HELP! I moved to the UK and my internet sucks!

Hi Duders,

I recently moved to England for postgraduate studies and got myself in a nice house with good housemates and a great gaming set up that I always wanted but could never afford as an undergraduate student. The last piece of my gaming magnum opus was supposed to be a solid internet connection to download PS4 games and play online lag free. My house and I decided on BT Infinity Fibre Optic Internet (their unlimited 38 megabits/sec package), and it has been nothing but grief since it was set up. I have had to deal with typical crappy internet before, but this takes the cake. We get a maximum of 3 megabits/sec at any one time with pings to UK servers reaching 600+ ms at the worst of times. I thought the issue might have been a weak wifi signal, so I bought a powerline adapter which affected absolutely nothing. Plugging directly into our router to test doesn't seem to do much either, so I really think the fault lies with BT. However, calling them achieves absolutely nothing - I get sent to a representative in India who can only tell me to reboot my router, and meanwhile BT sees fit to keep taking my money despite not delivering the product we signed up for.

Aside from using this as a chance to rant, I was wondering if anyone in the GB community has any advice for me, because it's really putting a damper on my gaming dream. Am I really obligated to keep paying for this if they are not delivering and refuse to send an engineer without threatening to charge through the nose if an issue isn't found? Can you recommend alternative providers (I believe we can sign up for anyone except Virgin in our area)? Can you perhaps direct me to a department at BT that will actually do something? I'm at my wits end!

Any help you can offer would be really great. Cheers.

UK net is terrible outside of major city centers. So all I can offer are my condolences for your gaming dreams.

As far as I've heard BT's customer service is pretty dire. Is your router pretty modern? Your problem sounded similar to mine, til I realised that the router was several years out of date, replaced it with a new one and now I can get a damn good signal and speed from my ISP.

@rhombus_of_terror: Yep, they supplied us with a Homehub 5, which is supposed to be at least passable. I am wondering if perhaps we need a new ADSL filter, though surely they can't make THAT much of a difference...our router says it is receiving a connection from BT at 38 megabits/sec but what we are getting is nowhere near that. I hesitate to say they are lying, but I can't think of anything else that might be wrong.

BT is internet for people who don't know any better. I used Plusnet for a while and that was pretty great. Talktalk is totally solid, especially for the price. Have a look at http://www.uswitch.com/broadband/ to check what's available to you if you haven't already.

@downloaded: If you can, try replacing the ADSL filters. The last time I was having horrid internet woes, it turned out one of my filters was faulty, and it was crippling my internet speed. I got some new ones, and it was fine.

Whereabouts are you in the UK? Since you're here for studies, I would assume you're not in some village in the middle of nowhere, so your connection doesn't make much sense. Could be faulty wiring in your house.

As for suggestions, personally, I've had a pretty good experience with Sky (I'm on Fibre Unlimited), connecting at 40/10 and getting pings in the teens. The two times I've had issues with my internet, it was a wiring issue. That said, I know others who would warn you away from Sky, so I dunno, I might be lucky, or they might be unlucky. You can never be sure how it'll turn out for you with these things.

PS: In my experience (a friend of mine works as a support guy in one of these providers), it has never, ever* been the microfilter. I think that's just something on the support line script that they have to say, just in case someone has forgotten to put a filter on a phone or they've put it on backwards.

*Well, there goes DazzHardy breaking my streak now :P

@volemaulder: I'm in Bath for the next 3 or so years...not a huge town but Bristol is just up the road and it seems like the people here are generally wealthy, so I imagine for better or worse they get treated decently by internet companies. I really appreciate everyone's response. I'll try swapping filters and if things really continue negatively I'll look into the providers you suggested.

Out of curiosity, some people said the wiring in my home may be at fault -- I have read about this somewhat online but haven't found a more in-depth explanation of how house wiring can negatively affect internet speeds. Is it something I can fix? Our router is detecting an incoming connection of roughly 39 mbps, so I surely that means the house is wired properly?

Their DSL is terrible, their Fiber Optic is fine and reasonably priced if you like football/ufc because you get BT sport thrown in for free. ADSL in the UK is universally dire so you should always choose fiber, however if you don't live in a city this isn't likely to happen. Sounds to me you have some interference internally in your house though if the router is reporting you're getting 10 times the bandwidth you actually are.

