Entertainment For Lively Minds
The Massive Which? - Broadband providers
We've been having a lot of trouble with our home broadband. We currently use Virgin Media. However it's been down for over a fortnight now, with their latest estimate for the service to be restored by Friday 11th. That will be the 17th day it's been down.
They claim it's a signal/noise ratio problem affecting London N8 and adjoining areas.
We are really fed up with the ever receding date for restoration of service, the contradictory information we receive from their customer support, being given alternative phone numbers for further information that ends up being a voicemail message telling us what we already know, not being called back when they've promised to do so etc etc. That's besides the general inconvenience of not having access to the internet and e-mail. My posting here is restricted to weekday lunchtimes.
So I'm looking for recommendations for an alternative broadband service. Any information about reliability, customer service, e-mail packages and any extras would be appreciated. I'm not concerned with information about alleged broadband speeds, because as recent stories have indicated, these are largely works of fiction.
Over to you, dear friends. And thank you in anticipation.
- More from Carl Parker.
- Login or register to post comments
-
BT
I was a Virgin Media customer in North London before I moved to the West Country, and to be frank, it was crap for broadband. It would go down on a regular basis, customer service was at best ordinary although we did receive refunds for downtime on two occasions.
BT isn't brilliant for customer service, and there are cheaper options, but it's so far been consistent and reliable, and averages out about 10 mbps at it's busiest and has hit 14 during quieter times. Which is more than fast enough for my needs. I do however live quite close to the exchange which I'm told can make a difference.
(I've checked the speeds myself on a regular basis by the way, I'm not just going on what it's 'supposed to be')
I don't use their email service though, having found GMail to be pretty good. And I'm not interested in any other extras right now.
Have always used
BT and no complaints and the technical help is really good as well.
I've used BT since broadband was invented
and have gone from happy with the service to wishing there was an alternative.
For a start, it's pricey.
Secondly, it's slow. I used to live in a small village and our exchange was an early upgrade to Broadband, resulting in a very quick line. I now live in Milton Keynes but miles from nearest exchange so I get less than 1 Mbps! It's awful. Further, there are no plans to put MK onto Infiniti.
Finally, the engineer who connected my new house messed it up and it took a week of escalating the matter and half a day off work when an engineer was finally scheduled to put it right.
On the positive side, the service is very reliable.
Overall, BT = 6/10
Virgin Broadband through fibre optic
Absolutely brilliant. No problems, fast, reliable.
In fact, so good that when I moved everything else back to Sky following hideous experiences with Virgin's tv and landline services, I kept the broadband knowing I'd getter better deal elsewhere.
I'm with you
If we ever have a problem with Virgin (cable) broadband it gets fixed simply and easily. I wouldn't consider anywhere else until there's a non-copper alternative. I pay for 10M and get 10M (well 9.8M but complaining about that would be picky). I know we could get a cheaper service elsewhere but not with proven reliability and speed.
Quickly and easily?
If only. As noted above, we've had no service for 15 days and I don't think they have a clue on how to go about fixing it. I have no confidence at all that Virgin will have our service restored by the weekend.
My observation that a fortnight was an inordinately long time to wait for it to be repaired was met by the observation that "broadband problems are a lot harder to fix than you think".
Other users experiences may differ etc etc.......
One outage in 7 years and that was fixed inside 3 hours (workmen drilling through a cable) with a call out.
That's not unreasonable
I guess it depends on where the problem is. If it's in the cable between you and the box down the road then it may not be a quick fix at all. If it's anywhere else in the system they ought to be able to patch your connection across without having to work out what's wrong... in fact they surely should have done that first. If you have an ADSL connection and something went wrong there you're at the mercy of your supplier talking to the owner of the cables etc. I think the only solution is to have two ISPs one cable and one ADSL so that if one goes wrong you still have a service!
No specifically us
They say it's an area problem, affecting many people.
Yarse
We too are on VM (cable) and so far (just under a year) it's been very good - we just got the upgrade to 30MB and it's blisteringly fast.
Before that we had O2 (as they give discounts to their mobile customers, which we were at the time) and that was also good. At the time their customer service seemed really surprisingly good.
I use Orange
I have done since my first provider was Freeserve, and have never changed because I have never had a problem with them. I pay £12pcm for unlimited 'up to 20 meg' broadband, and typically get about 11 or 12.
We use BT
and have done since broadband was rolled out. It's not the cheapest but the only time that I've had a problem so far was when I made the mistake of getting a new pc the week that Vista was released. There was obviously some compatibility issue that slowed it down to modem speed while a laptop running XP was fine.
