Slow broadband in Bangor, North Wales: is there an...

Question

I apologise in advance for the length of this post, but wonder whether anybody could advise me.
I live in Bangor, a small University town (though technically a city) in north Wales. In the Autumn of last year I took out a broadband contract with BT.
The Broadband was slow from the very outset. Although during the daytime the performance was adequate, during evenings and weekends it was slower than dial up connections I have used in the past, making it completely unusable.
I tried all the steps suggested on various websites, e.g. connecting the Home Hub to the test socket. I also waited for two weeks to see whether the connection speed would improve.
Having seen no improvement I called BT’s helpline. It was a tedious process. I was put on hold for lengthy periods of time and at one point having got through to an operator I was suddenly cut off.
When I did eventually speak to an operator after going through a number of steps he advised me to use BT’s speed tester. According to the results, the connection speed was somewhere in the region of 200kbps, which according to the operator indicated a fault with the line. As a result, he arranged for an Open Reach Engineer to visit, although I had to wait for three weeks, during which time there was no improvement in the service.
The BT engineer, after having tested the line and found no faults, described the cause as being a major fault at Bangor’s telephone exchange. He had been on numerous callouts regarding the same issue, and stated that several hundred houses in the locality were affected.
He cited the reason as being the strain put on the exchange by the town’s student population, with the effect that connection speeds were being limited to 250kbps at peak times.
Nonetheless, he said that engineers were working on resolving the issue, and that due to my proximity to the exchange (a few hundred yards) my speed should be approaching 7mbps.
Following the end of the University term in December 2010 the speed improved significantly (to around 3.6 mbps at one point), which suggests that the engineer’s diagnosis was correct. However, now that the students have returned from the Christmas vacation the speed has dropped once again to an unusable level (as low as 100kbps in the evenings). This clearly suggests that the problem has not been addressed.
In the light of this, I wonder whether anybody could help answer any of these questions:
Is there any way I can get any information from BT about the issue without having to go through a foreign call centre?
Are BT likely to resolve the exchange fault in the near future?
Are there any steps that I can take in the interim to improve my connection speed?
Does the fact that I am not receiving the service for which I am paying provide me with grounds to terminate my contract?
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

We're currently experiencing the same issue on a business line.
We work just outside West Haddon, a small village on the outskirts of Northampton, and have 3 ADSL lines. We are only half a mile from the exchange
The first line was installed when we moved in and works perfectly. No issues or complaints and download speeds in excess of 7mbs. However, this is a dedicated line form one of our clients to access servers which we host so we can't hop on and use it for our own needs.
The 2nd was a replacement to a previous line which was very slow during peak times. This was extremely slow and on the verge of unusable. We thought this could be an issue with the isp as they use Tiscali/TalkTalk who are notoriously slower than most.
The third is an additional line which went live yesterday and was meant as a replacement for our 2nd line. However, while the ping times and upload speeds are much faster then our 2nd lines, the download speeds are still only 2mb.
My colleague has just been on to our new ISP who has told us this could be an issue with the virtual path. We're currently running BT speedtests so we can pass the information back to our ISP so they can query it with BT.
My questions are these.
1. Can the virtual path be changed in any way? This isn't a residential line that can "cope", but a business line where the speed of the line is crucial to the running of the company's business. Having said that if this were a residential line, then it still wouldn't be fit for purpose as we can barely run any internet based applications at all!
2. If BT refuse to change our virtual path, then what are our options regarding reporting them to OFCOM for failing to provide a reasonable service? The excuse that we are too far from the exchange isn't valid as we do have a working line.
I am convinced that the seperation of BT wholesale from the rest of the BT (openreach) group has offered no additional benefits to end users at all, and simply provides a way for different parts of the BT organisation to pass the blame for faults and never actually get to, and fix, the root cause of most peoples internet issues.
When we were investigating the issues with our 2nd line, we had 2 engineers visit us. The first told us he wasn't a broadband engineer and could only do a line test (which he told us had no fault) and that he would rebook a broadband engineer to visit us.  When the broadband engineer turned up, all he could do was the same line test as the first enginner! 2 engineers, different job titles, exactly the same job. Neither could find a problem, both said it was more than likely and exchange issue and both told us THEY were unable to speak to BT wholesale about it and would have to escalate it. Neither did according to our ISP.
It seems that broadband providers are able to make and break promises regarding speed and service at will.
These are my current views on ISP's and BT in particular, and would love to be corrected or enlightened as to why there's no simple fix for the issues raised, so while I've had a bit of a rant, please do correct me if I'm wrong.