...the evil empire that is Sky.

It`s raining here in Manchester so consequently my broadband is slow.
Seriously!

Vodafone here in Ireland, and it's the worst service I've ever had. Cuts out about every five minutes these days. Loads of other people I know having the same problem. One month left and I'm gone, unless I can get out earlier due to the crapness of the service!

I can heartily recommend Vispa, who are a small ISP run by experts somewhere up north.

When you call the support number, you speak to someone who actually knows what they are talking about, not a recent ex-jobseeker with a Noddy 'first line support' script to follow.

It even pays to RTFM, as it is possible, very occasionally, to detect a teensie weensie hintette of a gentle and comforting sigh at the other end of the line when you ask them a really, really dumb technical question you could probably have found the answer to on their FAQ. Bit like Fraser really. I like that in my ISP too.

I'm a customer purely because they bought Tiscali, not through choice. In the year or so that they've been my ISP they've hiked the price to try and get me to take a 'bundle' including telephone calls but I'm not interested - I'm quite happy with BT for that.

We moved house a month ago which entailed a change of telephone number. TCALSS a month later I still don't have broadband at my new address, but I do have a list of excuses from them as long as my arm and high blood pressure from spending close to two hours on hold over the last two weeks. As soon as we get connected (allegedly on Saturday but I'll believe it when I see it) I'll be requesting a MAC code. Avoid.

It's £10 a month because my phone contract is with them. No problems and a good price. Shame I have to have a landline as I don't even bother plugging it in.

Here in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in Hull and surrounding villages you either take Karoo from Kingston Communications or nothing at all. My internet costs £24.99 per month and that is by no means the top package and doesn't include a landline, Sky, mobile or any form of cable tv.
If the network goes down then the entire city's internet and email goes down with it so we often see apolgies in the local press when this happens.

They do, however, boast of very high avalability rates,speed and industry awards so that's alright then.

...like Sky. I've been with them for a while, and they're a hell of a lot better than my old ISP, Pipex. Good speeds (I'm a nerd, so I check), no downtime, and when something's gone wrong they've fixed it quickly. I have no complaints. Same with their entire service, to be honest - I'm a "bundler" and do my TV, phone and broadband with them.

I know that every time Rupert Murdoch smiles, a kitten falls, shrivelled, into the gutter, but he's a minority shareholder in a pretty nifty company, if you ask me.

I get it as a package with my cable TV and a phone line I don't use, but it's very fast and rarely breaks.

Utterly, utterly useless customer services, and capped bandwidth - unannounced, and unrevokable. I'm off as soon as I can persuade the GLW that it won't bring a premature end to the kids education

I've been with Virgin for about 3 years and they've been excellent, very reliable and fast. Good customer service on the couple of occasions I've had to call them.

Previous to that I was with Orange who were appalling, unreliable, lousy customer service, I managed to get out of my contract early because they were so rubbish.

*touch hub* so I'm sticking with them. Heard horror stories about them and other providers so playing it safe if a bit more pricey.

Been with Virgin for about 5 years (when it was still called NTL).
Extremely reliable service, not gone wrong yet.
Complete Package (TV, Landline, Mobile & 10MB Broadband (would get the faster version but I'm too much of a tight git!)

Customer Service has improved about 1 million per cent since the NTL days (ie they actually answer the phone now)

...over the last 10 years. In summary :

Talk Talk : cheap but completely useless if you run into any sort of problem
BT - service better but not cheap. VERY large differences in speed at peak times ( so big, in fact, that they let me cancel a 12 month contract after 3 months even though they said there was no fault)
O2 - reasonable prices (very good if you have their mobile as well), excellent service with people who clearly know what they're talking about. Recommended

Everyone seems to suffer from peak time slow-downs but O2 is better than the others I've been with. If you get a physical fault, everyone uses BT Openreach to solve the problem, but it's about how willing they are to get to that point fast, presuming they have to pay if they need to get a hardware guy to get involved.

Here at home in Old Portsmouth we're at the far dangly end of a copper cable so Virgin is the only way to get any sort of bandwidth. To their credit, when I asked Orange they refused to sign me up as a customer because they would be unable to be able to provide me with a decent service. BT continued to blather and lie about how they could be marvellous. Bollocks. Virgin have been very good. Fast as bugger and very helpful when there's been a problem.

BT at work. Shite. But the only option for business where I am.

Been with them since NTL days, have had he occasional outage over the years, but never for very long. I'm happy with them.

BT for the landline & broadband; 02 for the mobiles. We're low use on the mobiles so get £10 tariffs with lots of calls & texts. If my bill is over £25 the FPO demands an audit!

I stick with BT on reliability and service grounds. If it goes wrong - very rarely in 12 years here - they sort it. Good package and so low call costs. For broadband we pay more then we could, but the price has come down and the speeds have gone up, so caution/inertia rules. The Home Hub has its detractors but it works for us - excellent with our new iMAcs.

Until this summer we had Virgin broadband via BT copper for several years. Generally, the service departments have been quick to answer and very helpful, particularly with anything technical. We then signed up for a Virgin cable package deal that included TV, telephone and broadband for £35 per month. Compared with what I was paying before for individual services this meant an M+ TV package was effectively free. The added bonus is that with our terrestrial TV signal being virtually non-existent without daisy-chained amplifiers, the improvement in viewing pleasure via interference free cable has been remarkable.

Our old PVR died so timing dictated I paid a one off £49 for a twin tuner V+ HD box with a large hard drive which records multiple channels/whole series etc etc. The data connection has been flawless and they threw in D-Link wireless router too. There is also an option I've yet to sign up to that includes silly amounts of mobile minutes and texts plus free calls to other Virgin mobiles for an extra tenner.

Now the downside is that after several calls, the department that should cancel my old broadband payment ... hasn't. So I'm currently paying twice. On consideration, I think I'm building up for an argument this weekend.

In the interest of balance, Mrs Phil's mum thinks equally highly of O2.

Edit: They also have the full iPlayer/4OD etc catch-up services too

I pay 19.99 to orange every month (service OK but I suspect not superfast (sometimes have issues with streaming on iplayer etc.)and 12.50 line rental to BT for the land line.

Virgin are offering 20.00 for broadband and cable tv, basic package, and you need to sign uo for a £15 line rental land line. Seems like a good deal but i was concerned the internet service would not be so good, so it's been useful to so on here that it looks OK.

Many years ago I had a cable service from NTL and that was lousy with non existent customer service which has also put me off making the move until now.

So think I may make the move (in fact they have an offer at present for 9.00 for the fist 6 months)

what does piss me off a bit is if i want a system which records with a hard drive (whatever the equivilent is of Sky+) than the fee goes up a tenner i think yet I bought my current preeview box with hard drive recording for a 100quid a couple of years ago, so would prefer a one fee for this box rather than pay 100's over a few years!

Been with them since the NTL days. I have had one or two problems but they've been sorted reasonably quickly. We also have their phone service but rarely make calls from it anymore so it's a bit expensive just paying the line rental. We're thinking of cancelling that and just using our mobiles. We can do this because the broadband runs on a completely different cable.

and happy with them so far. Very clear info and good communication - they emailed to tell me that our actual speed was lower than they'd first anticipated because of the line; they didn't need to tell me, hadn't asked, so I appreciated their testing and their upfront updating. They also emailed to warn when we were approaching the download limit.

BT never communicated like this, and charged £50 simply to stop being a customer after years of custom.