BT Internet Failures

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Anyone else on BTInternet been locked out of their e-post service by a strange change to it?

Some while ago BT started ornamenting the signing-in page with a vague notice of in big bold letters warning of some un-described change to the web-site at some date it could not give, and for no stated reason; but promising to preserve our existing addresses and pass-words.

About three weeks ago it switched me to what seemed a parallel web-site that refused my password, and after several tries it locked me out.

I managed to regain service eventually, but have since discovered it seems to strip attachments and even their host messages. This came to light when I learnt our society secretary had received and distributed the information for the forthcoming NAME Meeting, but it had failed to reach me.

I also found photographs from elsewhere had been stripped from messages, but that turned out to be due to a very obscure Firefox setting – it certainly foxed me for over a week before I found it.

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Now (today) BT has done it again – switched the e-mail account to another web-site with a different signing-in page, refused my password and locked me out!

Has anyone else suffered from what looks suspiciously like someone in BT tinkering with the system in an attempt to seem Doing Something Useful?

I have not altered anything. I have done nothing differently. It does not affect anything else – otherwise I would not be able to read this site and post this message.

[NealebParticipant @nealeb]

I have just been reading email via the BT site and Firefox on my laptop, and I can also log in via Chrome on my Android phone. However, as you say, BT seem to say that “something” might happen “sometime”, so maybe the axe will fall on any time soon!

 

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Probably something to do with the EE link-up which has been switching phones to EE, that’s landlines not just mobile.

Are you using webmail? I assume so if you are going to web pages so there could be all sorts of ‘protection’ to stop you getting malicious attachments.
If you use a mail program it is less likely to get messed up. Thunderbird is a free one.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

I gave up trying to understand what BT was playing-at, years ago

… I just know that I don’t trust them [it’s a long story, and of no relevance to this discussion]

This, however, may be of interest:

https://community.bt.com/t5/Email/Email-font-and-design-changed/td-p/2345939

MichaelG.

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P.S. __ in case you missed it … this [linked in that brief discussion] is BT’s story:

https://www.bt.com/help/email/manage-email-account/updates

 

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

I have just left BT (yippee!) for a full fibre service at a higher speed and a retained landline number with unlimited calls for a full £41 a month (£492 a year) LESS than BT was proposing to charge me this year. The only difference being that our ‘local’ landline number is now a ‘national’ number so you have to dial it with the full STD code and it now has the American type of ring. I simply patched in the router’s VOIP port into the old master socket input and all the old analogue phones on the domestic copper network still work perfectly. I would have left BT sooner but was locked into a contract. For over a year both my wife and I have been migrating all our email dealings over to the free gmail facility in preparation for the move. I had been a loyal customer of BT since 1978 but it’s greedy pricing policy ripped me off once too often and I only kept the ‘landline’ (now VOIP) because we appear in the very last Phone Book to be published and it’s only £5 per month. I will never go back to BT.

(BTW, the government paid for the fibre installation, I had to apply on the gov.uk website for the grant upon being instructed by the fibre service provider and I paid a nominal sum to port the old landline number over to VOIP).

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Bazyle –

I don’t know the details, only that BT as my ISP provides the e-post and internet services; and I find them via Firefox.

I managed to sort it eventually by using the ‘Lost Password’ route. Rather surprisingly perhaps, it accepted the one I had been using. That did not work at all when the same thing happened a few weeks ago

However I rang the customer services number, and a very helpful lady noted my dissatisfaction at the loss of attached documents – or loss of the whole message – and with the very vague way BT is making and announcing these changes. She said even she could not tell me when they would occur!

I stay loyal to BT on the Better-The-Devil-You-Know-Principle, don’t believe that changing to an apparently cheaper service will necessarily mean it always will be, and don’t want the possibility of having to change numbers and e-addresses. I can still criticise it though if it neglects it duties.

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

“I stay loyal to BT on the Better-The-Devil-You-Know-Principle, don’t believe that changing to an apparently cheaper service will necessarily mean it always will be, and don’t want the possibility of having to change numbers and e-addresses. I can still criticise it though if it neglects it duties”.

