BT, Plusnet or Sky BB?

[Analoguesat]

AT the moment our broadband is supplied by Demon. When we joined way back before the Millennium they were a great little company, but over the years they have been swallowed by various big companies, and are currently part of Vodaphone.

Their customer service is appalling now - based in India their "customer service" reps are to put it bluntly absolutely bloody useless. Trying to get an investigation into slow line speeds I eventually gave up in disgust - there are better things to do with my life than battle with Indian call centres that dont understand much English. Get off their script and they are totally lost.

And to add insult to injury Ive had an email saying Ive exceeded my rolling 30 day limits and Im going to be throttled to 128kbps - they got an email back saying go ahead - we wont notice much difference! ) Using up a 50gig allowance on a 1 meg line is good going - must be all the old TOTP's from 1976 Ive been downloading.....

Im not expecting anything fantastic - our ratty old copper phone line is at least a 2 mile run round 3 sides of a square, and the chance of getting fibre up the valley seems remote - the rest of the town has been done but we seem to have been quietly forgotten.

Ive had enough of Demon's incompetence which leaves a choice of BT, Plusnet or Sky as far as I can see. Suggestions of good & bad or any other decent resellers of the BT product gratefully accepted. (TBH Im loathe to give Sky any more of my readies unless their service is excellent - 30 quid a month is more than enough for my liking!). Must have at least a 50gig monthly limit as thats what Ive burned through this month and Ive not done much different from normal.

 

[Lazarus]

Plusnet.

 

[Analoguesat]

Ive also yanked the ethernet cable out the back of the Sky box. I thought the download stuff was turned off but with all the s/w updates recently theres a possibility its got turned on again.

 

[Lazarus]

Plusnet.

 

[PaulR]

None of the above. I recently dumped Sky as my BB supplier. Apart from the fact I felt unclean dealing with them they annoyed the hell out of me with their degradation of the service I used to get from the much-missed O2.

After dismissing BT - I have absolutely need or want of BT Sports and I'm sure they wouldn't give me a reduction - I was weighing up between PlusNet and EE.

In the end I went for EE. Until recently they would only supply phone/broadband to their mobile phone customers. Going through the MoneySavingExpert.com web site not only was I able to circumvent this but also I was eligible for a £120 Amazon voucher.

After weighing up the various packages I went for the top level one. I get the same/similar as I got from $ly for unlimited downloads, and all day unlimited phone calls. Unlimited calls to 30 odd countries and calls to 0845 and 0870 included ($ly would only offer 0870/foreign or 0870/0845, not all three). In addition, something I've not seen from anyone else, 1000 minutes a month to mobile numbers. Paying twelve months' line rental in advance also saved some money. Slight downside is that they do operate traffic management but this hasn't affected me yet.

EE used to rank pretty low for their customer service but recently this has improved. Not that I've had to use it yet. Everything worked out of the box just as it should have.

 

[Captain Jack]

I would go for one of the smaller companies as I hate dealing with imbeciles at Sky, BT, Virgin, TT and others. PlusNet is ok. I've been with them at my parents' address since 2003 and they are generally problem free.

I, myself, went with Vivaciti. As I work from home, I need a reliable, English speaking ISP and they fit the bill. They are far from being the cheapest but the customer service is very good and they generally know what they are talking about. Still a BT line in my neck of woods though. I am paying £30 for unlimited 'office' based product but there are cheaper options.

Or PlusNet.

Check thinkbroadband.com forums and see what people say about various ISPs.

 

[2cvbloke]

and the chance of getting fibre up the valley seems remote

Just a little note on that, the "Fibreoptic" broadband description is utter Jackson Pollocks, they only go as far as a junction box vaguely in the area (FTTC, or Fibre to the Cabinet), and the rest of the way it's copper lines, so, you are probably in for a chance of getting it where you are, the only way you'd get real fibre is if you had a dedicated fibre cable laid to your home (FTTH/P, Fibre to the Home/Premises), which is pricey and not really worth it if you're not working from home or have a server of somekind on the go...

I've been looking at changing broadband suppliers too, as Primus (who are changing their name to something stupid like Fuel Internet or something) are just getting slower and slower, 3 years ago we were getting about 3Mbps, now we're lucky to scrape 1.5Mbps, and the exchange isn't that far away in Stanley, so there's no excuse for a slow service like this, only problem is, if I went with someone else, would I get the same crap ADSL service over the same physical line or not, I could get the fake-fibre though, but at about £30/mo after the tempting deals have run out, I'm not that tempted...

