Broadband Internet & ISP Recommendations?

Is a 2 months old thread dead? Let's see...

What's happened to all those 12 months contracts? Most seem to be 18 months now.

I am due to renew my contract wth Sky and like most people, I don't really like them but they have offered me a fair deal and the outage in the last 12 months have been much better than the year before.

They have offered me £20 a month for just the normal broadband for 12 months and a VIP account which works much like O2 priority that I don't really care much to be honest... (I was on a fibre contract before but I didn't see any real speed increase...)

Sky won't budge and go down to £18, which is what new customers would get, but new customers do have to have to pay a tenner for connection and tie to a 18 months contract, so my offer seems fair, just nothing worth shouting about.

I once managed to get them to offer me £3 a month for 24 months when they first took over O2, that was proper result... they actually fucked up and offered me triple discount, but by the time they realized it, the contract was signed, sealed and delivered.

SSE doesn't give discount to their enenrgy customers, Virgins is still not in my area... and other companies all seem to be around the £18-£20 mark. If that's the case, I might as well stick to Sky for another year and see if Virgins will finally be here.

Any good deal out there I am missing?

New house, new Internet today...

Seems okay :-D

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Holy fuck - am at my father in laws tonight ahead of some work tomorrow.

In Plymouth we pay about 55 a month for virgin - supposed to be 350 dl speeds - we consistently get about 100 dl / 20 ul with ping of 15.

Just logged on to his Vodafone gigabit - dl is impressive at 700. but I've literally never seen a 300mb upload speed before. 6 ping. Still not worth moving to Milton Keynes for.

Pretty much since last post we've been getting 13-15mb dl and 3-5mb ul all day every day.
Fairly fucked off especially since another price increase bringing it to 57pcm.
I can't bear the tedious offshore call centre bullshit - do any other companies take over broadband contracts on your behalf like they do for mobile?

Just been trying to sort out BB for our new house in Teignmouth, current owns have Talk Talk and said it was a good reliable service, brilliant ditching Virgin at long last and going for BB only reducing by bill from £68 to £24 bonus. Speak to them on the phone as I need to make sure that my BB is up and running once I move in as I work from home. Yep no problem, be ready the day after I move. Perfect, get an email conformation a few minutes later, quick check yep be working from the 17th. Just received another email say great you go -live is the 3rd Feb what the fu*k apparently they can't change it as its computer assigned they've also put me on a reduced 18 month contract at a high price then advertised. Not a good start.

TL:DR

Are all Broadband provide shite?

I signed up with post office broadband a few weeks ago as it was the cheapest according to Which. They use talk talk's infrastructure I think. Same problems. Long wait + delay. Ended up cancelling and grabbing a 5G router from Three.

£30 unlimited. Speed has varied, but fastest I've seen has been 390 Mbps. Uploads at about 1/100th down is a bit lol.

4G mobile broadband, yay or nay?

Occasional movie, internet browsing, not used for gaming (maybe Fallout 76), problem is that I do move a bit and this is the first flat I rented that doesn't included internet as part of the package, last thing I want is to move again and have to change broadband provider.

So far Three look good at a decent price (abet bit more than landline) with unlimited data.

I reckon it's work very well for you.

BUT check which providers have the best signal in the area. Three might be cheaper but no point doing it if you have a shit signal there.

Live in Catford at the moment, signal show to be strong, I have tethered with my phone and the internet work well enough, just a bit of slowdown on too many tabs with videos.

I had to find an alternative when I've moved to a new building with only ADSL available.

So, I've got unlimited SIM card from Vodafone for £25 per month as existing customer and decent 4G Cat6 router (TP-Link Archer MR600) from Amazon.

It works pretty well on 20-30 Mbps most of the time despite it shows only 50% signal strength.

It works pretty well on 20-30 Mbps most of the time despite it shows only 50% signal strength.

For comparison, we're on the other side of Lewisham to Ed and get between 50Mb and 250Mb down and 20Mb to 100Mb up out of our ZTE modem and EE SIM. We are very close to a mast.

I really need to switch from Sky now as I have had enough of their piss taking we will charge you like a mug business model.

In my area, most ISPs use BT cables, does it mean I’d get more of less the same sort of stability I switch to a different ISP that uses BT cables?

I know speed and how they manage their bandwidth etc etc is different from ISP to ISP but how about stability?

Yep if they use BT as the primary supplier, the ADSL is the same, you just pay someone else when you switch

Thanks, currently thinking about SSE as I am with them with my energy bills so I could get £6 off a month. In the last few days WFH, my internet connection has proven to be far better than my team who pay far more with Virgins.

I worked for BT for 15 ish years it’s all much of a muchness, but plusnet did have very friendly customer service and fault resolution. So there’s that

Thanks I did consider them before but SSE also have been pretty good customer service wise. The only possible issue is that their CS isn’t 7 days a week... they shut shop at 2pm on Sat...

Guess the true test is when you need them to send someone out, but then don’t they all use Openreach engineers? Maybe some companies have priority bookings?

I was with Plusnet and rate them.

I changed to save a bit of money, I am now with the Post Office.

Plusnet tech support was very good

Can I ask what sort of issues you had that you needed to call them?

TBH, I am a bit anxious to switch now as I WFH for the foreseeable and my job is digital learning so... but if I don’t do it now, I’d be stuck with Sky until next summer with another ridiculous piece increase this time next year... so will have to...

Try zen internet.
Think we pay £37 a month for fibre broadband and a landline, tops out at 40mbps, which is more than enough for two in a flat.
Customer service is good and we’ve had no issues with it in the year or so we’ve had it..

There tends to be two main options, Virgin or the whole variety of others which use a BT connection. Virgin is good if you can get it. Generally fast and reliable.

Other options tend to be a variety of wireless dongles which seem to have mixed reputations or, if you're in a big building, you may have fibre to the building which is pretty fast.

I've been with Virgin

With the PO migration, we lost connection. Someone hadn't done it properly in the exchange. We were without a connection for a couple of days.

Plusnet sent an engineer round twice, the first time needed another visit with three engineers to replace the copper wire from the pole to the house.

Second one was due to my router being faulty.

The only downside to Virgin is what happens if something goes wrong.

Which? have them rated as literally the worst company for customer service in the whole UK. If it works its great. If not, you're fucked.

As you say, service quality is much of a muchness between the conventional openreach infrastructure ISPs.

Plusnet and Zen have by far the best reputations for customer support so either of those would be my recommendations.

Worth mentioning Hyperoptic too. I'm working with them on a rollout to 7o flats in our freehold and they have been superb so far.

Can’t get Virgins, can’t get Hyperoptic, in fact, Hyperoptic would be my choice... @Stonehedge, can you get them to hurry up to SE5, please?

I thought Post Office uses Talk Talk and Talk Talk uses BT? So wouldn’t it have just been a flick of a switch on a computer somewhere? Does it actually involve someone swapping some cables? Sorry 😐