Customers connected to nearly 50% of BT exchanges in the country could be suffering very poor speeds due to capacity on the exchange network being at an all time low.
The Customer Support Centre have been noticing an unusual number of faults being returned as rejected from BT over the last few weeks, so we did some digging! BT will reject a fault if it’s a speed fault and the customer is on a congested exchange.
Exchange status information is publicly accessible and can be searched on various websites including our own Usertools site (http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges). The database feeding Usertools was updated last week, and it was noted that nearly 50% of exchanges are RED for capacity. This can result in poor speeds at off-peak time, and even more so at peak times, and means that the BT exchange is under-capacity. This is something that could affect all customers on the exchange, regardless of who their ISP is.
My own exchange in Sheffield is currently on Red status, and has been for some time. BT keep pushing back the date to upgrade capacity – but I do hope they do it sometime soon! It can result in peak-time performance for an 8Mb connection being around 400kbps for me, and there’s nothing I, nor my ISP (us), can do about it.
This graph shows the impact of the issues over the last few weeks :
So, next time you’re getting slow speeds at random or peak times – do check your exchange status at http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges before raising a fault to us!
This entry was posted by admin on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 9:38 am and is tagged with and is posted in the category Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
well what can i say, this is shocking b.t i should be on a up to 8mg but never get it, in the day i get about 1mg then come peek time it drops off i cant play online with my ps3, sick of telling b.t my exchange is doncaster and is in the red has been for months and yep bt keep puting the date back for upgrade but still they add more ppl on to the exchange this is a poor service how can they still charge 24.99, when i phone bt they say my line is good and my speed, but i know diffrent, surly this is down to congestion on exchanges bt need to start working fast. im yet another unhappy u.k bt customer when will the nightmare end,
It's shocking, my exchange has been red since January. My broadband used to be super quick, now it's worse than dial-up.
I'm on the verge of reporting BT to the Information Commisioners office, as clearly they are happy to take the money we pay (via Plusnet) and not spend the money keepking exchange capacity in order.
I know what will happen, my money will be used to provide cities with even more broadband choices with ADSL2, yet leaving semi-rural exchanges out in the cold.
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