OK, so I called EE today. The first person I spoke to admitted they weren’t fully sure how to move my connection from BT FTTP 900 Mbps to EE’s 1.6 Gbps service, but they did say it’s a common and well-known issue.
They explained that EE has now set up a new department specifically to deal with this problem, and transferred me over.
This newly created team is called the Remedies Department.
As soon as I got through to them, they said their entire job is to fix this exact issue, and that there’s now a proper procedure in place.
Previously, EE were doing a standard “line takeover” from BT, and that’s where everything fell apart. The real problem was that Openreach weren’t testing the existing BT-installed ONTs to confirm whether they could handle speeds up to 2.5 Gbps. A lot of those older BT ONTs can take 2.5 Gbps in, but the Ethernet port going out to the router is limited to 1 Gbps — meaning customers were paying for speeds they could never actually receive.
The new solution is that EE now cancels the customer’s old BT account entirely and sets them up as a brand-new EE customer. This has two big benefits:
1. It forces Openreach to test the existing ONT and replace it with a multi-gig version if needed.
2. You get treated as a new customer, so you qualify for the new-customer pricing.
My order is now done and the switchover is booked for two weeks’ time.
Happy days.