The technical 'support' was atrocious. I rang a few times, the first person told me they had spoken to an engineer and it would be fixed in a month. When I asked how, as she'd been speaking to me the whole time, she hung up. The second person said they knew all about it and gave me the phone number of the people dealing with it. Turned out to be a somewhat bemused sales team. The third person suggested I empty the recycle bin. It then degenerated into BT and Microsoft blaming each other. To be fair it I doubt it was BT's fault as it was resolved after the painstakingly slow download of some updates from Microsoft.
They do various packages including phone line & BT vision, some come with 'free' internet security, you get BT Yahoo mail accounts and no doubt other stuff but I just get the basic broadband.
Find out locally
Have you tried one of the speed checkers to see what other speeds and service other people are getting in your area? Some of the checkers overlay local results on a Google map.
Plusnet
Very pleased with them. Not the cheapest, but customer service is really good, UK based support too. Had terrible trouble with Demon before, but been with Plus for over a year and hardly any loss of service. Lots of online tools to fix problems too so you may never need to ring support anyway.
which is actually BT
Not that they advertise the fact, a BT employee writes.
I use BT but I have to be honest and say it's mainly because an an employee I get it for free. We used to have Telewest, now part of Virgin and had no problems.
The big differentiator is between cable and non-cable. Which means effectively between Virgin and everyone else. And as everyone else pretty much rely on BT Openreach to provide the infrastructure that really means a choice between Virgin and BT. My daughter has Virgin and loves it. My BT line is still copper wire but I've never had a loss of service and the speed averages around 8mbps. But roll on BT Infinity. I can't really comment on support. I have to use internal support for that. You can guess where that is. But BT is steadily moving support for real customers back to the UK.
The other providers pretty much buy capacity from BT Openreach. There are equivalence agreements which require Openreach to treat the rest of BT like all other providers and these are strictly monitored by OFCOM. So the choice maybe should be dictated by the value adds you get from your various suppliers - hub, usage policy, support, net protection etc. But be mindful that cheaper suppliers almost certainly don't buy the capacity they should. You get what you pay for.
I know it's BT owned
but as far as I can tell it is to BT what Fopp is to HMV.
The support and the Plus website is really good, full of useful resources, a support forum, loads of geeky tech information, and if there is a problem you talk to someone in Sheffield I believe.
Yes, it's Sheffield
I regularly drive past some of those geeks have a ciggie break outside their office!
This must be preferable to Demon, who use an Indian call centre with blokes who call themselves 'Paul', who seem to know very little and are next to useless at sorting out problems.
About 3 years ago, when I upgraded my Mac OSX software, the router stopped working. It turned out that the router was not compatible with the new software, but nowhere on Demon's website did it say that. When I phoned the support line, I was firstly accused of breaking the router, and then told to "borrow a friend's" to make sure it wasn't a hardware fault with the computer or our phoneline! What utter bollocks!
Needless to say, a complaint to customer services was required and to their credit they sorted it out and admitted that they should have publicised the incompatibility on their website. We at least got a new router for free.
Zen Internet
have been an consistently excellent provider for some years now. Cannot fault them, apart from no customer service on Sat. & Sun. Not cheap at £38 pcm + landline. Am on the point of going over to Virgin cable as it is half the price for an improved speed.
Seconded...
...fled to them from Demon some years ago and no complaints since. Customer service (on the rare occasions I needed them) right on the button. Cable not an option for me anyway, since I live in the sticks. Mac-friendly too, if that matters.
Thirded..
..as if there were such a word. Have been staying with relatives in the UK for the last week and using their Zen connection.
As usual, was asked to fix up all sorts of email accounts and website bits and pieces hanging off the account. Found Zen/Zylex very easy to deal with and hugely responsive.
The connection itself is supplied via Wholesale Line Rental/ADSL from BT (we're talking deepest darkest rural Sussex here). Not the cheapest but fairly priced for the volume caps (for the UK - outrageous rip-off when compared with other countries).
BT
terrible if you move house, (don't get me started) but consistent and reliable when you're finally plumbed in. I live out in the sticks and get decent speeds and almost no interruptions in service.
Their TV service doesn't offer HD, which I was a bit surprised at to be honest.
BT again
I have used BT since I first joined the internet revolution 4 years ago and have found consistently excellent service including one house move. Always on time, sending texts to remind of service appointments and great tech support.
A little pricey but with service like that I don't mind a jot. (That and the fact it comes out of the FPO's bank account)
Sky
I know, I know its Murdoch but.....Very consistant speed 24 hours a day and very good customer service. That is however 1 mile from the exchange.
Virgin
I'm with Virgin - it's fast and not too expensive - and thankfully I have not experienced anything as bad as in the OP, but they are far from perfect.
I did use Tiscali but apparently I was using more than my fair share of the internet so gave them the boot.
