Help What are my options? (internet speed problem)

[Raven]

I am on BT for broadband, I live in the sticks and there isn't a lot of choice really, certainly no cable. I went on BT expecting a decent service for the extra few £ i pay a month. I pay for the "up to" 8 meg line and for 2 years I got 3, not great but I accepted it due to our location. I recently signed up for another years service as I was reasonably happy with it.
Three weeks ago all the phone lines to the village went down and were down for 2 and a half days, when they brought them back up again I was at 1 meg I assumed it would go back up after a few days as things needed to settle but it hasn't. Two weeks ago I called BT to report a fault, they went through their various tests and said they had found a fault and to leave it 48 hours to be repaired, fair enough I thought. Two days later no change. I called again and got the same thing, leave it 48 hours. Anyway after over a week of having to talk to Indian call centre drones and being told to leave it 48 hours I wrote a web form complaining about my service, the same bunch of morons answered it with a phone call and I was back at square one.
From talking to people in the village it seems the whole village has the same problem since the lines went down so its obviously nothing wrong at my house, besides I have already had an open reach engineer check things over, 1 line into the house, no bell wire etc. BT are insisting that I have a day off work or wait 3 weeks and pay for a Saturday slot for an engineer visit, despite me explaining several times that is affecting the entire village.

Its been 3 and a half weeks now with crap speed and a dodgy connection, can i tell them to shove the contract up their arse? I realise I wont get a faster speed with anyone else but I would pay a hell of a lot less. Every time I phone up they have closed the case as resolved when it clearly isnt. Would Ofcom get involved? At the moment I am just thinking I will cancel the direct debit and send their kit back recorded delivery, fuck um etc

 

[Zenith.UK]

Cancelling your DD and sending the equipment back is the wrong thing to do as *YOU* will be the one breaking your contract and liable for the cost of the remaining months.

The way to see about getting this resolved is to get onto BT Broadband (more foreign call time sorry), submit a fault and request an SFI Engineer visit. Not an ordinary engineer callout... an SFI engineer visit. These are the guys at BT that not only deal with the physical characteristics of the phone line, they also look specifically at what affects your broadband connection. The problem is that if you have the visit and it turns out to be something due to your equipment or something on "your" side of the master BT box in your house, then they will hit you for the £185 cost of the visit.
However if they truly find a fault with your line or even at the exchange then you shouldn't be liable for the cost of the visit, so you need to be DAMN sure it's an exchange or line problem. On the plus side, you should be able to talk with the engineer about the history of what's been happening.
I found the SFI engineer was VERY helpful when I had line problems. It turns out that I was on the "poor" quality copper trunk from the exchange so I was switched over to the "better" alternative trunk. He also checked my master socket, the line to the panel in my drive, the line to the cabinet and the full length from the exchange to the cabinet. He found a "dry joint" in my drive panel and sorted that out as well. All my weather related problems just disappeared and my speeds shot up 40-50% almost overnight.

You say you're getting speeds of 1Mbps or so. Is that throughput or is that sync speed? What speeds were you getting before this outage?

Oh yeah, run a test at the BT speedtester to get an accurate measure of your speed.
Test Result

That should give you your sync speed, your IP profile and your actual throughput. If you have good sync but crap profile then you might have what's called a "stuck profile" and that's a simple matter for BT Broadband to sort out. It will also help your case to show that you're getting crap speeds.