registered with a 3rd party (1and1) so I'm not tied to any ISP.

2) Websites - ditto.

3) Cable/Fibre - sadly not an option; we don't even have mains gas.

[GaryNattrass]

At the end of the day for most users BT own the lines and the exchanges so the buck stops there.

 

I was with AOL for years and tried SKY and someone else but everytime there was a problem it took forever as they would blunder their way through fault finding but at the end when it was taken to a higher level they all have to contact BT to fix the fault or put gain at the exchange end. Of course BT have their own customers so they tend to get priority treatment so last year we switched to BT for phone and broadband and have not looked back.

 

We live in the middle of nowhere so 500k was all we could get on a good day but when broadband went off last year it took AOL over six months to do basically nothing with me having to do all the run around.

 

Now we are with BT we get close to 1meg and have not had a single day in the past year where we have lost the service where with AOL it would go off if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction.

[kerry davies]

At the end of the day for most users BT own the lines and the exchanges so the buck stops there.

Which is why privatisation always was a crap idea. Had BT and POEU had their way the entire country would have been working on fibre optic direct into every building for over 20 years already and the UK would be still at the forefront in IT.

[madorangepanda]

So we've been waiting 2 months for BT to even install a line.

 

The day after we place the order we get a call from someone that barely speaks English, we ask to speak to their supervisor and they hang up.

 

A few days later we get some letters to sign, we send them back, we get confirmation letters saying they've received them back and that everything is ok.

 

Of course, it isn't. Apparently after that first phone call our order was put on hold. Though we never got told this and the letters never indicated this.

 

A while later I try to track the order, only the phone number they give for order tracking requires that you have a phone number to enter to get through. Only we don't have a phone number yet.

 

So I try their live web chat to get help, who give me the same phone number. I explain that this number won't work for me. They disconnect my web chat.

 

After much searching of forums I find a phone number that works, the order gets taken off hold and "expedited" for installation.

 

"Expedited" seemingly means two weeks, despite all of their literature saying standard installation times are one week.

 

Anyway, on Friday an engineer was supposed to turn up but couldn't even find our premises. Our 60ft high several hundred thousand square feet premises.

 

Today, an engineer finally visits us. Only to say that a site survey needs to be carried out before a line can be installed.

 

 

 

 

So please, if you have any alternative to BT for actually installing a line, then take it.

[sablednah]

Thanks for the ideas so far.

 

A few answers to points raised...

 

1) Email address - I have a couple of domains registered with a 3rd party (1and1) so I'm not tied to any ISP.

2) Websites - ditto.

3) Cable/Fibre - sadly not an option; we don't even have mains gas.

 

Shame about #3 - I feel your pain, would love cable in my main work office!

 

How remote/rural are you? I remember seeing some interesting options before in places with bad broadband.

 

Also Zen Internet are not bad, not the cheapest or fastest, but reliably good customer service levels - and a "no squealing" policy.

 

 

http://www.zen.co.uk/latest-news.aspx?page=11430

[Brian]

How remote/rural are you? I remember seeing some interesting options before in places with bad broadband.

I'm not at all rural. I live in a village of around 3,500 people and I can see the exchange from my office window. That's what annoying.

[Owain]

Whatever provider you use, I recommend using a non-provider specific email address like a Google gmail one.

 

Although gmail is specific to google and there's always a risk that one day they'll break it, as has happened with Google's Usenet interface in the past.