Talk Talk, just now
We are currently on a trial of super-fast broadband with them, and it is really good. However, when there were problems earlier on, the Customer Services team were not helpful. (I've cleaned that up a lot).
My techie colleagues recommend Zen - all the Zen users I know are evangelical about them and I think they will be my next ISP if Talk Talk have another week of disruption.
As already mentioned above
You really have 5 choices
1. Virgin Cable - they don't have separate fibre service, it's just marketing against BT Infinity)
2. Virgin DSL
3. BT Broadband (DSL)
4. Any other Internet Service Provider (ISP) who run their service over a BT line (Openreach)
5. BT infinity (Fibre to the kerb, DSL to the home)
My personal view as someone that used to sell this stuff
1. Cable is likely to be most reliable once it is running. Virgin can be a nightmare if a complex fault develops but most of the time, the service is solid and faults are silly little things that get fixed within hours. Also, in nearly all cases, Virgin knows there's a problem before you do. Upstream speeds can be a bit limited and this can lead to some congestion at peak times but in general, not too noticeable from my experience.
2. Virgin DSL - same as 3 & 4 below but they supply the line instead of BT so fault finding is same as BT ISP/BT line.
3. & 4. DSL speed and reliability is dependent on how far away you are from the exchange. If you are close enough (they have a postcode checker on their website), it should be solid and will not suffer from faults. The ISP you choose only routes your data so in most cases a fault will be with the line and will fall to BT to repair. If you go with another ISP, you will wait longer and suffer more stress getting either BT or the ISP to accept blame. If you use BT as the ISP, faults get seen to faster.
I have also supported a friend through an upgrade from Talk Talk to BT. Her connection speed went from 128K to 1.5M simply by changing the modem and having a BT engineer retest the line from their end. Go to the BT broadband website, they check your line live and seem pretty accurate as to the real speed they will offer.
5. The holy grail - alongside Virgin's cable in terms of speed. I have Infinity now and found the BT support team to be great during teething troubles. I suspect they are looking to keep negative publicity and feedback to a minimum during the early days.
Oh, one other massive improvement over Virgin - upstream speeds are 5-10x higher than Virgin offered me on their 50m cable service.
Virgin
Hi Carl,
As you know I'm just down the road from you and haven't had any problems in five years. I'm on the 10mb deal and get 8mb or so. Never had a problem in fact I'm out of contract and I'm thinking of upping to the 30mb deal. My brother is in High Barnet and can't get any broadband except a dongle! Best of luck.
If you can't get a decent cable operator
and you need to stick to ADSL, go with Vispa.
Technical support direct from technical people (not newt-brained retards with scripts to read).
A proper UK support number, not one of those 08666 jobbies at 85p a second to a voice activated system read by someone shouting in an undecipherable regional accent while standing in a busy chip shop right after closing time with a thunder storm and a major terrorist incident going on just outside the window.
Sensible prices and a range of tariffs you can understand without recourse to PhD level Monte Carlo analysis on a supercomputer.
That's Vispa. They are based in Cheshire somewhere, there are about 8 of them, and they do the job really well. Vispa. I don't have shares or anything, they are just my ISP.
Also Vispa
Moved to them about 2 weeks ago. It was them or Zen and VV's previous endorsement edged it. I was with Orange, but they started to throttle my connection back every day from 4pm, to the point where I couldn't even stream a basic You Tube clip. Orange's help desk washed their hands of any problem I had once they established I wasn't using their router. Needless to say once I rang for a MAC code, Orange were ready to promise me anything.
Will see how it goes with Vispa. First few days were rough but we seem to have a settled at a consistent speed of around 2mbps. The only drawback is that there's no telephone support in the evenings or weekends.
Gulp.
*crosses fingers*
*and toes*
Seriously though, I haven't had a single problem since switching to them over a year ago nowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
(Console: message ended by operator)
Thanks for the advice
There's some food for thought, but we're thing of BT Broadband with an upgrade to Infinity when it becomes available.
As an interim measure I've got a Vodaphone USB dongle.
Our estimated restoration date from Virgin has now slipped to March 16th. They say they need a part from the US. I suggested they send an technician over on Virgin Atlantic, pick it up and save time. I doubt they'll take my advice.
I also have a Vodafone dongle.
If you've been given a dongle made by Huawei, and you're feeling bold, you might like to know that you can squeeeze more performance out of the Vodafone connection than their default settings might suggest...
After a little research I found a mobile broadband operator in NZ with a website where you could download far superior firmware and software to use with your Huawei. I flashed the dongle firmware and now use the supplied client software on my lappy, which gets me a much better connection, and far more control over it, than the rather noddy default software shipped by Vodafone.
It's one of those, "Undo these screws and you've invalidated your warranty" jobs, but there you go. Just a thought.
