Last year I transferred from Wanadoo (now Orange) to BT Broadband. The Wanadoo website said that the fastest available connection on my telephone line was 1.1Mbps, but when I changed to BT, I suddenly had a 4.4Mbps connection! Is BT only providing faster connections to BT customers?
Also, why isn't it possible to have a broadband only telephone line without signing up for weekend call packages etc? Kevin Williams
BT is controlled by Ofcom, and it has made the company split its operations so favouritism should be impossible. BT Wholesale (http://www.btwholesale.com/) provides broadband services to a large number of companies. BT Retail sells services to consumers, including services such as BT Fusion, BT Talk Together and BT Broadband. BT Wholesale is contractually obliged to treat all its retailers the same, and not favour BT Retail customers.
Your Wanadoo connection would have had two major parts. The first is the phone line connection to your home, the "local loop". The second is the network connection from the exchange. Broadband suppliers can let BT Wholesale run both parts, or they can pick up your broadband connection at the exchange. They can also install equipment in the exchange and control the line to your home. This is called LLU (local loop unbundling). In any case, the whole connection will only be as fast as the slowest link.
With Wanadoo, you probably had standard ADSL, provided by BT Wholesale, at least as far as the exchange. (But like Talk Talk and Sky Broadband, Orange has been moving heavily into LLU.) With BT Broadband you are now getting the ADSL Max service provided by BT Wholesale. ADSL Max is a "rate adaptive" system which initially doesn't have a set speed: it is vulnerable to interference, and does the best it can. It is correctly described as a "regrade" rather than an "upgrade". The results are variable, and sometimes they are worse than ADSL. I think you've just hit lucky.
On line charges, again, Ofcom is ultimately in control. Under its direction, BT Wholesale offers a service called WLR (Wholesale Line Rental) which reflects the value and costs of operating the copper telephone network. Ofcom has set a price ceiling of £8.39 per month (residential) for WLR and also requires customers get "a single bill that covers both line rental and telephone calls".
BT Retail does not have the cheapest deals for renting a phone line plus calls, but whichever way you cut it, roughly £100 a year goes to BT Wholesale for the cost of your line. The only ways round that are to use a different set of wires, by switching to a cable TV provider, or not to use a line at all, by switching to a wireless broadband service.
Backchat: Many thanks to Dave Smith for pointing out an error in my answer. He says: "WLR and LLU Services are provided by BT Openreach, not BT Wholesale. It's more than a little confusing that 'Wholesale Lines' are not provided by BT Wholesale especially when 'Wholesale Calls' are. However, you need a UK wide network (which is managed by BT Wholesale) to deliver calls; you just need local access to the exchange (which is managed by BT Openreach) to provide a line." BT Openreach (http://www.openreach.co.uk) was spun off at Ofcom's request, and since last summer has provided what BT calls "LLU Equivalence of Input (EoI) via the Equivalence Management Platform (EMP)." In other words, BT Wholesale gets the same LLU on the same terms as other suppliers.
