FTTC for business - thoughts on new sign up for new account

[#1]

Thought I'd post my thoughts here on the sign up, and how it goes afterwards.
No problem finding the product we wanted, but our address did not come up when we entered our post code, it does on the post office address checker - seems to be a few missing.
At one point I was dumped back to the start again, IIRC it was after I entered the direct debit information, second time round went OK.
Ticket number 70629424 mentions installation at our home, minor point but this is a business, also the estimate in that ticket is 60Mbps, BT Wholesale has never estimated above 39Mbps, we are about 500 meters from the cab. Would be nice to get 60Mbps, but I doubt it, if this happens on other accounts I could see problems arising.
That's all for now 🙂

[#2]

Hi Ronski
Thanks for the feedback on the fibre signup process, it's really helpful to get this 
With regards to the address checker, as you've found, unfortunately sometimes not all addresses are in our supplier's systems if any other customers encounter a similar situation, I'd recommend they call us on 0800 023 2221 or 0300 123 4433 and we'll do a manual workaround.
Sorry you had problems with the signup journey. I don't suppose you can recall the time it sent you back to the start of the journey?

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Ticket number 70629424 mentions installation at our home, minor point but this is a business

Thanks, we've actually already captured that as a bug that we'll be fixing

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also the estimate in that ticket is 60Mbps, BT Wholesale has never estimated above 39Mbps, we are about 500 meters from the cab. Would be nice to get 60Mbps, but I doubt it, if this happens on other accounts I could see problems arising.

Thanks for flagging this. This was actually a mistake made by one of my team. Just human error - you're right that the BTW estimate for the line is correct and the one we'd normally use. I have fedback to the agent in question 
I do hope the installation all goes smoothly; it'd be great to hear your feedback on this as well.
Regards
Rob

[#3]

Hi Rob, I finished the sign up just in time for tea break at 10am Tuesday morning, so some time between 9 and 10 I would say. And thinking about it, it was previous to the direct debit section, as I only asked our accounts for the account number once, I'm sure it was  when I continued from the credit card details it kicked me back to the beginning. I was using Chrome browser.
First time round I'd managed to miss the data extension kit option, so it was a good job I did have to start again.
Talking about the direct debit section, it asked for first name and last name, but being a company I tried to enter just the company name in one of the fields, in the end I had to put a full stop in the first name field.
I'll let you know how the installation goes, I've allowed for problems, we still have the normal broadband active on another line, just in case 😉

[#4]

Couple more points:
Had an email on the 12th, advising that our appointment had been changed to the 26/06/2013 AM. A minor point, but it should be scheduled for, as we didn't have a previous appointment to change.
Then yesterday I had a text advising "Your broadband service is due to become active by midnight on 27/06/2013. Please don't set up your router until we confirm your service is active."
Notice the problem? The service is not due to be live until the day after the appointment. This may be a concern for some customers, I know that the installation engineer will still get sync with the cabinet, even if the service isn't live, but most customers will worry. It's probably also just another glitch, so I won't be worrying 

[#5]

Quote from: Ronski

Talking about the direct debit section, it asked for first name and last name, but being a company I tried to enter just the company name in one of the fields, in the end I had to put a full stop in the first name field.

Thanks for flagging this. I've passed this onto a colleague who dealt with the requirements for the signup journey. He'll take a look and let me know but I suspect that if the account is in the name of a company, it should just be the company name in the surname box and the forename box should be optional.

Quote from: Ronski

Had an email on the 12th, advising that our appointment had been changed to the 26/06/2013 AM. A minor point, but it should be scheduled for, as we didn't have a previous appointment to change. Then yesterday I had a text advising "Your broadband service is due to become active by midnight on 27/06/2013. Please don't set up your router until we confirm your service is active." Notice the problem? The service is not due to be live until the day after the appointment. This may be a concern for some customers, I know that the installation engineer will still get sync with the cabinet, even if the service isn't live, but most customers will worry. It's probably also just another glitch, so I won't be worrying

Thanks for this as well    We're reviewing all emails we send to customers prior to their services activating so I'll be sure to pass this on as well.

[#6]

Installation day arrived 🙂
Got a phone call at 07:54 from the BT engineer to advise he's working on the cabinet, and the line will go dead for a short while. Soon afterwards he's arrived at our offices and installed the new face plate and data extension cable. Very helpful pleasant chap, no problems at all, up and working in no time. Only minor downside was that he said the speed will not drop because it's fiber, I did point out that cross talk will affect lines as take up increases, as it's only fiber to the cab. I've seen this mentioned elsewhere that BT engineers have said this, and it's a shame they haven't had better training, as we know speeds can vary greatly from day one due to interleaving being turned on, and of course cross talk from other lines.
I've tried to set up a static IP, had the confirmation email as well, but so far the router is not being assigned the matching IP - it gets a different one each time I disconnect/reconnect, or even reboot the router. I'll leave it for a few hours and see if it gets the correct one then. We're still using our old ADSL connection, so it's not a problem, but I can't get the everything changed over to the new connection until the static IP is working.