All that is perfectly true and ‘you pays your money and you takes your choice’ as they say. I can understand the reluctance to change because I too had to make a ‘psychological leap’ to leave a provider I had been with, at least as far as the landline was concerned, for so many years. In the early internet years I did have 56K dial-up with Lineone/Tiscali before moving to BT ADSL and the later VDSL. However, the price difference for a better, or at least the same, service is just big to ignore and it’s guaranteed for two years, so now that the loyalty bond has been broken, if the cost of the new service becomes prohibitive in future I will simply seek out the best deal. Also, correct me if I am wrong, as BT migrates its customers to full fibre I think all ‘local’ landline numbers will become ‘national’ numbers as there will be no routing of VOIP calls through local exchanges anymore. (BTW, do BT VOIP phones have the ‘American’ type of ring?)

Just to go off-topic for a moment, I recently received the renewal notice for the house insurance from an online broker, up from £135 to £259. Consulting the ‘opera singer’, I found I could get this down to £165 for more or less the same policy ‘benefits’ and confronted the online broker about this. One moment Sir, please. Yes, we can discount your renewal premium to £185 for exactly the same policy, the same excess with exactly the same insurance company. So OK, I will take that because it’s only twenty-quid more than the alternative and I do have a little sense of loyalty left when treated fairly over an inevitable price rise, but it just shows you how these people try it on!

[mark costello 1Participant @markcostello1]

American style of ring? That’s a new one on Me. Thought phones were all the same.

[mark costello 1]

On mark costello 1 Said:

American style of ring? That’s a new one on Me. Thought phones were all the same.

The phones may well be all the same but the cadence of the AC ringing current on the line can be different. The British ring is a ‘bring, bring, pause, bring, bring’. The ‘American’ ring, which you sometimes hear in television programs and films is a slightly longer single burst of ringing followed by a slightly elongated pause, if you can see what I mean.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

https://youtu.be/rTym_VTz9x0?feature=shared

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

Yes, that demonstrates precisely the ‘American’ ringing tone which has exactly the same cadence as my phone when it now rings. The caller still receives the British ringing tone, or at least I did when I rang my ‘landline’ from my mobile to test it (presumably because ring tone is sent by the mobile provider’s equipment that has been customised to a British standard and also by BT to a real landline phone) but the ringing current from the VOIP outlet on the new router has the ‘American’ cadence presumably because the software that routes the VOIP message packets is American.

[JAParticipant @ja]

Nigel

Back to the original subject, are you sure this is a BT problem?

Two years ago I received a piece of nasty software during a downloading of an update for my videocard. This essentially put a mask on my Firefox browser so it read, and sent somewhere, everything I wrote through the browser, address, passwords, bank card details, the lot. Fortunately I very rapidly became suspicous, reset Firefox to an earlier date and did a number of anti-virus scans. OK, it was not very clever and may have been discovered by anti-virus software very quickly.

But these nasties are very clever and are always improving their game.

Have you checked the BT connection and website using any other browser or computer? Have you made a major software download recently. Has you done a major anti-virus scan recently?

My BT & EE problems are their bills.

JA

 

[Harry WilkesParticipant @harrywilkes58467]

I had a problem last year where I could not ring a mobile number this I also discovered turned out to be any number starting with 0. As most of the numbers stored on my landline are local I don’t use the STD prefix so how long i’d had this problem I don’t know so got it touch with SKY who did their line checks drew a blank so arranged for BT to come it the BT guy did not have a clue what the fault was despite checking the line and some of the local connections and blaming my phone’s etc and concluded it was Sky’s problem SKY and BT exchanged ‘who’s fault it was ‘ over the next few day during this time the problem clear with both sides declaring they had not ‘fixed’ anything. Sky gave me a discount on the rental and now all is well.

H

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

It could be in the near future, that if you cannot get through to a local number, the person you are calling has recently acquired a VOIP phone and you now need to include the STD code (or should we now call this the area code?) to reach them. There has been very little information about these changes except that, as I understand it, BT is aiming to abandon its copper network by 2026. I think we should be told because a lot of older people are resistant to change and still prefer to use the landline phone as opposed to a mobile.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

Chris, Im old and yes resistance to SOME changes (Ill leave you to guess which ones!) but as for being able to use my landline for 59 mins and 59 secs for free is a no brainer

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

Bernard, it isn’t for free because nothing is free, it will be within the ‘package’ of services you pay for but obviously you are not being charged extra.

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Just after BT made their change, my E mail stopped working (On Talk Talk, who are I believe, with Plus Net, another BT subsidiaries)

Took the PC and wife’s laptop to my computer giru.

He said that Virgin users had also had lots of problems.  He loaded Thunderbird, and all has been well since.