Good idea but...
... probably best not to do it when it's the effectively the reserve chute! If it was me, I'd wait until I was on solid ground again before I fiddled with my lifeline.
Thanks John
Sound advice, I think.
One benefit of the dongle is being able to open e-mail and see Virgin have been sending me questionnaires to rate my satisfaction with their performance.
Where there is a rating option, most of them have been 0. Otherwise I've politely but firmly expressed my profound dissatisfaction with their service.
BT Infinity here
More expensive than Virgin Cable but heaps faster.
Various speed checkers say I get around 34MBs but that gets throttled quite a bit for heavy downloads during peak times.
BT's customer service has been very good on the few occasions I've needed it, but to be fair Virgin's customer service was prompt and helpful too.
Plagued with frequent outages requiring cable modem resets with Virgin, only a couple of outages for a few hours apeice since switching to Infinity. Virgin are now offering a fibre connection but I don't see any great reason to switch back again for a little bit of extra speed.
Virgin aren't offering fibre
It's marketing in action.
One of the main reasons I left Virgin - I had no technical issuses with them - was their dishonest marketing.
They tried to get me to upgrade to 50Mb saying it was a new fibre optic service.
Bullcrap. It's cable. They always used fibre links to the big cable transmitter boxes but the connection from their PoP to your house is the same coaxial connection it always was. Since fibre became the next big thing they just changed their marketing message and carried on as before.
Technically they can say it is a fibre optic service because parts of the network do have fibre optic cables in them but you do not get fibre to the kerb and you sure as hell can't make use of the bandwidth like you could on Infinity.
Having said that, Cable is an excellent downstream technology and is, in nearly all cases, faster than Infinity. But you share with a lot of other people and the upstream is a lot smaller than the downstream. This means at peak times, if you have a few file sharers in your area, the upstream goes to hell and that makes the downstream sluggish too.
I just ran a couple of speed tests
The first one was via a server in Milton Keynes and was 22MBs downstream, 6MBs up. The second was via a Maidenhead server and was 37MBs down, 8.3MBs up. I am in Watford, about 2 miles as the crow flies from the BT exchange.
Have been with Demon since 1997!
If there is a better provider, I'd be interested, but the sheer hassle of changing email address after all this time would be a massive inconvenience - or can you keep a [username].demon.co.uk address with a different provider?
Our exchange isn't enabled for BT Infinity yet. Supposed to get 8mps downloads, but it is rarely above 3mps.
Personal domain
In the fullness of time you're bound to want to change your ISP so the sooner you get an email address that you have control over the better. I've had an address (coincidentally originally registered with Demon) since 1995 and I've moved it to several different hosts since (currently it's at 1&1). I gradually moved to a different address about 10 years ago and I now hardly ever use the original one at all and I didn't make any effort to migrate.
I've found that old email addresses will
still reliably receive email years after you've changed provider. You can't send from them, obviously, but they will still allow you to log on to the server and receive. I'm still getting emails sent to email addresses that are two ISP changes ago.
Just moved from BT after 8 years
to Virgin Cable. Virgin handled the transfer very well and their engineers seemed to know what they were doing as well as being considerate.
My biggest issue with BT has been speed and until they roll out infinity there isn't much they can do for anyone who lives a distance from an exchange so no particular gripes with them.
Service so far has been great, getting constants speeds of round 48-49mbps.
Virgin Media - a lesson in how to lose customers
Thanks for the suggestions, we're going with BT which is due to be installed next week.
We've had the broadband service restored today, 51 days after the problem started. It was fixed by me calling them up and insisting an engineer come out because, despite a number of users in London N8 having a problem, it could be fixed at the box in the road.
I only found this out because I celebrated 50 days offline by browsing (using a Vodaphone Broadband dongle) for information about others' experiences. I found another N8 user had posted on the VM Users Forum that he had got an engineer out and the problem had been fixed. He recommended others do likewise. The thing was he had posted this on April 5th. Why had VM not acted upon this and contacted customers and made appointments? Because the organisation is an utter shambles.
What I found really annoying was that I had made an appointment on February 26th for an engineer to come round. VM unilaterally cancelled this. A manager was supposed to call me and explain why, but of course she never did. Had she done so this situation might have been sorted in 7 days rather than in 7 weeks plus.
I'm expecting to receive an e-mail asking for feedback on their performance. Unfortunately I'll be unable to give them a minus score, for that is what they deserve.
BTW, should anyone wonder why I bothered at this late stage it's because we still have a contract with them which I think they should fulfil and the breakdown also affects TVOD, and we are retaining their TV service. For the moment, at least.
The Optimists
Virgin Media rang me today to try and get me to subscribe to their broadband service.