BT accidentally chokes bandwidth to 'superfast' customers
Infinity minus one
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BT has said sorry to subscribers to its "Infinity" packages, who have seen their "superfast" broadband connections slowed to a relative crawl in the evening recently.
It blamed the problems on a "technical fault", but did not provide any further details.
Hundreds of postings on BT's customer forums in the last week report a similar, dramatic cut in downstream speed between 6pm and midnight across the country. Subscribers typically report their usual 25 to 35Mbit/s is slashed to about 2Mbit/s.
BT said in a statement today: "The slow speed experienced by a number of customers was due to a technical fault that was highlighted through individual complaints and our customer forums, this has now been fixed.
"We're sorry for the inconvenience and grateful to customers who highlighted this. We worked on this over the weekend to establish the cause and as of now it is fixed.
"The technical fault caused a limited number of customers to see their speeds reduced to 2Mbit/s at certain times."
Infinty is the brand name for broadband packages based on BT's ongoing fibre optic deployment. Most lines are being upgraded to fibre-to-the-cabinet and VDSL2+ technology, which offers theoretical maximum downsteam speeds of up to 40Mbit/s. Prices are at least 40 per cent higher than its cheapest Total Broadband package, which is (or should be) significantly slower.
Because of the way their connections have been slowing at regular times every day, coinciding with peak evening bandwidth demand, Infinity customers in the BT forums have angrily suggested they are being deliberately throttled.
"Oh come on," pleaded user "cherkhan" in a typical gripe.
"These are NOT isolated incidents. We have been reporting this problem from all over the nation. This is a throttle.
"In my opinion this is due to over selling a product. Why say this? look at the hours that the speed returns. Look at the times that the speed dies off. Peak times of when people are home and using the net."
Under Hanlon's razor it's most likely the recent speed restrictions were the result of genuine mistakes. BT does deliberately use bandwidth throttling on its Infinity packages, but the fair usage policy restricts bandwidth to 2Mbit/s once a subscriber downloads 300GB in a month, which several of the complainants insisted they were nowhere near.
They will be monitoring their connections closely this evening. ®
COMMENTS
Don't Talk Talk
Believe me don't go to Talk Talk. I moved home in May and canceled my subscription. It took three attempts for them to acknowledge I no longer had the service. I then started to receive letters from a debt collection agency demanding payment. I wrote to Talk Talk and they apologised saying it was an admin cockup. Guess what, I am still getting demands for payment and the debt agency is taking me to court. I have over 20 pieces of correspondence proving they know I don't have the service. Looking forward to my day in court as being self employed I intend to counter-sue for loss of earnings. I would like to know if anyone else is having similar problems. Maybe we could start a class action.
If you think that BT are bad
Then going to Don't-Talk will be a thousand times worse.
It took me nigh on 3 months to get my Mum's phone line fixed.
BT had a man at the green cabinet fixing the BT customers up her street who'd suddenly got no service. He wanted to fix all the other LLU customers but was not allowed to.
I spent hours on the phone to TT (and its an 0870 number which is free from her phone but her phone wasn't working) trying to explain the problem. All they would say was that if it wasn't a problem then they'd charge my mum. Then they wanted a mobile phone so that they could call her.
Cripes TT, she's in her 90's and does not own a mobile.
In the end, they got BT to run a line test. This was only after I'd threatened them with Ofcom. Sure enough there was a line fault and the same BT Engineer came out to fix it. Even though my mum wasn't a BT customer, he knocked on her door to let her know that the fault was fixed.
Nice guy. But why did he do that? TT Didn't let her know that the fault was fixed for nearly 10 days. Why? Because she didn't own a mobile despite the fact that they had mine all the time they never used it.
The end result was that she moved her Phone & broadband back to BT at the first opportunity.
Talk-Talk Pah. Mega fail.
My heart bleeds for them.....it really does
After being stuck on <1mb for the last 6 or so years I have lost all sympathy for fast users moaning about crappy speeds....speeds which i can only hope to one day get close to.
Watch now on BBC iplayer hahahahahahha I can only feking dream!!!
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