Ridiculous situation with slow broadband - who to complain to?!

When I worked near Bedford there were lots of people in my department complaining about their home broadband. Some were new builds that were sold with high speed broadband but BT and Virgin never took up the option to lay the cables, leaving them on < 1mb and in constant meetings with the developer. The others lived in areas with slow internet and were constantly harassing BT to lay fiber and even had ideas of laying their own.

Me personally, if the house doesn't have high speed internet I wouldn't even consider it.
 
Thanks for the responses folks - MP had been emailed, and got a draft to the BT CEO sat in my outbox.

In terms of moving house - that would surely be daft. We spent a year looking for a house at the right price in the right location and are very happy with it. Just not with the broadband connection. And selling up/moving on is a right bellyache, so that's not going to happen!!

I was aware of the potential issues with slow internet connections in new builds so did raise this with the developer, and was obviously pointed to the fibre at the end of the road, no issues expected, you should have a nice fast connection. Obviously the sales lady put in the "obviously we don't know yet as the house is still being built... Not legally binding etc etc"

I just don't want to get forgotten - it seems we're on the bottom of everybody's list at the moment, and unless someone kicks up a stink it'll be easier for everybody to forget about this little pocket of a couple of dozen houses and leave us in the 1990s!
 
There's a few things here that may throw a spanner in the works.

You're on a new voice cabinet (importantly it wasn't the FTTC cabinet that ran out of capacity, as that would tend to trigger an automatic upgrade or a new cabinet to appear next to it, as obviously there is demand) which is too small for the costs of the smallest FTTC cabinet to be a commercially viable option.

I think the only real option you have is to enquire about the cost of gap funding your cabinet, by sending an email to [email protected] with the details. Now this won't be cheap (I have a quote in my inbox from a few years back for £13.5k + VAT), and I doubt you will have any chance of the developer chipping in since no promises were made about Internet availability when you were sold the property.

How many houses are we talking about?

Edit: Looks like community gap funding has been given an official page:

http://www.communityfibre.bt.com/
 
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If I remember rightly and you've got all the dates and email correspondence and letters etc to your ISP and still no joy, the last resort is usually the ombudsman called CISAS.
They have all the details on their site with the process for making a complaint about ISP.
 
An ADR (there are a couple - see http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/phone/problems-and-complaints/adr-schemes/) won't accept a complaint along the lines of "my phone line is too long for good ADSL and there's no FTTC cabinet". If you had an issue with how your provider had been dealing with you then you may have a case - maybe they took money for an FTTC install and haven't refunded you despite being reminded a lot.

The regulator can't force Openreach to install a cabinet.
 
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