Which Broadband?

[ging84]

durbster said:

They were both domestic and had excellent customer service. I'm struggling to see how that proves your point.

The point is that if you look beyond the big providers you can get customer service.

The point is the 2 example you could come up with were primarily business broadband suppliers, the fact they sold a home broadband product doesn't make them domestic broadband suppliers any more than petrol stations are sweet shops.
But more importantly they no longer exist, and this is the point, all the smaller suppliers have been gobbled up by a series of mergers, you are left with a handful of massive supplier all of which can be equally st because individual customers mean absolutely nothing to them. The rest are either straight up resellers for the big ones, or are business telecom suppliers with a home product, which are an option, but unless you are a fairly light user you will pay quite a premium for.

[hairyben]

durbster said:

Cheaper broadband means worse customer service, as a general rule.

I'd recommend Zen. Switched to them earlier this year and no issues since.

I used zen back in the days when 512kB gave you bragging rights. Always a little more but very good service. But left for bundled TV/BB for ten years now, but now sky seem to have decided 0.6m BB is acceptable, I'm looking at zen and they're really expensive compared to some of the deals out there, are they that good?

Mind looking around you have (for fibre)
BT will never use any product/service of theirs due to a scam run by them that pestered me with constant nuisance calls for 6 years
virgin. wrote the book "customers are all scumbags and should be treated as such".
talktalk. see above.

Pretty much a cartel isn't it?

[Sargeant Orange]

No issues with Sky fibre here. My half price contract is up so it's back up to £20pm now but I'm not particularly bothered in changing for the sake of a fiver a month when it's running perfectly

[anonymous-user]

BT are awful, call centres in india are useless, executive level complaints aren't much better. They will take 8 weeks to make progress on anything because this is the max time before the customer can take the complaint to ofcom.

Now they are sticking their prices up as well, had less trouble with talk talk. Seriously looking at Andrews & Arnold for a broadband only service but is expensive.

[AJB88]

just moved from SKY Fibre to Infinity 2

On SKY I used openreach modem + apple airport extreme and it worked fine. was averagine 38 down 10 up.

Moved to infinity 2 (76 down) using the HH5, wifi keeps dropping out and only averaging 50 down, 7 up.

[stemll]

I've just cancelled my Infinity2 because they were hopelessly unable and/or unwilling to discuss renewing the discount that I had for the last 12 months. In fact, they were so hopeless that their chat service MUST be automated, no human could miss the point of a question and supply the same stock answer so many times in a row.

After they received the migration request from Uno they offered me £1.30 a month discount leaving my bill (after 20 years as a BT customer) higher than they are offering new customers today.

I very nearly signed up with Zen but Uno matched them in responsiveness to questions (answers at 11pm on a Friday evening), ISPReview reviews are pretty much equal and Uno are slightly cheaper. Biggest difference is that Zen is unlimited and Uno is 100/200/500GB a month but that limit only applies 8am to 8pm Mon-Fri so little impact for me. Money wasn't the main thing though, I'd have happily paid Andrews and Arnold more than BT (after BT managed to wind me up so easily) if they offered a normal voice service alongside the Broadband.

[ashleyman]

I'm with PlusNet ( I know it's owned by BT ) but so far any issues I've had - and there's been a lot of them - have always been dealt with either over emails from english support staff or through an english call centre. Getting through tier 1 support is easy enough, you just say, I know what I'm doing, I've tried everything your going to tell me try try, do a line test then please pass me to tier 2 - works every time.

Whenever I call, english call centre.

The times I have had problems, I've received refunds for the bad service.

Static IP is great, speeds are reasonable on their top package. I don't use their router for anything but the entry/exit point to the internet but it seems to do that ok. I then use my own hubs, and airport extremes around my house and it's all fine.


I would totally take Virgin over PlusNet though. They both have their downsides but I was with Virgin and I never had a problem, if it went down they came out to fix it asap - no risk of Open Reach charging me if they couldn't find a fault. The only problem is 1, their upload speeds are rubbish and 2, they don't serve my new house yet.

[Bullett]

We have been happy with Vodafone. Solid reliable connection, but then we had a solid reliable connection with BT as well and the only reason we changed was that BT put the prices up and we could get VF for free as the Mrs works for them.
Free is obviously great but I'd change it if it was rubbish as I work from home a lot.

[tankplanker]

ashleyman said:

I'm with PlusNet ( I know it's owned by BT ) but so far any issues I've had - and there's been a lot of them - have always been dealt with either over emails from english support staff or through an english call centre. Getting through tier 1 support is easy enough, you just say, I know what I'm doing, I've tried everything your going to tell me try try, do a line test then please pass me to tier 2 - works every time.

Whenever I call, english call centre.

The times I have had problems, I've received refunds for the bad service.

Static IP is great, speeds are reasonable on their top package. I don't use their router for anything but the entry/exit point to the internet but it seems to do that ok. I then use my own hubs, and airport extremes around my house and it's all fine.


I would totally take Virgin over PlusNet though. They both have their downsides but I was with Virgin and I never had a problem, if it went down they came out to fix it asap - no risk of Open Reach charging me if they couldn't find a fault. The only problem is 1, their upload speeds are rubbish and 2, they don't serve my new house yet.

Would mirror my experience at plusnet, although I've had few issues.

