Beware of Infinity upgrade from ADSL

Question

I felt I had to pass on my experience of BT's push to migrate its ADSL broadband customers to Infinity. In fact it was my mother-in-law who is the subscriber (I just get called upon to fix IT problems when something goes wrong) and who got the call from BT. She was pushed into upgrading as it was positioned as all positive, more speed, the future is fibre blah blah with the only downside of a £25 one off charge. That said she had no idea after the call if she had actually agreed to a change in the tariff or whether, as I presume, this has locked her in to BT for another 12 months. Bottom line is that the upgrade was entirely inappropriate for her, did not work properly, was worse than what she had before and she has since had to downgrade back to the old service. This has left her without broadband at all for a week and about £45 out of pocket. Plus I had to drive 30 miles round trip to sort it all out for her. Thanks BT. So why was something that you would naturally assume to be fantastic such a bad idea? Well firstly she did not need the improved speed (I don't know what was promised to her on the phone) as she was already getting 14Mbps on ADSL and has one PC which she uses for a bit of email and browsing. If she uses the PC for more than 30 mins a day I would be surprised. She currently has a desktop PC connected by Ethernet cable to her home hub connected to an extension BT phone socket (in a small study). BT Inifinity replaced the master socket (which is in the hall not her study) and then installed an OpenReach modem/router and a conventional BT Home Hub 3 in the hall. As she also has an Ethernet powerline adaptor to allow the TV to connect to the Internet then this not only placed additional equipment on a hall table which she did not want but required three power sockets which she did not have (the powerline adaptor has to go into a real socket and not an extension or multi way adaptor). So this led to an extension cable trailing on the floor in the hall. Plus the £25 for the install. Now as she was using a desktop PC, short of moving that to the hall, she had no connection from PC to home hub. So she was told by the BT engineer to go out and buy a WiFi dongle for her PC. She is 82 and made the trip to the shops in the snow. Another £20. Had my wife or I known we would have stepped in but she is one of those fiercely independent types. Initially that did the trick and it worked. Then I did a speed test for her and found she was getting 3Mbps download and about 5Mbps upload! But at least it was working. But then next day the trouble started as the Internet connetion appeared down. Called BT and a long spell on the phone to the call centre. BT could not explain the line speed issue and put it down to needing to "settle in". The Internet connection to the hub (from the BT network) was fine and turned out it was the wireless connection starting to drop. Then rather than pick up the BT home hub again (a distance of 5m away) it would find a neighbour's BT hub or what appeared as a public access BT WiFI FON access point. She did not realise that she was trying to connect to the wrong hub. Plus anyway she did not want the hassle when she previously had only a wired connection. So at that point she called BT. Another long spell on the phone. But she was able to ask for her service to be downgraded. She was told it would happen the next day. Indeed BT Infinity stopped working the next day. But no BT ADSL broadband service was back. Another long phone call. Now was told that the old service would not be reactivated until the following week (almost one week after the BT Infinity service was cut off). That should happen today. So hopefully today all will be back to normal but it has left her out of pocket, having also spent hours on the phone to BT and required me make an "onsite" visit to move equipment and clear up the mess of boxes and cables in the hall. And for something she did not want or need. I will be telling her to write to BT to complain about this fiasco but I post this here as a warning. Before you migrate make sure it is right for you (or your friends and family). Oh and this is not technophobic fear of all things new - I myself have been using various broadband suppliers including BT for 12 years (dating back to BT Home Highway - 2 x 64kbps ISDN service).

Answer 1

Ratty2012 wrote:
I did read the OP's post The homehub should have been installed near the computer, I don't see a reason why it was'nt.
Other than the engineer being lazy?