• 20 users on 24Mb ADSL sharing just 1Mb of bandwidth.
• All other users sharing 30Mb of bandwidth on old 20CN 8Mb ADSL.
• Added in enhanced care for all users at £8 a go.
• Forgot monthly broadband line rental charges at £7.90 a go.
• Will charge us for bandwidth across the 21CN network, plus charges for 3km of fibre across the London Docklands and we have to provide the BRAS – but yet they still have the balls to charge us £24k a year just for the privilege of doing business with the almighty BT Wholesale. Seriously, noone can explain what this charge is for given that they have separate charges for both bandwidth and fibre.

When I entered the correct figures into their shitty little price sheet, added in all the things they forgot, it came to a whopping £26 per user before any profit margin is added.

By comparison, Be/Fluidata is charging a non-recurring £3k to setup a simple crossconnect in any London Telehouse, and then all we pay are simple line charges depending on the product used, the average one of which is £16 per month.

It’s quite clear that BT Wholesale is not interested in providing any sort of service to other service providers. The ridiculous ordering/faults system, the outright denial of clear area-wide faults and now these ridiculous and quite arbitrary charges for access to their so-called 21st Century Network that still doesn’t properly support IPv6 are all very telling.

Yes.. that is a grand total of 43 seconds from reporting the fault to BT Wholesale rejecting it. This was even reported via KBD, which lets you confirm that the user has already attempted to replace his router, cables, filters and even tried from the test socket. 43 seconds is not enough time for most people to type that long-winded reply about SFI appointments, let alone for BT to run the necessary diagnostics to determine if there is a fault or not.

At my place of work we have suspected that BT was doing this for a long time as all too often, and 9 times out of 10 blatently obvious faults are rejected with the message “not due to a network fault”. Now I have a handful of faults, some where it was customer some, but some where there was genuine faults such as the DSLAM being faulty where BT has denied anything being wrong and cleared the fault in less than a minute.

Is it any wonder that people think their ISPs are incompetant and BT can do no wrong? It’s because when BT has a fault they have the ability to actually go and look at the DSLAM and see for themselves. When anyone else has a fault, they have to rely on the BT Wholesale broadband diagnostics systems which are quite frankly, half assed and go down more often than a thai hooker.

This is what happens when someone has a monopoly but are mandated to supply wholesaler services to others to make it look like they don’t have a monopoly. Their own service is perfect and can do no wrong, while all those wholesalers can scream and shout and cry about the godawful service they’re being given.