Broadband Internet & ISP Recommendations?

There used to be a broadband provider called Be!. They had a good product (fastest in UK at the time and excellent customer service.

The current leader in customer service for ISPs is Hyperoptic which turns out to be owned by the same guy as Be! which surely isn't a coincidence.

O2 broadband was actually a result of O2 buying Be! Broadband. They used the same excellent infrastructure but fucked it up with underinvestment and shoehorning support i to their hopeless call centers. The death of an excellent company.

I used to have BE! Loved those guys. Moved to Sky though for Le Tour watching. Shit house. Then moved house and got Virgin cable. Amazeballs.

Oh, I never had O2 broadband. But fuck them still for their mobile business.

Be! does ring a bell. I had no problem with O2, but they surly didn’t last long. I think it was the time where they tried to do everything, wasn’t it also O2 money or something like that?

Anyway, no chance of hyperoptic with us anytime soon... 🙄

Anyway, no chance of hyperoptic with us anytime soon...

If it makes you feel any better, we're only getting it because we're paying for them to run a new fibre connection from the exchange to our block and then paying for them to retrofit a 1930s building.

Yes it does! How ££££?

Would rather not say but we're paying 35% of their costs. It's five figures.

I've had very few issues with Virgin because generally it just works: no throttling, very few outages. I did have one long outage where some builders accidentally cut through the cable and the service was average.

I know other people only a few streets away who have constant issues with it not working though and customer service is terrible according to them.

Pretty much my experience as well.

Only frustration with VMs customer service was being the first to report an issue and it being very difficult to convince them the problem was on their side of the network. Assumed that was probably due to the number of technophobes calling who simply can't get the wifi to work.

Can't be many ISPs who manage 10% faster than the advertised speed...

Just switched from plusnet to zen. Plusnet were terrible to deal with - a small good company a few years ago that has now expanded way beyond what they can manage. They take 30-45 mins to answer the phone, pass you around three diff departments, can’t fix your problem, randomly cut you off and then when they reconnect you they extend your contract for 2 years without asking you (really), and took 3 months to connect me when I first moved here.

Zen on the other hand are amazing. You get through to someone (quickly) who actually knows what they are talking about. My switch was flawless. Now have much faster broadband for same price and the router is far better - reach in my house is now useful rather than useless. The difference is night and day.

Jellies. We get 30mb down and 2MB up IF we have a good piece of copper going into the flat. 10/1 if not.

Somehow, for reasons nobody knows, our green Street cabinet is over a kilometer away (straight line).

Zen had a good rep 15 years ago. Guess they've maintained it. Maybe because they're off the 'big guys' consumer radar so they've not grown too fast to outstrip their service levels?

What Virgin service is that on? My boss gets speeds like that out in the sticks but in London most people seem to be below 100MB.

Zen, Purple and Demon are the services that I remember being good.

On Virgin fibre you pretty much get what you pay for. I used to be on the 200Mbps but realised it was a bit unnecessary so dropped down to 100Mbps which I get consistently.

It might be worth mentioning, while I managed to get through to all Sky, Zen and Plusnet with no wait time, actually quicker than normally. I also asked them if they still have to go into work. Zen’s staff are working remotely, not sure if that means means WFH. Sky’s staff are really spaced out in their offices. Plusnet, not sure...

Yes I was with zen about 15 years ago too as it happens. Not sure why I left them tbh... they were more of a small business provider then that didn’t do much household broadband. they seem same as then but with a much better consumer facing end to the business.

You get through to plusnet quickly if you’re a new customer or want to cancel your contact - once you’re hooked in to a contract you’ll find yourself in a very long queue to get hold of customer services.

I started on like 40MB or something but over the years they have bumped us up so I think I'm officially on 120 or 140MB or whatever that level is. Speedtested at 97MB when I asked the question (after I turned off my VPN).

I've got Plusnet at the moment and it's been fast (60-70Mb/s) and reliable but I've not had any problems.

Vodafone are offering us a much better deal though if we swap and that's to what's advertised as 63Mb/s. Any Vodafone customers on here? Happy?

Main worry at the moment is being left without internet for any reason as a result of changing over which would be disastrous under lockdown when we're both WFH.

Anyone else have Google Wifi mesh setup?

I'm finding that it has some issues with handoff across the house. I have 4 nodes across three floors. Coverage in is excellent - no dead spots - but i have a host of other issues:

1. Strength seems weak even on the same floor. I'm 12 meters and one room (and a hallway) away from the main access point and i'm getting 70Mbps. The main router is testing at 360Mbps
   
2. Handoff sucks. There's a particular spot in the kitchen where it seems to get confused between two nodes and keeps switching causing minor drops or slowdowns
   
3. Sonos has an issue connecting and paired systems in the house often have the right hand of stereo pair drop or never play at all
   
4. iOS devices seem to have some compatibility issues which are widely reported on support forums. Sometimes they just drop for no reason. Wifi disappears and it jumps to 4G then back to wifi in 3 or 4 seconds. This is particularly prevalent when using facetime
   
   

Management of the system, general stability (it's never dropped as a network in two years) and cost of setting it up were all great but i'm wondering if there's a better solution.

Anyone got any wifi 6 mesh system set up yet?

Not helpful for your questions but I'm seeing you say 70mbps is slow and I'm burning with envy... I have BT and we struggle to get 10mbps from the router. It's bullshit

Strength seems weak even on the same floor. I'm 12 meters and one room (and a hallway) away from the main access point and i'm getting 70Mbps. The main router is testing at 360Mbps

I'm not sure that link speed is associated with signal quality. I think Google vary the link speed according to what resources your device is requesting. I used to be disconcerted with reported link speeds until I noticed them bounce up when I was transferring data. Typically, my PC which is only about 5m from the nearest AP will have a link speed of about 150Mbps but then jump to 500Mbps when I'm moving files.

Other than that, with our 3 Google Wifi setup, I have never encountered any of those other issues.

I don't see any increase in performance when stepping away from speed test sites. Downloading from dropbox etc results in the same download speed.

The above comes across more negatively than it probably should as I've been happy with the setup overall. I guess I'm just a little annoyed that I'm paying for 380Mbps, getting it at the router and not seeing it outside of that room.