Plusnet is owned By BT....

I think it just depends on your location and the age of the infrastructure. I had fibre installed in my tiny village about three years ago. BT infinity has been rock solid for me, Can't think of the last time I had a drop out, and it sticks to the maximum 75 mbps.

@gaggle64: you do realise that plusnet is owned and operated by BT, but just rebranded, right?

But yeah op if the router says you're getting 38 from the wall then it's either a dodgy router, or you've got too many people connecting at once, and it can't handle it. The BT routers have always been bottom of the barrel terrible.

Another thing might be network congestion; I'm fairly sure the 5 has 5ghz, so try swapping it over to that to see if it gets any better.

Yeah try a different router. The one BT give you is terrible, especially the wifi.

just my 2 pennies, have you tried testing your connection through the master socket in your home, if you test on this and are getting the correct connection speed, then it could indicate internal wiring problems in the home link, if you still don't get a connection here, then it could be faulty equipment, try using the bt help forums or live chat option live chat , they are generally a lot better at giving help than the call centre in my opinion

Yeah, swapping out the router is probably the best.

Does anyone know if Fibre connections use different lines depending on provider? I know that for ADSL all the line are managed by BT anyway, and just rented out to the other providers to help cover costs. In such a case switching provider really does very little as they all have to go through BT anyway.

Not sure if that's the same for fibre though...

@gaggle64:

A +1 for TalkTalk I've been with them for five years and my unlimited fibre is 80 down 20 up. Never had an issue and fairly cheap too. Also I'm not in a major city.

It's owned by BT but it operates as a separate business.

I really appreciate everyone's input. Since I posted this I have been in further contact with BT who have failed to do anything, but insist that the issue lies with us for having too many devices connected at once.

Can anyone weigh in on whether this would actually affect our connection and whether there is anything that can be done about it? Our (supposedly) 38 mbit/sec fibre optic connection (I presume FTTC) is shared by 4 people, and we each have a computer and a smart phone connected when we are home. We try to connect our computers via ethernet whenever possible - either way it's a max of 8 devices connected which seems like a reasonable load to me, as we are not actively using the connection to download/surf/stream on all of them simultaneously.

A couple of days ago we were receiving a connection speed of less than 0.5 mbit/sec with outrageous pings, which seems too drastic to be completely due to our number of connected devices. At the best of times we receive only 20 mbit/sec, when nobody else is home and the rest of our neighborhood is at work. This has got me thinking that our issue may be due to our distance from BT's FTTC cabinet - might it be possible that our house is just very inconveniently located so the connection is significantly degraded by wire resistance and other users before it reaches our house at normal use hours? If so, does anyone know if all internet providers share the same FTTC cabinets, or could we swap carriers and get serviced by a cabinet that is closer by?

Thanks again for your help duders, it's very much appreciated.

I'm gonna say it again, have you tried swapping to 5ghz? Or at least use a different 2.4ghz channel. Download something like inssider and see how congested it is in your area and choose the least busy channel, although it's unlikely that there will be a not busy 2.4ghz channel which is why I said go 5ghz first. Just go 5ghz. If it's still shit then your router's fuckin broke or something.

If you keep repeating to them that you're entitled to faster internet because of your package and you keep talking and keep talking and refuse to put the phone down, they will eventually relent and up your speed/fix your connection. I've done this twice. Not sure what the minimum for yours they legally have to provide but with my 78 mbs package I am guaranteed a minimum of at least 3.8 mbs. In reality I get about 7 mbs, which is more than they wanted to give me. But if you don't refuse to take their shit over the phone they will attempt to screw you out of as much as possible.

It's just BT, they arbitrarily screw people out of bandwith in the hopes that no one will notice/be arsed to do anything about it, presumably to make more money. Complain, and complain a lot on the phone.

If you check Ofcom's website, it says you have the right to terminate your contract without penalty if speeds drop below acceptable levels and if these problems cannot be resolved.

BT really are the drizzling shits when it comes to broadband. A while back, they tried to sell me unlimited, uncapped, unthrottled broadband. When I got the paperwork from them, it was capped at 100gb a month and was throttled at peak times. They're fucking lying scumbags.

