Have you retained any evidence of this, if not I suggest you do. It's an admission that your service is substandard.
Cabling is in ducts, and unless the ducts have collapsed then either more cables can be added or the old replaced. Either way it's BT's problem and not yours. They can also re-route the cable if they wish.
You don't need permission from the other party to record your conversations, not in the UK - yet!
I'd be tempted to get more hands on with BT, you need to be a broken record till they fix it to shut you up. However I don't know about virgin, though their phone is fine, their international rates are daylight robbery. Try a voip phone for outgoing calls. Brian
No filter as virgin broadband is on a different bit of wire, its coaxial normally. The virgin guy simply lifted out the bt wires and crimped in his own. Brian
On the basis that someone else is probably already recording them, that seems far, doesn't it? Whether that is the other end, or somewhere in the middle, or both is the question!
Their conference call rates are crazy, something like £14 an hour. On a B T line we paid either nothing or 50p, can't remember which. The main upside of virgin is the broadband, which beats anything offered via the old BT wi ring by a long way.
NT
They do have capacity and outage problems as I know to my cost. Plus someone stole all the doors to the cabinets round our way last year.
The big issue - which came up a couple of years ago - is whether Ofcom will force Virgin to share its ducting. Until this happens we will carry on with anticompetitive practices that stifle high speed broadband and other services to premises. BT looks like an idiot having to deploy Infinity over old copper in cabled areas.
E.
Sipgate are OK but for business use I'd use a UK based provider.
Been excellent performance and service with VoIPfone. FWIW..
Yes but much less rental;)...
Been in VoIP for bizz calls for ages and its been fine. What do you think happens to your call when it gets to the exchange carries on over copper;?..
That it does .. thats the one thing they do very well:)..
On BT it depends a bit of your exchnage ATM it may go over IP or it may go over ATM. BT are in mid switch over from an ATM based network to IP based.
Donno if the IP based solution will emulate a circuit switched network by guaranteeing that once a connection has been established you will have the "circuit" barring a failure of kit/fibre WHY within BTs network.
VoIP over the public internet the quality/reliabilty of the "circuit" is down to the varigies of the public internet which was never built to deal with "real time" applications. Packets are not guaranteed to arrive in the order they where sent or even arrive at all...
Can't say I've had a problem at all Dave mind you our BB is very good here over co-ax rather then the damp string stuff hence the recommendation to the OP to dump BT and use his VM BB for the phones..
Can always use a mobile for back up not that I've needed to;)..
In article , eastender scribeth thus
Since we started using cable BB in 1995 its been down around 3 times once their fault twice good old Padrig and his digger was the cause..
Yes the Pikey's are renowned for nicking phone lies and there not bothered which Telco owns the cable!...
Yawn. On the other hand those of us that have USED VOIP over the internet find it is by and large better quality and cleaner than a land line.
"circuit"
I've also used VoIP over the public internet and have also found it better "quality" than analogue, mainly due to level. 3 miles of copper takes it toll on analogue... It also seems to have wider bandwidth than the ISDN as well, the ISDN is of course fine for level.
With the public internet the link is not under control of just one or two carriers but many and varied ones. These days with massive connecetivity common place (hundreds of Gbps or even Tera bps) delays, lost packets etc are much less of a problem.
If they say they can't/won't fix it take it up with Ofcom
Virgin work on the cheap/haggle-able line rental, expensive calls model:
3 Mobile: up to 32p/min 0844/0871: significant markup over BT Cuba: up to £1.30/min 1xxx(x) prefixes: not available Inclusive call packages: not great value CPS/changing calls provider: not availableEssentially the only way you'll win having a Virgin line: You only use it to receive calls You only use it with a dialthrough provider with 080 free access number You only use it rarely (eg fax line, alarm system, etc) If you need the PSTN and VOIP won't do
Theo
VOIP can go over all sorts of routes, and you don't get any control.
For example, 18185 on the PSTN (which sometimes goes to VOIP, routes outside the UK and comes back again) has been having call quality issues recently - sometimes it's echo-y and barely usable.
Meanwhile calling various UK and international destinations using Voipgain has been producing unusable calls full of echo, one-way calls, breakup etc etc. PSTN 0871 dialthroughs (roughly the same price) to the same places are fine.
If you're calling the UK you might be OK, because people would scream. But many destinations aren't actually tested (ever called anyone on Ascension Island?), and the VOIP trunk can compress them to death so when it comes to use them they don't actually work.
You'd think this is because I'm using cheap VOIP carriers. But even primary landline telcos do this - eg I can't fax to one place because it's being VOIP-ised somewhere along the line. Prefix with 1280 (route over BT) and it's fine.
Only BT circuit-switched all the way has a guarantee of not being mangled. But it costs.
ICUK looks interesting... especially if they don't mess about with compression.
Theo
Well does that matter?. Do we know what routing BT or Energis Virgin et al might take?..
We use VoIPfone and over the last year and a half now I've had one duff call which sounded like mobile break up and that was in Cambridge. In fact I didn't know for certain if the person who was calling was on a mobile or not.
Calls to France and the USA are excellent, sound like just down the road;!)...
Yes, they do know how to charge...
Odd. Must be a different Skype to what I've been using exclusively as my talk-to-landline connector for the past year and a half. The only time it's let me down was when the wireless BB it piggybacks on was up and down like a yo-yo. There are a couple of things it could do better, sure; but for so cheap as to be free calls to any landline in Europe, I'm quite happy with it.
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