:: View topic - QoS standards for residential customers

Bug Hut - QoS standards for residential customers

hieronymous - Mar 11, 2007 - 12:11 AM
Post subject: QoS standards for residential customers

I am shocked by what we recently experienced with BT. The telephone line went down and it took BT a month to fix. After reviewing customer agreements I now realize that really BT offers no guarantee that faults will be dealt with in any timeline at all. If it had taken ten years for BT to fix the fault they would have been no worse off. This seems to me totally unacceptable. Surely it should either be possible to pay according to the risk of service disruption one is prepared to look after; or the ISP should offer some sort of moble-phone backup line technology. What do other people think? Is the regulator asleep on this?

eusty - Mar 11, 2007 - 01:16 PM
Post subject: Re: QoS standards for residential customers

hieronymous wrote:

Surely it should either be possible to pay according to the risk of service disruption one is prepared to look after

There are companies which will provide s SLA (service level agreement) which will compensate you are provide alternatives if something goes wrong. But they are business orientated...and expensive!!

hieronymous - Mar 11, 2007 - 11:34 PM
Post subject: RE: Re: QoS standards for residential customers

eusty wrote:

hieronymous wrote:

Surely it should either be possible to pay according to the risk of service disruption one is prepared to look after

There are companies which will provide s SLA (service level agreement) which will compensate you are provide alternatives if something goes wrong. But they are business orientated...and expensive!!

Obviously I am not looking for QoS the same level as business. I would have perfectly understood a week's outage. I also understand that you get what you pay for. I do not however have the choice of paying a bit more to say limit outages to a week. When we had an outage BT told us it would be fixed in a week but they actually took a month.

TheBoy - Mar 12, 2007 - 09:08 PM
Post subject: RE: Re: QoS standards for residential customers

Some ISPs do offer a dialup backup, and with right routers, this can be fairly seemless (speed aside!). However, these will rack up your bills.

BT will compensate if the line was unable to carry voice under their voice guarantee scheme...

tbh, if it took them a month to fix, and you were always available to allow access immediately, then it sounds like an issue that couldn't have been fixed quicker anyway, eg replacement of underground cables, or some digging etc required...