As for other providers, I can only recommend Virgin Media, which is useless to you.

Try taking off the front panel of your master phone port and plugging the router directly into the test socket. If your performance improves it's likely your internal wiring. https://support.zen.co.uk/kb/Knowledgebase/Testing-connection-from-the-BT-Master-test-telephone-socket

If you're still having a rough time then it's likely to be an issue at the exchange. A good indicator is if you hear noise/static on the phone line.

And no, multiple connections to the router if they're not actively doing anything (like streaming/downloading) will not be detrimental to the speed of your connection.

You have to do the basics first. Turn off the wifi on the router, plug one PC into it and run a speedtest. If you use speedtest.net then choose a few different servers, don't rely on the one it picks. If you get good speeds, but once you turn the wifi back on it goes back to being useless then it will either be one of the devices eating up all your bandwidth, or stressing out the router, or it will be the router being faulty. Recently I had a case where an iPad was causing similar problems to what you are describing, which was resolved by doing a hard reboot of the iPad, so turning off the wifi will narrow down problems like that. If you get poor speeds still, then you can plug the router straight into the master test socket and try again, which should rule out any internal wiring issues. The engineer who first set up your Infinity should have tested for all that and done a speed test when he was first there anyway.

If none of that works then I've definitely had better luck with the live chat on the website - if you can get to it - than with the phone when I've had to sort out problems for clients. If you are getting such poor performance then of course you do not have to continue with it, a complaint to ofcom or even a call to the cancellations department and explaining the problem to the UK staff that you should get through to should give you an outcome one way or another.

Don't let anyone fool you with talk of other providers being better, when there's a problem they are usually as bad as each other.

Yep, my two cents is that you should test this exhaustively before contacting them. As mentioned, try disconnecting everything from all phone/ethernet sockets in the house, see if it helps. Try connecting a single computer through ethernet to the router, see if it helps. Try connecting the router to the test socket, see if it helps. When you are 100% sure of where the problem lies, it is much easier to argue with them on the phone. ("much easier" doesn't mean easy; I was 100% sure my problem was faulty wiring outside the house and it still took more than a month and three engineer visits to sort it out. At least I managed not to pay that month.)

In case anyone comes to this post in a similar state of despair as I was in when I first posted, the issue seems to have been largely resolved for me now and as it turned out there was an issue with BT's exchange box for our neighborhood by which it simply could not handle traffic during peak hours. After ensuring that nothing in our home network was at fault (we were receiving decent speeds during low usage times, so our wiring had to be sufficient), we did not stop harassing BT and threatening to switch providers until they sent an engineer. They have since done some tinkering with our exchange box and the speeds have improved quite a bit.

For what it is worth, while my PowerLine adapters helped somewhat, the old wiring in our house lead to some misleading speeds and pings when we used them which varied depending on which plug they were plugged into. I bought a new, longer ADSL cable (not ethernet) to move our router to a more central location in the house which improved both WiFi signal and PowerLine performance. When my PowerLine adapters/router were located in our kitchen (far from my room), the max speed the adapters could provide was about 20 mbit/sec despite our router providing the full 38 mbit/sec connection over WiFi to my housemates. Since moving the router/PowerLine adapters to the living room (much closer), they can provide the full 38 mbits and I get the bonus of a stronger WiFi signal. My guess this is due to the way our house is wired - there was a choke point between the kitchen and my room that I have bypassed by moving everything to the living room.

The TL;DR for all this is: if you find yourself in a similar situation where during peak hours your connection is unusable but at 3 AM it works as advertised, it is very likely a fault with your provider and you should harass them about it every chance you get because they do not send engineers out willingly (at least in the case of BT). However, you should be wary of any alterations you have made to a standard internet setup (eg: WiFi boosters and PowerLine adapters, as they introduce error that your ISP cannot account for). Moving these alterations to more optimal positions may help and this is simply a matter of experimentation. An additional conclusion I was able to draw is that while PowerLine adapters occasionally result in variable ping and packet loss due to house wiring, they are still generally better than a WiFi signal that has to penetrate even a few walls when it comes to gaming. I hope this helps someone in the future.