Brits: Need some ISP suggestions

[Prometheus]

I've been with my ISP for a reeeeeally long time, but in recent times they were bought out by TalkTalk. As you all no doubt know, TalkTalk has a notorious reputation for bringing a dire quality of service to all that they touch.


TalkTalk's service leaves me with a connection that's been increasingly becoming so unusable over the last several months, that for the last month or so I've had to frequently depend on my (capped) MiFi service from Three - it defeats the object of having a land-line connection at all if that's the case! I absolutely need something dependable, which is what I used to get until TalkTalk came along.


I trust the opinions of many of you guys here on such matters, so I'd like to ask if anyone could recommend a decent ISP (ADSL, not cable) to switch to, please. (The only positive I can say about TalkTalk is that they continued the uncapped service I had with the ISP that they bought out, and I would certainly like to avoid a usage cap if at all possible.)


(Obviously, our friends outside of the UK probably won't be able to help much here, so no non-British ISP suggestions, please. )

 

[meandu229]

bt is solid but you pay extra for it,


aol is good unless you have a problem and then their CS is awful, they are only ones ive dealt with, got bt now and no complaint got it free as gf works for them but dont think id pay extra for them would have prob gone with sky

 

[Prometheus]

Oops, I should have mentioned, I don't want to do business with any ISP that uses or has used Phorm - this is a very important requirement (and another reason I'm ditching my now-TalkTalk-owned ISP), so I'm afraid BT are out, as are Vermin Virgin Media (although I'm pretty sure that the latter only covers cabled locations anyway). I know that BT stopped, but they still conducted those trials where they spied on people without consent, which marks them as an untrustworthy ISP in my books.


My folks use AOL, and I agree with your analysis of them. That said, they actually got permanently bumped up to 10mbps service for the price of the slower service they were on before, after a particularly spectacularly bad bit of customer service. They certainly went out of their way to make things right when all was said and done.

 

[Trip]

From personal experience..


I wouldn't touch Virgin media with a barge pole. They screwed up my account and even though their people admitted it was a mistake on their part, they still expected me to pay £130+. They said that I had to pay the bill off fully before they could sort out the problem and re-reimburse me. When I told them that I didn't have that much money to front they then started trying to make out that the mistake was mine and sent it off to a debt collection agency.


I've also had complaints from quite a few friends recently that they've started to throttle bandwidth when using things like Sky Player or iPlayer.


I've just got my connection to PlusNET sorted out. I've been with them for about 2 months but due to a problem with the BT phone line to my flat I was getting ridiculously slow speeds. As I say though that was a problem for the BT engineers not PlusNET themselves. PlusNET's customer service seems quite good and they keep you informed over developments in your problem via email and text message. They have an option for getting a connection with no contract which is useful for testing the service for a month or two but it will cost a little more for the initial setup.


Sky broadband at my parents house seems really slow but I don't think they've had much trouble from stability of the connection itself. Customer support can be very confusing.

 

[craigix]

I went back to BT from a terrible talktalk (after they brought my ISP too).


Talktalk is, I believe, the most complained about company in the UK.


BT offers a solid service and real engineers, they sent one out to my house and put a new line in, removed the talktalk line, and tested the line and broadband connection, they were here for about 4 hours doing it, and charged nothing.


My internet is now faster and the connection is solid.


If you want to be safe and have access to real engineers I'd recommend them, they have an 0800 number for reporting any faults and the router they give you (free) also has all the numbers to call on it if you have any issues - talktalk on the other hand keep their phone numbers secret make communication difficult.


The BT router is also fiber optic ready if they are upgrading your area.

 

[Prometheus]

No fibre here yet (at least as far as I know), but my line is a BT one (thankfully I never switched the line over to my pre-TalkTalk ISP, so they never took that over) - I quite agree about the BT engineers and level of service. Excellent they are indeed - had to have them out a few years ago, and they got it fixed up really quickly.


I'm looking at O2's home broadband at this particular moment - they seem to offer good value and also seem to be quite well-respected. Anyone got any experience with them?

 

[may88]

I have nothing but praise for Plusnet. However they are now owned by BT, if that has bearing on your ethical dilemma.

 

[chosen]

I hear very good things about BE Broadband https://www.bethere.co.uk/


Definitely worth considering.


I've been planning to move to them for quite a while, I'm still with the dreaded Virgin Media for now.

 

[darfgarf]

Be/O2 (same connection, but if you've got an O2 phone and do O2, you get a discount for topping up something like a tenner every 3 months, well worth it)


cheap, fast as you'll get out of a bt line (just hope your line can take it, some are shockingly poor and BT won't trust you even if you know for sure where the problem is), and static IPs are a doddle to sort out

 

[ZXDunny]

Heh.