Howard

[Chris Crew]

On Chris Crew Said:

… There has been very little information about these changes except that, as I understand it, BT is aiming to abandon its copper network by 2026. I think we should be told …

A quick search finds this page from OpenReach :

https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/retiring-the-copper-network

and an update from 2023 :

https://www.openreach.com/news-and-opinion/2023/openreach-change-telephone-network

 

… essential reading, I would suggest.

MichaelG.

[Howard Lewis]

On Howard Lewis Said:

Just after BT made their change, my E mail stopped working (On Talk Talk, who are I believe, with Plus Net, another BT subsidiaries)

Took the PC and wife’s laptop to my computer giru.

He said that Virgin users had also had lots of problems.  He loaded Thunderbird, and all has been well since.

Howard

Howard, you seem intent on believing TalkTalk is part of BT, you have said this before and I have corrected you.

So! once again, TalkTalk is NOT part of BT.

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

Michael, thank you for the links which I will access and read shortly with interest.

In the meantime, I have to report something seems to have changed with our new VOIP phone service over the weekend. We can now reach reach it without entering the full national number and the ring appears to have reverted to something like that which equates to the British cadence of ringing. I am thinking that possibly the data that relates to our new service has been updated since it has been installed because it certainly couldn’t be reached previously without using the full number and it definitely had the American style of ring. Very strange!

[HowiParticipant @howi]

Regarding email on Windows platforms, I have been using Windows Mail app and been quite happy until Microsoft have decided that all windows mail app users should now use Outlook mail and will switch you over like it or not.

Now, Outlook mail is Ok but I have been having a proiblem.

I have two email addresses, one is Gmail and the other is @tiscali.co.uk (now TalkTalk so had this one a ling time).

I have no problem with the gmail but Talk Talk mail, current mail is missing – an example:- Today is 14th but only mail up to 7th showing, very frustrating, so, as Microsoft are intent on dumping Windows mail app I have gone onto Thunderbird and much happier.

[Chris Crew]

On Chris Crew Said:

… There has been very little information about these changes except that, as I understand it, BT is aiming to abandon its copper network by 2026. I think we should be told because a lot of older people are resistant to change and still prefer to use the landline phone as opposed to a mobile.

Problem is, it’s very difficult to get people to pay attention to what’s coming, and we gradually lose interest in new things as we age, preferring to rely on experience than learn new tricks.   I remember listening to two old ladies on the bus moaning about the imminent decimalisation of British money.  One of them said:  ‘they should wait until all the old people are dead’.

We also forget that in our youth we ran rough-shod over the time-honoured ways of our parents and grandparents, laughing at Aspidistras, Victorian Social norms, celebrating the empire, and playing the National Anthem in cinemas.  We ripped up tramlines, made it impossible for children to play in the street, insisted on wearing car seat-belts,  replaced High Street shops with out-of-town hypermarkets, closed all the Banks, pointed out tobacco was far from harmless, allowed Sunday trading, and got rid of steam engines, nice compartmented carriages and most of the railway network. Then we demolished about a million factory chimneys, blasted motorways through Dingley Dell, and are well on the way to eliminating cash money.

In the late 60’s the GPO had advanced plans for modernising their very mixed system, almost all of it Copper based, with a mass of electromechanical switching, much of it antique.   The cost was too much for a tax-cutting government, who in effect privatised the GPO so that the money could be raised privately.   Thereafter, during the 1970s and 80s, the telephone network was digitised, and most of the backbone copper was replaced by fibre.  A good deal of what Chris is noticing now started 40 years ago, and it wasn’t a secret!

Today what’s left of the old Copper system lies between the local exchange and the consumer, largely because it was cheaper at the time to reuse existing boxes, poles, trunking, and old phones rather than do a big bang upgrade.   Thus most consumers weren’t aware that anything had changed, because their end of the system was much the same.

Not the end of the story!.  Copper is not good for the consumers who wanted to connect to the internet, at first a rare breed, now almost everyone on the planet!  This led to yet more major changes in the telephone back-end, including telephony becoming a junior service on a general purpose telecommunications network, ‘the internet’.  There’s not much difference between telephone, streaming, web, email, or any of the other comms services using the backbone.  The characteristics of the telephone service aren’t conditioned by copper technology; it’s better understood as just another internet service.