[#7]

Hi again Ronski
Glad the installation went well! Sorry about the static IP. This is a known issue and it should be fixed soon. For the time being I've applied a static IP to the account correctly.
As for the engineer, yes you're right, cross talk and REIN as well as the resistance of the copper or aluminium wire etc could still affect the sync speed of the line. But the estimate you get when you type your phone number in here - https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/pls/adsl/adslchecker.welcome - should be fairly accurate.
Hope you don't have any problems but if you do, our dedicated business support team are available on 0800 028 0282 or 0300 123 6123 

[#8]

Quote from: Rob

Sorry about the static IP. This is a known issue and it should be fixed soon. For the time being I've applied a static IP to the account correctly.

Thanks, it's now got the static IP address 🙂

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But the estimate you get when you type your phone number in here - https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/pls/adsl/adslchecker.welcome - should be fairly accurate.

Our business speed does indeed seem to be inline with the estimate (hopefully we'll stay on fast path), but my home connection has unfortunately never achieved the 57Mbps estimate, being around 40Mbps since last August, but increasing to 47 when interleaving turned off in early May.  You can see my thread here, although I've not updated it recently as I'm happy with the connection, it's just not as fast as it should be given the estimate and cab distance of 450 meters.
I've created a ping monitor so I can keep an eye on things.

[#9]

It looks like we are on a 40/10 profile (see this post for details).
Not sure if this was intentional as our estimate is only 39/6, so wouldn't be worth PN paying the extra for a 80/20 profile. I'm not too fussed at the moment, I'll need to get into the modem and see what the attainable is. If it's substantially higher then I'd like to be put on the correct higher profile, otherwise it can stay as it is.

[#10]

Hi Ronski
If the downstream speed estimate is below 40meg down, we will provision the service on 40/10 or 40/2 depending on the upstream speed estimate. If you think the line can attain more than 40 meg down, I'm happy to modify it to 80/20 and see if you can get an improvement on that setting.
Rob

[#11]

Thanks for the quick reply, we'll leave it as it is at the moment - I've got a spare unlocked modem at home, I'll bring that in and and see what the attainable speeds are first.

[#12]

Quote from: Rob

if you think the line can attain more than 40 meg down, I'm happy to modify it to 80/20 and see if you can get an improvement on that setting. Rob

Hi, I've checked today, and the obtainable is 44,148 kbps, but given that interleaving is on, we are only syncing at 38,222 kbps so it is not worth putting us on an 80/20 profile, it will not make any difference.
The lost packets have now gone, now that interleaving error correction is on, so the connection is looking a lot healthier.
It's not a great speed for 500 meters, but given the poor state of the local telephone network, not to mention the electrically noisy environment of an industrial estate we are lucky to have it. There were only 26 other users on the cab, and hopefully we won't be too affected by cross talk in the future.
Now all I need is for our IT technician to come in and set up our network to use the new connection.

[#13]

Had a rather amusing email this morning:

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When you signed up for your broadband account, we performed a check on your telephone line to give you an estimated speed your line might achieve. Now that your service has now been active for 14 days, we thought we'd let you know the speed as it stands today, by way of comparison. Estimated line speed: 5.5Mbps Current line speed: 37Mbps

Looks like the estimate above is for an ADSL product, not fibre LOL.
Also whenever I log into my account, I always get a message saying "Our Support Team have replied to your question", even though it hasn't been replied to for weeks (no need to), and there's only one closed ticket as well. I view both tickets, log out, log straight back in and I've got the message again.
PS. We changed over to the new connection last Friday afternoon, all working well so far. Turning off the old ADSL connection on Monday seemed to bump up our attainable by about 3Mbps.

[#14]

Glad everything is still working ok 
Thanks again for the feedback and sorry for any confusion (though I think you already knew your speed estimate was above 5.5 meg!) I'm pretty sure these are known problems but I will make sure they've been captured in a project that's ongoing to improve customer communication.
Rob

[#15]

Hi,
I have just got my business fibre broadband installed yesterday, and ran into the same problems really. Static IP not being assigned to the router, which is quite important if you are trying to get your nameservers sorted as quickly as possible.
The router connected fine, changed its login details to my account details, and then promptly refused to connect again with an 'authorisation refused' message. A call to support got my account activated (why doesn't that happen automatically?), but then I was warned that no diagnostics could happen until the order was closed. I'm not sure what involves 'closing an order', but what is the reason to keep it open?
Otherwise, speed improvement is great compared to my old ADSL providor!
Thanks,
Koen.