I'm not a fan of Virgin if you are a heavy user on their cable broadband, my mate's street is heavily over subscribed and drops to a tenth of what it should be at night. Their support was pretty shocking as well when he wanted help setting up a VPN connection to his work and ran into problems configuring the Virgin firewall.

[TommoAE86]

So far so good with Virgin here and am loving the TV extra's. The TiVO box is proving it's worth by recording almost the entire Motor's TV schedule

Broadband is solid (so far) and I got a "free" upgrade to 200mb (from 150mb) which means when it does have slow down I will usually drop to around what I originally had. Will be interesting to see what happens when the contract is up though.

I used to have BT in my old house and that was fine too, but then I didn't have to deal with the call centres at all so that could've spared me. Only reason I didn't go with them for fibre is because Open Reach have taken almost 3 years to get fibre out to my area, ridiculous as that stupid tracker has been saying "fibre is coming very soon and your cabinet will be upgraded in the next 4-6months" for those 3 years.

[jamoor]

mp3manager said:

I was with Zen 10 years ago, when they used to have an unlimited service, (on a 2Mb line), and bragged about 'bandwidth to spare'.
The low and behold they introduced a usage cap and hefty penalties for exceeding it.

Don't believe the hype.

I was a legacy customer and they kept my unlimited package for a long time after, the different prices were for new customers only which I think is totally reasonable.

I'm now with their fibre service, just as good as always.

[Tonsko]

I think the main point, from here and other anecdotal, incidental conversations that I've had with friends, if you go with one of the 'big ones' - BT, Virgin etc. if the install works first time with no problems, you are unlikely to experience any, and the service will generally be good. It's when you have a technical issue that the problems start... which is why, when you pay Zen a bit more (Zen as an example), you get through to a UK call centre in roughly 2 minutes with good techs who aren't just reading from a prompt sheet. That's what is worth paying for, I think.

FWIW, I've been with Zen since 2001.

[CAPP0]

I've been with Plusnet (was Force9) since 2003 but of late the broadband has been hopeless. I've raised tickets with them in the past and they "reset something" which improved things but it just tails off again. Couple of reasons I've stayed with them, I have a legacy email address which uses their TLD but which has been in use since 2003, so about eleventy hundred people have got that, and also PLusnet host two or three domains f.o.c which nobody else sems to do - and yes, I use up all that domain space, although I could rationalise a little.

Anyway, looking at their website, I can upgrade to Fibre (FTTC) for £3 more a month. Funny enough they're not offering me the 6 months new customer discount. Is it (a) worth going for the fibre, for that money it seems a no-brainer, and (b) should I hassle them for more discount - will I get summat or will I get owt?

[tankplanker]

What sort of speed they offering you for fibre? What do you get currently? What do you use the internet for? Are you a heavy user?

I switched to fibre (BT first then Plusnet) as soon as I could as it meant jumping from an average of 12mb to an average of 80mb down, 2mb up to 18mb up. We are heavy users, anything up to four devices streaming video at once, gaming, two people who work from home, etc. so it made a lot of sense.

[CAPP0]

tankplanker said:

What sort of speed they offering you for fibre? What do you get currently? What do you use the internet for? Are you a heavy user?

I switched to fibre (BT first then Plusnet) as soon as I could as it meant jumping from an average of 12mb to an average of 80mb down, 2mb up to 18mb up. We are heavy users, anything up to four devices streaming video at once, gaming, two people who work from home, etc. so it made a lot of sense.

They're saying 38-40Mb down, I think 2Mb up. I'm currently getting well under 5Mb down, often a lot less (and I'm not in a rural location). So it's a significant increase in speed. We use it for general browsing and for occasional (few times a week) Netflix etc - and that's when the problems usually start.

[George111]

CAPP0 said:

They're saying 38-40Mb down, I think 2Mb up. I'm currently getting well under 5Mb down, often a lot less (and I'm not in a rural location). So it's a significant increase in speed. We use it for general browsing and for occasional (few times a week) Netflix etc - and that's when the problems usually start.

I'd have the fibre every time over ADSL but it sounds like you might have a line fault if your speed is varying that much. Are your voice calls perfect, no noise etc ? A switch to fibre might eliminate your dodgy line or help them rectify it if it's between you and the cabinet.

[tankplanker]

CAPP0 said:

They're saying 38-40Mb down, I think 2Mb up. I'm currently getting well under 5Mb down, often a lot less (and I'm not in a rural location). So it's a significant increase in speed. We use it for general browsing and for occasional (few times a week) Netflix etc - and that's when the problems usually start.

Anything less than 10mb and you want to use streaming I'd recommend fibre if you can afford it. Its not always needed but with those sorts of number and instability I think it would be a sensible upgrade.

[scooters]

look at AAISP. a little pricy but they have sorted my BB out a treat. Was with Zen before and moved as they couldn't resolve issues. Horses for courses and all that but it may be worth a call...

[Tonsko]

A&A would be my choice if I ever moved from Zen.

[so called]

gottans said:

BT are awful, call centres in india are useless, executive level complaints aren't much better. They will take 8 weeks to make progress on anything because this is the max time before the customer can take the complaint to ofcom.

Now they are sticking their prices up as well, had less trouble with talk talk. Seriously looking at Andrews & Arnold for a broadband only service but is expensive.

We are having similar communication issues right now.
What I don't understand is that if their are problems with the BT system going down, then how will moving to another provider improve things?