Now, the copper part of the BT system is a downright embarrassment.  It’s slow, noisy, high-maintenance and requires special adaptors in the exchange to connect it to the real-world.    A better solution is to extend general purpose telecommunications directly into the home, ideally using fibre, because this improves the services most people want, making them faster, cheaper, and more reliable.  Downside is the old easy to understand landline phone is replaced by a complicated box of tricks,  most of which I don’t need, with a complicated manual, and a proportion of installations will go wrong – more hassle!

Getting rid of the Copper is also likely to change old features, like the way local numbers are dialled, because the new system simply doesn’t work that way.   For example, the old ‘bring bring’ ring tone was generated by the exchange pulsing 70V down the line, originally into an electric bell, these days a sounder.   The new system simply sends the phone a ‘start ringing’ message and the phone provides the noises.   Like a mobile phone, the user can probably personalise the ring tone to be whatever he wants.  Unfortunately, that requires understanding the manual and wading through some sort of horrible menu to make the changes.

Young people positively enjoy setting up new toys, and they are the majority.   Sadly, old folk who just want to be left in peace have to cope with change too.  Whilst I hate it, change is unavoidable so I try hard to take advantage of it, and certainly not let it get to me.  The worst thing the elderly can do for society is to fight progress.  It’s because doing so merely extends the agony, and leaves the young with a complicated muddle to sort out when we are long gone.    Metrication is a good example: by allowing Imperial and Metric to coexist, the UK created the worst of both worlds, one in which Engineers had to convert between two systems, which was error prone, and costly to support.  Keeping an inch trained workforce happy during the 1960s put the whole of British industry at a competitive disadvantage, and was one of the reasons so many British manufacturing companies bit the dust over next 40 years.    Better in the long run for metrication to have been forced through, and the same is probably true of most other technical developments.

Dave

Dave

 

 

 

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Ok, so Talk talk is not part of BT.

But their change messed up my E mails, and for Virgin customers apparently.

The end result was the same.

AND Talk Talk credited me for the three weeks loss of service!

Howard

 

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

“Keeping an inch trained workforce happy during the 1960s put the whole of British industry at a competitive disadvantage, and was one of the reasons so many British manufacturing companies bit the dust over next 40 years”. 

Dave,

With the greatest respect, I found the greater majority of your contribution interesting if a little controversial in places with it’s stereotyping of both ‘young’ and ‘old’ and, whilst we are not allowed political discourse in this forum (quite rightly) surely the above statement, which IMO borders on the ridiculous cannot go unchallenged. As you rightly state, there are many reasons why British manufacturing industry failed, which to spell out would encourage further debate outside the scope of this forum, but I would suggest resistance to metrication was not one of them. To elucidate a more realistic analysis of British industrial decline, which continues to this day, would court the intervention of a moderator due to its overtly political connotations. So may I just opine that whatever happens in the country is due to the political choices its people makes in their choice of governments, many of which have not been overly supportive of British manufacturing, abandoning any long term strategy and being all too willing to allow foreign ownership of the few areas of industrial production in which our country still excels. ‘Nuff said!

[Chris Crew]

On Chris Crew Said:

“Keeping an inch trained workforce happy during the 1960s put the whole of British industry at a competitive disadvantage, and was one of the reasons so many British manufacturing companies bit the dust over next 40 years”. 

Dave,

With the greatest respect, I found the greater majority of your contribution interesting if a little controversial in places with it’s stereotyping of both ‘young’ and ‘old’ and, whilst we are not allowed political discourse in this forum (quite rightly) surely the above statement, which IMO borders on the ridiculous cannot go unchallenged. As you rightly state, there are many reasons why British manufacturing industry failed, which to spell out would encourage further debate outside the scope of this forum, but I would suggest resistance to metrication was not one of them. To elucidate a more realistic analysis of British industrial decline, which continues to this day, would court the intervention of a moderator due to its overtly political connotations. So may I just opine that whatever happens in the country is due to the political choices its people makes in their choice of governments, many of which have not been overly supportive of British manufacturing, abandoning any long term strategy and being all too willing to allow foreign ownership of the few areas of industrial production in which our country still excels. ‘Nuff said!

Can’t disagree with you Chris, and apologies for stereotyping!

But I stand by my point: too many people rejected metric for emotional reasons, making it one of those political choices to which you refer.   Mistake I think because a technical advance like a simplified rationalised system of weights and measures should never be torpedoed by sentiment.

Dave

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