Talktalk

[Woody Alan]

Just to add some clarity and confusion . In small exchanges (mostly rural) the only broadband equipment will be BT Wholsale. All providers will have access to this equipment to resell their product. So whichever provider you have will use the same equipment and Openreach line to deliver that product to you. That does not mean there are not Backhaul network issues with how much bandwidth the provider has purchased and therefore how much throttling occours. All customers will be under the contention ratio within the rack they are connecteds to with the backhaul fibre connecting that rack into the main network. Voice will be provided by the BT switch network.

In larger exchanges where it made commercial sense at the time bigger providers will have their own equipment to provide broadband and voice and exclude BT wholesale entirely. It is possible therefore their may be ties between e.g. Sky and ZEN (random selection) to resell between them as Sky may be more competitive in the reselling market than BT Wholsale.

Fibre (which has always been marketed confusingly) is either FTTC (fibre to cabinet) and last stretch on the D side network of copper to serve a customer, or FTTP fibre direct into the premises. These are Openreach (Wholesale selling equally to service providers) owned products. Again the caveat being unless it's a new housing estate, which say Virgin got into first they will then have complete coverage of that estate with their own network and BT will not. In this instance Broadband and voice (VOIP)are both over the fibre. This is the case with any newly built estate. To complicate it further the FTTP roll out under the government contracts only serve Broadband over the fibre (unless you specifically get a VOIP service) and your voice service will be over a hybredised Fibre copper connection (usin both copper and fibre).

The issue with the smaller providers is if you want to connect to FTTC and you are the only ZEN customer on that cabinet and there are no other ZEN customers on the collection of cabinets connected to that particular headend they would have to pay for a 1 gigabit connect to that cabinet to connect into the backhaul network and it won't cost in for one customer. Obviously as time goes on that scale increases.

Inevitably the above will not be the full story, or only solution, and clearly I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of any retail business costings or practice, but I do have an engineering knowledge of some of the mechanism, so please don't rip me to shreds. I am trying to give an insight to alleviate some of the misunderstandings of how it all works or open further debate if required.

Alan

 

[RogerS]

Ah, 'cabinets'...reminds me of where we used to live. The BT cabinet feeding a few of us was frequently inundated with the overflowing stream. As a result, over the years, the internals ended up with verdigris on everything. The Openreach engineers were forever attending to faults. They'd make recommendations that said cabinet should be replaced as they were wasting so much time and money attending to these never-ending faults. The bean-counters said 'No'. One night down t'pub, we were all having a grumble about it and 'Fred '(not his real name) the local farmer asked us all if we could stand to lose the connection for a few days if it meant getting it sorted once and for all. Needless to say, we all agreed. Never knew those bale spears on John Deere tractors could do so much damage.

We got a new cabinet, though and they never did find out who did it.

 

[D_W]

I accidently had Amazon prime on my business account. I rang up and said I didn't want it, they said fine and cancelled it and refunded my money. I have also had other Amazon stuff auto renewed my mistake and they always cancelled immediately with zero fuss.

I wroye a poor review of the Amazon Auto device, I used it for a few months and wrote an honest assement. They published the review but asked me to send the device back for a full refund. No packaging and absolutely no fuss. The 1 star review is still up.

The only time I have had an issue was when I ordered a monitor, the box came and it was full of laptops that had been returned. The monitor value was £350 and the laptop value was £3,500. That took a lot of fuss and confusion. I think they would rather I had kept the laptops but that would have been illegal and if I'd been caught, I'd have been in big trouble.

Rob

That's a bit different than the ground level consumer experience here in terms of canceling prime. However, returns here for any reason have never been a problem. On the service side in actually buying and returning things, I don't know that it could possibly be any easier.

Early on, I ordered some woodworking things through amazon where they'd labeled part of a set with a label for the whole set. That was frustrating as the order appeared to be complete and the customer service was in india. Explaining to them that a featherboard set vs. one separate part of the set wasn't the same thing - unlikely that a call center employee in india can look at the descriptions and figure out what you're saying. So, I reordered, same thing happened again and I tried to point out to them that they had a problem in their distribution center where they were putting the wrong labels on something and that a $39 single item and the set of two with a matching table saw fence and hardware for $159 were not the same thing (I kept getting the former with the labele for the latter). I made no headway there except to be warned that if I returned the second one, I would be marked for excessive returns and wouldn't be allowed to order a third.

Here's another side story from a BIL - not quite exactly like your experience - he ordered a whole-house generator (the kind that permanently hooks into a gas line and turns on when the power goes off and then turns off automatically when the power goes back on). People on REC electric here (small non-profit cooperatives) sometimes have unstable power and it's not taken care of as quickly as it is in suburbia by giant utilities. He got a $4k generator from amazon and it showed up dented. He sent them pictures, they sent him another one. He asked about arranging to have the other one returned and they said "just sell it to someone locally. If it's dented, we don't want it back." He informed them that it worked fine on a test run other than that and they still declined to take it back since it would be LTL freight and then they'd still have to resell it. His neighbor bought it from him for about 2/3rds of the price of new/undamaged. Presumably, freight insurance coverage and write off of any remaining loss made it a better deal for them to not get it back - I'm not assuming that altruism or charity was involved in that, but BIL made out well with it.

I sit here now at the same time having no clue when my prime will run out, but know that they'll let me know only after it's renewed and the price has probably gone up again.

 

[pcb1962]

I sit here now at the same time having no clue when my prime will run out, but know that they'll let me know only after it's renewed and the price has probably gone up again.

I've had at least 6 voice messages left (I don't answer my landline) by an automated system in the past month telling me what date my Prime will renew and how much it will be.

 

[artie]

I sit here now at the same time having no clue when my prime will run out, but know that they'll let me know only after it's renewed and the price has probably gone up again.

If you go to your account and scroll down to "Your prime membership" and click on that, it will tell you all about it and you can cancel it there as well.

 

[D_W]

I've had at least 6 voice messages left (I don't answer my landline) by an automated system in the past month telling me what date my Prime will renew and how much it will be.

Literally never happened here. I wonder if the laws are different there. I get an email informing me that prime has been updated and what the price is. There's no way (or wasn't in the last couple of years) in the states to sign up without auto-enroll.

 

[D_W]

If you go to your account and scroll down to "Your prime membership" and click on that, it will tell you all about it and you can cancel it there as well.

In the states, if you go there two weeks and hit cancel, there's no option to cancel at the the end of the term (or wasn't last year). If you click on it, you cancel instantly with no refund, month left or whatever. You have to come back a day or two before the renewal to cancel without getting charged and without losing the remainder of your year.

That said, I'd imagine I could call a day later to customer service and complain and maybe get somewhere. I've never tried.