BT Retail supremo Pierre Danon has again labelled his company's broadband backbone "mediocre", five months after first doing so and promising that it would improve.

Last November, Danon told European delegates at the iDate Telecoms, Media, Internet 2001 conference in Montpellier that his company's ADSL service levels were "mediocre" and promised "to work on our costs and work on our performance."

While BT has brought down broadband prices and made some improvements to its reliability, it has still not impressed its smaller business customers, 18 per cent of whom are dissatisfied with their ADSL connection, Danon admitted yesterday.

Trotting out his 'we're bad but we'll get better' line again, Danon said that his company's current service levels were "mediocre", but that this was an improvement on six months ago, when it had been "disastrous."

Still, whether it considers it mediocre or a disaster, nearly one in five broadband business customers will agree with Danon that the service isn't reliable enough, particularly when they're left stranded by network outages.

Danon said reliability was now running at 99.2 per cent, but that BT's research showed that business customers wanted 99.8 per cent.