Thought your household broadband was pants? Small biz has it worse

Re: BT are the problem

Why isn't another company stepping in to meet the demand? If there's demand and the chance of a profit, surely one company opting out of providing service just creates a gap that another will fill? Do Virgin operate in Edinburgh?

Re: BT are the problem

Same situation here. City centre, the exchange we are connected to has been fibre enabled for many years, residential buildings across the street have had it for years, but as a business our cabinet has not been connected. BT is hoping that businesses will pay a lot for leased lines, so they intentionally do not connect fibre to cabinets that primarily serve businesses.

BT is simply being competitive. They can make more money by not providing fibre to businesses, so someone needs to intervene to make them do it. All the focus has been on rural areas, but there are these paradoxical not-spots in the business areas of the largest cities of the UK, when apartment buildings 20 metres away were amongst the first to get it.

Re: BT are the problem

Of course BT don't want to upgrade the exchange - it is surrounded by businesses who they hope to fleece for leased lines.

Or, more correctly, BT don't want the hassle of small businesses who want business SLAs for domestic prices, and will give BT too much grief when they don't get what they "expect".

If you started a distribution company in your garage, would you complain about the lack of Motorway access to your driveway if your business became so successful you started delivering in 10-tonne loads?

Re: No FTTC for us

Its saddening, but reassuring, to hear from someone in the same ridiculous situation as us. For most offices under 30 users a business grade FTTC connection would be ample bandwidth. However telcos don't want to roll these out, much prefering long term contracted EFM/leased lines.

Re: No FTTC for us

We have exactly the same problem. Cabinet other side of the street for the domestic users FTTC - the industrial estate this side - zip, we are lucky with 4mb, we can have fibre, for £17000 install, and because the 'street' has fibre BT class it as 'available', so we will never get any realistic speeds on our estate - so we have 3 BB lines, two bonded, just to get a reasonable service that is just about workable.

At home? we get VM cable at silly speeds for £40pcm

Re: No FTTC for us

We had this problem for ages until we just gave up and had Fibre installed. Your only real option is ADSL bonding if you just need download speeds or EFM if you want upload speeds too but you would cry at the speeds you will get compared to a FTTC connection! I am hoping that 4G will sort things out a bit.

Re: No FTTC for us

Bonding would also be an option if needed, we already have half a dozen telephone lines, of which a couple could be bonded, allowing us to use VOIP and ditch the rest.

Our small office of 12 people has FTTC and it's great (lucky us), but using it for VoIP is something we've often considered but never quite had the courage for. The internet connection has only gone down a couple of times in the past few years, but the plain old phone lines have never died. Once I learned that a SLA just meant getting just a pro-rata refund for the time the connection was down, my confidence went.

Has anyone out there taken the gamble? If so, how'd it go?

Re: No FTTC for us

You've hit the nail on the head there me ol' fruit.

If small businesses had enough bandwidth, they'd jump on the VoIP bandwagon sharpish. More lost revenue for Bastard Telecom.

It also amazes me how wasteful of money BT are. I worked in a business centre in a large town just outside Glasgow, which was supplied by a 200pair cable from one exchange and a 50pair cable from a different exchange. The 200pair was so congested (imagine @40 broadband circuits through that) and the frame in the business centre was the old solder type.

There was a BT van in the car park there every week at least, without fail. They would come in and fix the complaint,only to cause another fault for a different tenant. BT engineers no longer carry the equipment to properly terminate with a solder connection, so they just wrap it around and hope for the best.

Last time I was in the frame closet, I noticed an Openreach engineer had scrawled on the wall 'pure quality' (a common colloquialism in those parts)

Re: A rock and a ransom strip.

Sometimes lack of decent connectivity can be blamed on business park developers. Namely they don't consider communications services when developing sites. Or they view those as services that should be bought through the Estate/FM company at a hefty premium. Otherwise as many estates are private property, trying to provide services means trying to negotiate wayleaves, often at a high cost. Or show us their shiney new comms/fibre distribution room and look put out when asked why they installed multimode to feed a 20 acre site.

If there were competitive and practical access to ducts, splice chambers etc etc, businesses on industrial or retail parks may get more choice but generally there's no incentive for providers to do that.

Re: Regulatory requirements for a phone line need to be updated

Yep, Openreach's SLA is for voice and whatever you can throw down the line "as voice" (e.g. fax/moden). ADSL and ISDN are basically "best effort", and if they can't or won't supply them then its your problem.

This is why I tell people to report any slow broadband fault that's obviously a line fault issue (noises/crackles/no dial tone) as a voice fault and keep broadband out of it.

Re: Regulatory requirements for a phone line need to be updated

Client's wife ordered "superfast" upgrade on their long line. 3200 metres to the exchange, 3000 to the cab.

faulty adsl line (1, not 2/2+) was 5.5/400.

VDSL2 (self install.. 2 adsl filters no faceplate...) 6.8/375

After regrade down to adsl1,7.9/448.

Why couldn't they have fixed the orginal line, I have no idea...

The leased line/superfast broadband "grants", as you say, paid a contribution towards the installation costs of a leased line. The problem is that while the installation costs are pretty considerable on leased lines, they're usually less than two months cost of rental, which as a rule is 10 times higher than FTTC.

Re: SMEs with at least one employee?

A sole trader has no "employees" (i.e. someone else you pay to work for you)