BT: Hat off… Hat back on.
The story so far…
BT announce that they’re going make a free 8mb upgrade available to all their broadband customers. Oooh, happy days. Even happier days when they actually hit the schedule for upgrading all their exchanges. Hypothetical hat off to them. Not an easy job I’m sure.
So then it comes to actually upgrading. Riiiight, this is where it goes a bit Pete Tong. First up, the upgrade is initially only available to the customers on their most expensive package. I had to wait another week before I could place my upgrade request. Fair enough. I can live with that. Makes sense I suppose.
Seven days later, I request my regrade - to be told that’d it be another 10 days to actually provision my order. Ok, well I’m sure an engineer will be working on my line day and night to pull this off then… 10 days… it must be a HUGE job!
Ten days later, the upgrade request is ‘processed’ and I can resync to 8mb. Woohoo!
But can I actually get 8mb? No. The line is still capped at 2mb, exactly like before. Riiight. So, ten days have elapsed, and frankly nothing has been changed. Did an engineer really work on my line for 10 days? No, of course not. Reality is a quick automated line test, followed by an automated regrade. It should be 24 hours max - but I’m sure it could all be done in five minutes if they really wanted. Anyway… there’s probably some regulatory issue there, but frankly I don’t care.
A quick look on the internet reveals that BT are having a few problems with some lines… the Broadband Remote Access Server’s (BRAS - which controls the throughputs of each line) aren’t updating properly, but another 3 days and everything should be sorted. Apparently.
3 days later… still nothing has changed. After a call to BT I’m told, “Oh, it should kick in soon - but we can’t raise any fault reports for 8mb lines at present though”. Oooooooook.
After another five days… here I am. Still synced to 8mb, still capped to 2mb. Can I do anything? Apparently not. BT now say “this is normal”. What a pigs ear. 25 days and bugger all has changed. Upgrade my arse. What a bunch of fookwits.
I used to work for BT for many years - I know how the internals work and obviously nothing has changed since I left. I was talking to an engineer once who described BT’s network as “an ancient lumbering beast”. He wasn’t wrong. Although if he’d added “with alzheimer’s and the IQ of a peanut” on the end it wouldn’t have been wrong either.
Hat most definitely back on.