 

[Archived-1]

We are with sky on the low package up to 6 ?, we took recently took the deal for the new sports channel that reduced our bill a little, I am unsure of the figures,

We don't D/L much, but I do a little streaming at times my wife is always on online games etc on the same network as me, and its ok a little sluggish at times tbh if you try and work it, its been a solid connection one little problem for about 10 minutes in two years,

We will be upgrading to the faster package as more work gets done at home and I have more time to play,

I loved the V/M broadband at my old home, I could download a x box game in around 20 mins, if I could get it here I would, using newsgroups it would maximise the 50mb connection out nearly 24/7.

 

[Channel Hopper]

Find out where your neighbour's router is, and drill a hole in the wall.

 

[2cvbloke]

Find out where your neighbour's router is, and drill a hole in the wall.

Anyone who tried that on us would have a hard time about it as I keep the router in the middle of the house...

 

[Riverblue]

Plusnet for me too, been with them for 18 months, so far no problems at all, definitely no speed reductions. FITC for our installation, constant 50+Mb/s, urban location.

 

[Archived-1]

You could add this to your farm A/S :-).

 

[sonnetpete]

Swapping providers is something that comes up fairly frequently on the 'ex-pat' forums here. There are plenty of alternates, Free, Alice, Neuf, SFR. I'm on Orange, which started off as Wanadoo. Orange took over France Telecom a while back and as people on one of the alternate services have found, if there is a fault with the line (as opposed to the router) you get put to the back of the repair queue unless you are with Orange.

Here I get 1.5MB download on a good day. I'm over 6km from the exchange so I don't think that's bad. I have no download limits and get free international calls included, plus my line rental for less than €40 a month.

 

[timo_w2s]

I was transferred to Sky in the spring when they took over BE but it's been OK so far. I am planning on leaving though and will switch to Plusnet when fibre eventually comes to our cabinet (been delayed for a year, everyone else in the village already has it available).

 

[timo_w2s]

You could add this to your farm A/S .

Surely the dish in the video is looking too high in the sky for wifi signals? He'd probably scan in more access points if he removed the dish obscuring the signals from behind. ;)

 

[Lazarus]

will switch to Plusnet when fibre eventually comes to our cabinet (been delayed for a year, everyone else in the village already has it available).

Don't forget my Referral Discount!

 

[Captain Jack]

Fibre? What's that? My parent live in an FTTC area, despite being a rural location but they are about 1km away from the exchange so they are quite happy with their 19Mbit connection.

Virgin - I'll avoid them whenever possible from now on. When it works, it works OK but when it doesn't, you get the privilege of dealing with overseas call-centres who know nothing. And it doesn't work an unacceptable amount of time - critical when you work from home! Also, they throttle (at least used to) their "unlimited" connections once you go over a certain amount of data.

 

[PaulR]

I was transferred to Sky in the spring when they took over BE ...

That was exactly what happened to me as well.

...I am planning on leaving though and will switch to Plusnet when fibre eventually comes to our cabinet (been delayed for a year, everyone else in the village already has it available).

That was the only reason I stayed with Sky for so long. I didn't want to tie myself into someone else for 12 months and then find that FTTC would have been available from yet a different ISP at a better deal.

Fibre has been a long time coming to our exchange. First mooted for 2012, then 2013, then April 2014, it was actually commenced in June/July this year. Although our cabinet has been FTTCed (actually replaced) the system as a whole hasn't been switched on yet.

To be honest, if I were to switch to fibre (yes, I know it's only to the cabinet and then VDSL to the house but let's call it fibre for simplicity) then I would only be doing it for the increase in upload speed. Being so close to the exchange my download speed is just under 20 Mbps which is fast enough for everything I need at the moment.

The upload speed is something that people don't often take notice of but it was something that I managed to get O2 to tweak. I sacrificed a bit of my download speed to raise the theoretical maximum from 1.5Mbps to 2.5Mbps. In practice I used to get about 1.9Mbps. I refused all of Sky's entreaties to "upgrade" to their box just to retain this for as long as possible and it was only when they finally changed the equipment at the exchange that I was downgraded to their norm. To be fair to them I don't actually get a better upload speed from EE (about 1.05Mbps) so I had to compare other aspects of the service and that's when EE came to the fore.

I realise that I've rambled on quite a bit about EE but you won't find many people using their service simply because they are a bit of a start-up company in this area. As with most companies they buy their service in from BT wholesale. It's the extras that make the difference.

 

[timo_w2s]

Don't forget my Referral Discount!

Don't worry, I haven't!

 

[Lazarus]

Don't worry, I haven't!

A few more and PlusNet will be paying me!