I had an awful time with BT, including a 3 month wait to have any sort of phone line installed (after two months they told me there was a line installed, and I had to contact my MP to get them to actually put one in). For that reason, BT are out here. I got Virgin, but the connection in my admittedly very rural area was about 10 - 20 kilobytes per second. TalkTalk then moved some equipment into the exchange, and I get a much faster connection now (though still slow, but it's the best it will ever be, as there are no plans for BT to install fibre here) of about 200 kilobytes/sec download.


The only downside is that TalkTalk's DNS servers frequently go down, but one quick trip to OpenDNS sorted that one out - I no longer use the TalkTalk DNS. After that, it's been about 6 months of much better service.


D.

 

[DaMummy]

and here i am complaining about my 24mbps connection....

 

[craigix]

and here i am complaining about my 24mbps connection....

What on earth do you need faster than that for? My 3.3Mbps seems to provide all I need.

 

[Prometheus]

and here i am complaining about my 24mbps connection....

Mine is 1.36mbps... It's dropped rather a lot. It started out as 512kbps, was bumped to 1mbps when some charges or other to ISPs changed at some point meaning that they could pass the saving along, then it was bumped to 2mbps (I'm guessing for a similar reason), and much later was bumped to 6mbps (this latter one being around the time of the TalkTalk buyout), and now it's dropped waaaaaaaaay back down again. I wouldn't mind that greatly, if not for the fact that it now drops synchronisation (and thus the connection) every few minutes most days. That it's managed a few hours without going kaboom today utterly astonishes me.


Thanks for the suggestions by the way, chaps. Having looked around some more, O2 and BE are particularly high up on my list at the moment. TalkTalk are already making it difficult for me to get my migration code and leave*, though, so I foresee more fun with them and their idea of "service" first.


*(Instead of just providing it when requested, an automated response forwards you to an automated online FAQ service, wherein they insist on a telephone call if you're wanting your migration code. They say this "gives them an opportunity to assess why you're migrating", or some such thing, but I predict it might really be a means to try some last-ditch hard-sell "retaining" nonsense)


Craig, did you come across this by any chance, or are they alright about that once they have a real person answering this request instead of an automaton?

 

[drenyx]

and here i am complaining about my 24mbps connection....

What on earth do you need faster than that for? My 3.3Mbps seems to provide all I need.

I have 10 Mbps at home, and I could honestly live with less but I'd miss it.


I want it now.

 

[DaMummy]

once you get into the usenet thing, you try to get the best connection you can possibly have. time warner is bringing 50mbps here soon so i might switch to that, and google just started a campaign where theyre brining 1gbps connections to home users, but its only in kansas for now. and for people who think its wasted money, trust me its not the way i abuse it. some people would rather pay for TV service, i just know how to watch tv from pc, and no its not low quality streaming. and ive been known to download a terabyte of data within a week, so a bandwidth cap is also out of question for me

 

[ZXDunny]

once you get into the usenet thing, you try to get the best connection you can possibly have. time warner is bringing 50mbps here soon so i might switch to that, and google just started a campaign where theyre brining 1gbps connections to home users, but its only in kansas for now. and for people who think its wasted money, trust me its not the way i abuse it. some people would rather pay for TV service, i just know how to watch tv from pc, and no its not low quality streaming. and ive been known to download a terabyte of data within a week, so a bandwidth cap is also out of question for me

My usage is condsiderably different. I do a little web browsing (here, a couple of news sites), some IRC for support for my apps. I find that youtube streams just nicely without buffering issues and if I want a TV episode it is downloaded in an hour or two; a movie usually gets set up the day before I want it and is downloaded overnight. As far as ROM images for my panda is concerned, I use a certain french "planet emu" site which means that I download them one at a time in less than a minute each. The largest torrent recently was a Debian install and the Wiz MAME romset - they came down over a couple of days which suits me fine


My son has an xbox 360 which he plays online with no lag noticeable, and I get to play my minecraft MP survival rather well indeed - though I can't really do any downloading at the same time; again, that's not really a problem for me.


D.

 

[DaMummy]

oh yeah, if you wonna go that route, this 24mbps connection serves 3 desktops, 4 laptops, 1 netbook, two wiis, two 3ds, a psp, a ps3, 3 cell phones with wifi, and one tablet

 

[Prometheus]

I'm pretty set on O2 at this point, by the by. They offer an up-to-20mbps service, for rather less money than I'm currently being charged for my 1.36mbps-at-best one, and they're a lot better-regarded than my current ISP has become.

 

[emcee]

At least you guys seem to have plenty of options. Where I live your options for broadband providers is the one you have, or the other one.

 

[Prometheus]

At least you guys seem to have plenty of options. Where I live your options for broadband providers is the one you have, or the other one.

It's getting better, that much can be said. When I went with the ISP I have now, it was pretty much a case of finding one that was decent amongst a bunch of bad ones. It's just unfortunate that one of the bad ones bought mine. :lol: