Its a sad day

[deskmonkey]

Right …..

I’ve posted on here a few times now with connection problems etc and Saturday has kindly and patiently answered most of them.

For info I signed up for the Max package at the beginning of the year, due to line length etc I was only able to receive about 700 kbps, this was eventually capped at 512 due to connection problems. For the last couple of months everything has been fine, semi constant speeds and a canny decent uptime.

That is up until a couple of weeks ago – since then I’d lose connections when the phone rang, if I tried to open 3 or more web pages, or even tried to carryout windows updates. Browsing on single pages was fine though.

I contacted support to have them check the line and the exchange, they “without” my knowledge just capped my line further to only 224 without investigating stating that it was due to line length, even though previous to this I’d been alright . This as I’d expected made no difference at all. So I complained nicely via the Murdock email address.

I’ve just received a call from their “senior” support team, saying that unless BT carryout work on the lines to upgrade, they cannot offer a better service. I understand that they are in the hands of BT when it comes to this and don’t really blame them, but it still peeved me a bit. It seems that the length has increased due to a re-routing of a couple of poles away from the village, so they said anyway.

The added complication and the reason for my extreme line length (8097 metres) is that BT in their infinite wisdom has my village (Byers Green DL16) connected to the Bishop Auckland exchange – 7.5 km away. Even they do not now know why we are not connected to the one of the two closer to us. Spennymoor exchange is just over 3 km away by road. Curiously the main road near the village that has the cables under them is the Spennymoor to Bishop Road – answer that one!!

Currently a campaign is about to start in the village trying to get us moved over, the MP and OneNorthEast are being asked to get involved.

Anyway to finally finish this long posting (sorry btw) it looks like by the end of the week I will not be connected via any broadband service and will be leaving Sky – reluctantly and have to go back to dial up.

I’ll still be checking out this site though at work ‘cos its fab.

All the best

Mark

[iannufc]

sounds like a right carry on - you have my sympathies. i have dealt with durham county council before, and know they aren't the best.

your post confuses me though - why dial-up? it comes through the same phonelines. is it price?

you don't say why, and i'm just curious!

[NewsreadeR]

I’ll still be checking out this site though at work ‘cos its fab.

Thank you for the nice words, you will always be welcome on here.

Lets hope you get your line sorted at some point in the future

[IWasNotTheEnemy]

i think the sooner BT realise upgrading the countries network is needed now the better BB will be for everyone - just look at sweden and their £10/month 100mbps connection!!! takes the micky just a tad...

[deskmonkey]

your post confuses me though - why dial-up? it comes through the same phonelines. is it price?

you don't say why, and i'm just curious!

I don't think I'm going to have a choice in the matter, I think they want to close the adsl connection down. I'm trying at the moment to pursuade them to downgrade me to their Base product 'cos of the available speeds etc but they dont seem keen on that.

224 kbps with a noise margin of 12.5db is all I'm going to get, Its okay ish... for normal browsing but the kids can't use it for iTunes etc. cos it disconnects.

Dial up doesn't disconnect - its just slow.

[iannufc]

ah, i see. bit of a nightmare that one.

i hope onenortheast can help out, they seem to be better than most councils up here.

good luck with it then!

[deskmonkey]

Hi folks - I'm sort of back again!

I've managed to pursuade the sky bods to let me have a connection of 256 up and down ( I think I'm on SDSL ). Its stable and ok for browsing but not much cop for anything else. My MP has taken the case up on behalf of the village and is currently liasing with BT and OneNorthEast - so fingers crossed in a year or two my village will join the 21st Century

Anyway, a guy from their senior support section has given me the option of downgrading my package, despite only being 3 or 4 months into my contract. I'm currently on the MAX product, which I hope you agree is totally wrong considering my speeds.

As I'm only getting 256 kbps, I'm tempted to just go with the BASE package. 'Cos of the speeds the 2Gb allowance is going to be more than enough I think.

Is there anything I need to be considering if I do downgrade?

Are there more contention issues?

As its "free" is there less of a service? More downtime?

Can anyone shed some light on this for me please?