In Scotland
Our home exchange had an RFS date of March 2011 for 21CN WBC.
Then Virgin touted 50Mb and so BT had to gets into an arms race.
They just dropped the RFS date and went to install fibre elsewhere to fend off Virgin.
Our work connection comes via 200 pair from the cabinet, to an office complex supporting 50 businesses. Yep, 200 pairs for all the broadband and telephone/fax/banking/franking extensions required by 50 small businesses. Guess what? The connection is utterly shit, totally unreliable and we get at best 3Mb. Engineers best guess is that there is too much crosstalk on the 200pr.
As soon as you get an engineer to rectify your faults, you only wait a week for someone else to report a fault or a client to request additional lines, and mysteriously you have a new fault.
In what classes as the comms room (where the 200pr terminates, an Openreach engineer has written 'pure quality' on the wall!)
It's OK, though, soon they will provide fibre to the cabinet and we'll get utterly shit and totally unreliable at 20Mb!
@tomjol Extremely! We've discussed this, at length, with BT Retail and Openreach engineers. Doing the maths, conservatively, if every business here had to go through the same hoops as we have with BT (and they realistically would) and assuming a rate of £75ph (they charge £150 for a call-out (2 hrs)) for an Openreach engineer, it would cost (3x2hr engineers + 2x6hr engineers * 50 tenants) £67,500 to service this building. I would estimate that would have to be done at least twice a year.
Fortunately for them, most tenants here just put up with it or move on.
Amazingly (to me at least), it seems BT Openreach/Wholesale has no apparatus to determine that it would be more cost-effective to pull an additional cable rather than send engineers here at least twice a week.
Perhaps we could bribe the squaddies to pull an extra 100pr from the cab, I'll even install some new panels, rather than the twist-on terminals that are in there at the moment (they're supposed to be soldered, but Openreach don't carry irons anymore, we forced the last engineer to jelly-crimp them at gunpoint (OK, I made that last bit up)).