It Just Gets Worse

[ownwonnow]

An hour on the phone to NOW Broadband on Wednesday afternoon and it finished with another BT Openreach appointment being booked for Tuesday afternoon.

This morning I get a text from BT Openreach saying my appointment is... Saturday morning.

[gavs82008]

@ownwonnow 

You need to call the broadband team to confirm what's going on. See this link to explain why you won't get staff replying. 

https://community.nowtv.com/t5/help/faqpage/title/what-is-community-for

[Jayach]

@ownwonnow 

As today is Friday, isn't that an improvement? 

[ownwonnow]

@Jayach 

@Jayach Not when you've had to change others' and your own work and personal calendars to accommodate the change of date and time slot... twice.

[Jayach]

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@ownwonnow wrote:

@Jayach Not when you've had to change others' and your own work and personal calendars to accommodate the change of date and time slot... twice.

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Fair enough, I'm retired, so I don't have those kind of problems.

Unfortunately any appointments Now (or any ISP) make on the Openreach system is very much provisional, and dependant on Openreach's availability, and they seem to be "stretched" especially on the copper side.

It's possible the engineer can fix the fault without visiting the property, but they won't know that for sure till they investigate.

[ownwonnow]

Engineer attended, and concluded "one of the young lads must have pulled out the connection in the street cabinet". Internet service restored only this time download maxing out at 16Mbps when before the outage it was 20Mbps. The guaranteed minimum is supposed to be 23Mbps. Highly unlikely the performance will suddenly improve by 44% in the coming week when the service is supposed to find the best settings. Bah!

[Jayach]

@ownwonnow 

Not Bah! at all.

Now use FTTC (fibre to the cabinet), which means the connection from the cabinet to your home is twisted pair copper, and can be subject to various problems such as poor connections, interference and other troubles.

Openreach have a service called DLM (dynamic line management) which tries to you give the "best" connection it can. It does this by monitoring the line over time and makes adjustments it considers necessary.

Having said that the biggest factor in what speed you will get is the length of the cable between you and the cabinet, and Openreach have an estimate of what they believe your line capable of, and you can see that here:

https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/#/ADSL

Do bear in mind what you measure as your download speed is not the same as your "access line speed" (as now call it), synch speed to the rest of us. See Now's help here:

https://help.nowtv.com/article/broadband-speeds-explained