![Portrait with a Clumber horse [10/52]
I actually intended to try and do quite a straight portrait and include the horse at the side of me. I stood with my back to the horse with my camera at ...](http://publicenergy.co.uk/Projects/52-Weeks/20100306-1145-0017-Edit/803460292_nQg6M-Th.jpg "Portrait with a Clumber horse [10/52]
I actually intended to try and do quite a straight portrait and include the horse at the side of me. I stood with my back to the horse with my camera at ...")
BT I-Plate
A few weeks ago, I fitted a BT I-Plate to the phone socket that my ADSL router is plugged in to.
This little plastic gizmo is supposed to, well, I’ll knick this bit of text :
The I-Plate (also known as IPLATE) is a special ADSL filter that can be easily installed to improve the speed and stability of your connection. It works by filtering electrical interference created by TVs, lights, extension wiring and other everyday electrical equipment in the home.
This interference is usually caused by phone extension wiring as it acts like a giant antennae picking up interference. Some lines have seen up to 4 Mbps increases in speed although improvements of 1.5 Mbps were found to be more typical in a benchmark survey of 36,000 filtered lines. This I-Plate can also help with poor performing long lines.
I completely forgot that I’d fitted it after a day or two of checking that I’d not made things worse. I’ve been doing some checking though, and my connection used to reach a maximum download speed of 670Kb/sec – it now maxes out at about 830Kb/sec.
This is almost a year after I was getting 15Kb/sec when using Virgin Media! Since I left Virgin Media, I’ve been using ADSL24 and I’ve not had a single issue in the 12 months I’ve used them.
So, hooray for the BT IPlate giving me a near 25% speed boost and hooray for ADSL24 for doing a perfect job invisibly.
I bought my Iplate from ADSL24 for a tenner.
Tony, 
I really really like 
Ollie 7:47 pm on July 23, 2007 Permalink |
I hear ya’ bud, I hear ya’. Unfortunately, most companies are the same. The small ones do care, but don’t have the resources to help in a timely manner, and the big multi-nationals just don’t give a rat’s bottom about your £x/month subscription.
I hope your next supplier works out better than Demon, but don’t be surprised if they don’t. Such is life, forever spent navigating stupid help-desk menus just to be told I’m the problem. No wonder some folk go insane…
(Oh, I think the graphic is just about right ;-) )
publicenergy 8:51 pm on July 23, 2007 Permalink |
I don’t really expect perfect service anywhere, I just like it not to be quite this bad!
Another small email exchange from today…
I sent this
They replied with this
I have lost the will to argue.
brendadada 11:20 pm on July 23, 2007 Permalink |
Nightmare. Good riddance.
David Salter 1:45 pm on August 20, 2007 Permalink |
Here here. The help desk just keeps lying to me. Excuse after excuse. In away all they are doing is showing contempt. In my case it has taken them three months and my complaint is still not resolved.
Such a shame as Demon used to be so good.
If I do not get satifaction shortly, I shall jump ship as well.
Steve R 12:43 am on September 2, 2007 Permalink |
I have had the same problems with Tiscali. I was trying to upgrade my account from 1mb to 8mb and after 4 months I am still on 1mb. The customer service is non existant and the technical service is clueless. I am just about to transfer to Demon because I was with them in 1995 on their tenner a month dial-up and had no problems and I thought they would obviously know what they were doing.
Thanks for the warning. Where do I go now for decent broadband with decent customer care.
andrea f 9:27 am on September 3, 2007 Permalink |
Hi
We have same problems with connection disconnecting all the time demon were no use at all so we have put up with it for a while. As we have a second line we are having sky broadband on that (it’s free) so we can run it and check its ok, then we will cancel demon as the are also too expensive.
Chris Swinson 2:00 pm on October 12, 2007 Permalink |
We left demon after the 12 month contract had ended, they are still billing us and they even signed us up for a second contract and billing us the top price per month even after admiting it was a mistake. I have countless letters demanding payment, and now its in the hands of a collection agency. After 40 emails and hours of phone calls talking to idiots, and several letters to demon we are getting nowhere.
How they can threaten us with bills for 2 contracts while we have been with BT for the past 4 months is beyond me. We will be taking them to court soon as it seems the onyl way to get them to understand simple facts that we left 4 months ago.
publicenergy / Infrared Fishey 8:14 pm on February 23, 2008 Permalink |
[...] period of bad weather and another Saturday spent waiting for an engineer to arrive to fix my long standing broadband problem, I really needed to get outdoors. Saturday had some really nice weather which was hugely [...]
Bryan Stone 8:49 am on April 8, 2008 Permalink |
We currently use Demon for our internet accesss and web hosting, but will be moving both as soon as is practical. They are unquestionably the worst organisation I have ever had to deal with. Any administration errors (of which there are many) take at least 6 months to deal with, and the hosting becomes less reliable by the week. Stay away at all costs!
steve 4:31 pm on April 29, 2008 Permalink |
I echo Bryan Stone’s comments entirely. Demon are abysmal.
Tony 4:36 pm on August 5, 2008 Permalink |
Demon are one of the ISPs which has a strict and rather unfair 12-month contract policy. Example: If you are a student and end up moving unexpectedly into a house with existing broadband or onto the university campus then you can expect to lose upwards of 200 quid. Most ISPs just charge a disconnection fee of 50ish quid, which is a lot fairer. This happened to me and the Demon helpdesk were totally useless: took ages to connect, got randomly hung up on, voice quality real bad, didnt understand questions, never called back, failed to update records, didnt understand basic things like remote disconnection, sent bills to the wrong address and then hired a debt collector etc etc. These guys were really good in the late 90s, but have gone to pot ever since.