Broadband (Complaint more than a Q)

[iniltous]

You can check what’s available at your address here , posting the entire return will be helpful .

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

If you don’t have access to SoGEA ( effectively fibre to the cabinet without PSTN telephone ) it will not show that as an available option , SoTAP  is exchange based ADSL without a legacy phone service (PSTN ) , you can get telephony from BT on both SoGEA and SoTap but has to be IP telephony , with BT  that means BT Digital Voice , which is only available by using the SH2 router .

Your  previous supply is unknown to myself, if it were a big brand  like Sky , Vodafone or Talk Talk , it’s generally known what type of service they use (MPF or WLR ) , and therefore easy to  speculate what may have happened to leave you in thus state, but as your provider is uncommon /niche  I personally don’t know which it is , others may offer an opinion on that .

I suspect you haven’t actually been migrated at all ,you are still basically connected to your old ISP , and all that has happened is your old ISP has inhibited your broadband account , hence you have connectivity you can see from the router admin , but no internet access ,  similar to a delinquent account, basically what they do to non payers ….but strangely they have not inhibited your telephone service ….for whatever reason I suspect you are still waiting for the physical work in the exchange to connect you to BT equipment to be done by Openreach , or your old ISP has acted on the instructions to ‘remove’ you but the instructions to connect you to BT haven’t been issued to Openreach ,or issued  but  future dated , hence leaving you with a break in service.

[iniltous]

Final point , your estimate, apparently for SoTap (ADSL ) is 21Mb download, this is incredibly high for ADSL and indicates a very short line length , basically adjacent (within a few 10’s of metres) to the exchange building, do you live really near to the exchange building….if you don’t (or you don’t know ) , and given your statement about living in the ‘sticks’ , is there anything vague or non standard about your address , as your problem may be a misidentified address , looking at the postcode you posted , there doesn’t seem to many  ‘standard’ addresses following what would be considered the regular format  of house  number , street name , postal town , county , postcode , they are all somewhat unusual.

[GSV3MiaC]

My isp was 'firefly Ltd, trading as intec, company sc231044' (Scottish).

I am 3km from (burwarton) exchange, as the copper wire flies. On the B4364. We don't have street addresses, bugs several websites, and while bt/openreach have the full address I try not to post it on websites.

The openreach page I linked says I still have a choice of pstn or digital phone. Of course they could be lying too.

Problem with having to use the bt smart hub is that it does not support multiple ssids, vlans, manage my draytek APs, or any of the other stuff I need, so ain't going to fly.. Just want what I had, adsl connection and 3 hardwired phone extensions, which is what I signed up for. 

[iniltous]

If you are 3km from the exchange with ADSL2+ your predicted speed would be around 8Mb , you posted an image that shows a predicted speed 21Mb , so something is obviously incorrect, either the image showing 21Mb isn’t for your address , or your estimate of the distance to the exchange is way off ….for what it’s worth between 4 and 5km is where exchange based ADSL2 can perform better than FTTC , but we don’t know what’s available as you haven’t produced the information asked for .

If you don’t want to post the image from the BTw checker , obviously that’s up  to you , people that do provide this information generally obscure their address to keep their anonymity and that way they can get assistance in interpreting the return from the checker .

I’ve no idea what you are referring to when you say an Openreach site  says you have PSTN available, OR show nothing about the type of telephony available on any of their sites that I’m aware of ,(copper broadband doesn’t equal PSTN telephony , cooper pair SOGEA and SoTAP are copper but can have IP telephony if that’s required) but you seem cling to the idea that PSTN is available to new supply when it isn’t , but as you won’t post the images you supposedly have seen , we can only speculate to what it is that your are interpreting ( incorrectly in my view ) 

Anyway good luck with this , as you say , your post is a complaint rather than a question as to how you got to where you are now .

