In many respects BT’s Total Broadband service is an excellent way to view the internets. In many respects BT’s Total Broadband service can be considered good value for money, reliable [with caveats] and reasonably fast. Only not when you want it - i.e. between the hours of 5pm and 10/11pm.

You see I work all day and sleep all night, that is how it works at my house. Therefore I wants me some broadband in the evening. For surfing the www the service is good, great even. You get you pages quickly and without error. All fine and dandy. Maybe not fast as you should be getting. “upto” is such a great get-out word for the BT folks, its ingrained in their collective psyche from the tech guys to the marketing department. It basically means they can give you any speed they like and you still pay the same money.

BT Total Bullshit
Compete my hairy fat arse!

For example, I live within spitting distance of the exchange–I can see it from the Bathroom window–but I can only get 5Mbps. Not too bad except a friend of mine who is twice the distance gets a full and wholesome 7Mbps. OK so another acquaintance only gets 1.5 or 2 on a day in which the Copper Wire Pixies were not chewing on the cables too much. But we all pay the same.

I’m not one for just doing the www dance though as fun as it is. I like to watch IPTV (internet protocol TV - see above tab for a few great programmes). I like to download stuff using Bittorent. I like to watch stuff on Joost.

All these activities are pretty much off-limits during the evening hours. That is where the Broadband experience fails miserably. Due to the wonderful [sic] way that BT implement traffic shaping I cannot watch my favourite shows on the web, like DL.TV, these shows are broadcast at 8:00pm in the UK, slap bang in the middle of shaping time. Constant buffering and dropped frames along with stut-t-t-t-tt-tering sound make the viewing experience dire. Yes, yes yes, with DL.TV the next day I can download the programme and watch it from the Hard Drive, so some naysayers and BT fanboys could shoot my argument out of the water, but no, feck that. I want and expect to be able to watch IPTV when it’s “broadcast” live.

Also Joost is a no-no and that’s sad. It may be Beta and there may be not a great deal of content on it at the moment, but if people like me can’t realistically use the service it will not expand into the mighty Media behemoth it promises to be. It’s the same story with Sky Anytime and Channel 4’s 4OD service.

So where does that leave BT Vision, or is that the plan. Conspiracy theorists theorise now. I bet that service isn’t affected by the shaping daemons. Thus everybody gravitates towards BT’s own vision of online visual entertainment purely because rival services are curtailed. Many people who are maybe not that tech and computer savvy won’t realise the shananigans employed by the BT, won’t know what traffic shaping is let alone that BT are doing it. These people will see that the only way to get reliable and constant IPTV is through BT Vision. 1-0 to BT me thinks.

The same applies to downloading and uploading with FTP and Bittorrent. The necessary evil that is leaving my PC on during the day or during nocturnal hours should be a situation that does not occur. It does occur because I’m impatient and want stuff now. It is a good job that the PC is in the living room and not the bedroom.

Then there is the hardware itself - the HomeHub - all shiny and white. Aesthetics aside it’s crap. Constant restarts - mainly when downloading something which is fecking annoying when you have waited 3 hours already and you have to start it again - frequent drop-outs of the DSL line, and crashes/lock-ups galore. I binned it and am using an older BT Voyager 2100 Wireless router which is a paragon of stability and reliability. I have never had to restart the thing since powering it up months ago. Many people will have gotten better mileage out of their HomeHub but that’s them this its my experience with the damn thing and looking on the discussion forums will attest that I am not alone.

Using the older router does prevent the use of the HomeHub phone. No great loss at all. BT Broadband Talk is a joke. It costs just as much as a landline and in some cases more. The only time it is free is if you phone another Broadband Talk phone. Nobody I know uses it. Everybody is on Mobiles, normal POTS phones, Skype or Tesco Internet phones. I though internet telephony was supposed to be cheap. Not so with this system.

It may seem I am having a downer on BT specifically. Yes I am but I am on BT and all the other ISP’s do the same here in the UK. BT is one of the cheapest for what I get (there are cheaper but they don’t have unlimited downloads), so I thank them for that. It may not be the fastest - Virgin are - but to get Virgin you pay £35 instead of the £24 I am paying. They also have a more rigorous shaping policy than BT.

I hope that in the future when BT ditch the copper and fully embrace the goodness that is fibre (the 21CN initiative is a start) we can finally be rid of the evil that is shaping.

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