Nothing Special

My BT Infinity (Home Hub 5) went live yesterday (21st Oct 2014). The wireless system to my daughter’s and wife’s smart phone worked OK so did my daughters lap top but my stand alone PC running Windows XP did not.

So I rang the BT “help line”. Note the use of inverted commas here. Spent almost one hour, including two resets, bringing out an old lap top with no Wi-Fi (running Windows 8) and connecting this via cable to the router. All was working but at no time was I given any advice as to why my desktop was not working.

After 30 or so minutes of this useless exercise I was beginning to wonder where all this was leading. (I had already opened the Local area connection status from the control panel and could clearly see that information was being sent to my PC but nothing was being received.) So the problem was clearly with the internal IP settings in my computer.

After an hour of this rubbish with zero advice as to how to get my desk top PC to receive the internet signal, I was told that the internet service from BT was working perfectly well and that the problem was with my PC and as such it was my responsibility to get it sorted. Great service! But why did she not tell me at the beginning of the call that BT were unable to provide me with the appropriate advice needed to get my desk top working?

WARNING. If you have an old PC which does not run the latest Micro-soft operating system then you may well have problems connecting.

After browsing on the internet I discovered that there are many, many people who have signed up to BT Infinity who have experienced the same problem, The solution is to reset your IP address, subnet mask, default gateway and DNS server. So no thanks to BT I eventually got it working.

The BT publicity blurb states that you can access BT sport and some other broadcasts. What BT do not tell you is that this is only free provided you watch on-line. If you want to access this material on your TV then you pay extra, and if you want to watch this in HD then, yes you’ve guessed it, you pay even more.

The internet service I have is faster than the previous telephone line service but only just. Fortunately I get this “service” for £5 month for 6 months but I am tied into an 18 month contract.

Overall my expectations of what this BT “service” was going to give me has not materialized. Their customer service is rubbish and their product is disappointingly average at best.

Hope this review is of some help.