[GSV3MiaC]

That 21 mbit prediction is what openreach say they offer as 'standard broadband', the pstn/digital phone is also in openreaches description. It may be BT don't offer pstn, even though openreach do.

The bt prediction for my property is the same 4-5 bits that I have always achieved. Mention of phone but not what type. 

[iniltous]

There is nothing on the Openreach image you posted that even mentions telephony of any type whatsoever , copper broadband doesn’t mean PSTN telephone , the image you provided presumably for your address clearly predicts 21Mb  from copper broadband (so exchange based ADSL ) , which is impossible if the distance from the exchange you say is accurate, so something is obviously wrong , vague addresses on postcodes that cover a large geographic area can be way off because some parts of the postcode can be much nearer to the exchange than other parts of the same postcode , inaccurate or misleading addresses are usually the reason for obviously incorrect speed estimates , the link I provided is a much better resource ….

[GSV3MiaC]

The PSTN/Digital phone is mentioned halfway down the checker page:

https://www.openreach.com/fibre-checker/standard-broadband

I did not post the whole thing, I assumed you could find it. Openreach checker just says 'we can do standard broadband' and if you ask for details, this is the (generic) page you get. Obviously 21mBit/s is 'up to' and not achievable for 99% of adsl customers, just like 'up to 70% off' never applies to most sale items.

[iniltous]

Any BT , Openreach , or BTw site where you enter a specific address gives a speed estimate for that address it’s not the generic advertising speed that the average BT customer on that product can get, if it were the figure for  ADSL (country wide average ) is 17Mb , it has nothing to do with ‘upto’ speeds , the theoretical maximum for ADS2+ is 24Mb , which is not achievable in the real world, but if allowed , advertising the product would be ‘upto 24Mb’ , the ASA stopped providers using the ‘upto’ method years ago , they now have to use an equally nonsensical  ‘average’ speed , and for BT on ADSL that is 17Mb , but as stated , once you put your  address information in , you get an ‘proper’ estimated speed  for that address not the pointless national average and certainly not the ‘upto’  speed from years ago .

….as far as telephone, it doesn’t mention what type of telephone any particular order will get , it says that analogue telephony  is being phased out , and to check with the provider, this is primarily if a customer has things like an alarm  that may not be compatible with IP telephony …..you used BT , therefore you are getting BTDV (that is not negotiable  ) if you had an alarm that wasn’t compatible your choice is to use someone else for telephony or change the alarm, you say you have dialtone from the master socket …..BT are not supplying that , therefore it’s still from your old provider, your BT dialtone will be from the SH2 , that’s why we can state with reasonable conviction that you are not connected to BT .

BTDV  is BT proprietary IP telephone service  , it’s delivered via the SH2 router , not the master socket (or any socket apart from the one on the router ) Openreach can’t assume that BT will be the provider, that why they say to check with the provider and are somewhat circumspect, plus that page on the Openreach site is not your providers website , because that is BT .

Anyway , there seems to be little point in myself continuing to add this thread ,  you obviously are at liberty to think whatever you want .

[GSV3MiaC]

The bt site does indeed give a speed for my address, the openreach site just says 'standard broadband' which clicks thru to the link I gave. Feel free to try it with any address in this postcode.

I begin to suspect BT just can't deliver what I need, but sadly they are the only listed provider here, given 4g is hopeless. Maybe openreach can suggest another, or I just go back to intec, who are helpful but don't really want residential customers anymore.  

[GSV3MiaC]

Just to close the issue, Liam (?) from Openreach in Kingswinford (think Wolverhampton South) turned up, listened to the issue, went to the exchange, and got them to enable the PPP/router ports they (BT? Openreach? The cleaner?) had failed to enable.

Whatever received wisdom says I am back on ADSL broadband (now nearly 6 mbit/s), PSTN phone line (yes, it is possible, out here in the wilds), and blue light on the SH2, which is now retiring in favor of the Draytek 2862ac.

So it is eminently fixable, just not by BT CS staff.