Best broadband provider

Need to get broadband installed. Fibre not available yet. Who is the most reliable of the big providers?

Which exchange please? If you have a phone at the premises, please can you put the number into this checker and copy/paste the results as far as the end of the table, editing out the phone number.

If you don't have a phone yet, use the Address option. Not the pure postcode one.

Do you want the phone and broadband with the same company, or would you like them separate?

By reliable, do you mean fix things when they are broken, or provide good speeds 24/7 without congestion slowing you down? The two don't always go together.

Do you do a lot of P2P and streaming? Or mainly gaming, or what?

Will need both phone and broadband.

Reliable as in good speeds without congestion, fixing things when broken would be secondary but still important.

No special requirements, so no gaming or heavy p2p, some streaming of usual content (iPlayer etc).

Plusnet sounds like the answer then, with good UK support.

Possibly Sky if you have Sky TV.

Big not always best.
Dependant on usage Zen worth a look.

Big is mostly often never the best But there ain't no guarantees that a smaller ISP can provide better TBH, As the saying goes "you only gets what you pays for" Seems to often be the case, cheap prices, end up being quantity and not quality 24/7 and at the rate that some appear to be recommending their ISP's they should be quids in each month by now from all the referral fees paid(joke), no wonder why they jump at the opportunity, it all makes sense now ,lol

Edited by tommy45 (Sun 11-May-14 22:20:24)

Dear Tommy,

The reason for recommending my ISP, (as well as another), is because I believe what I say. Why would I stay with an ISP I did not believe was amongst the best?

Wrt referral discounts, I was with Plusnet for many months, making similar recommendations, before I got incensed at someone boasting how much they made from referrals.

I was appalled. But realised if there is money going for nothing, then better to have it than to let Plusnet keep it.

So yes. Out of probably well over 100 recommendations I have half a dozen referrals. Nice, but no banana. Certainly not a reason to lie to people in my own interest.

Nice of you to introduce that topic however. Maybe the OP will ask for my username. In general, I do not initiate referrals, though admit to having done so occasionally - when I have given considerable help.

With best regards - Bob.

Yes but at the end of day, your personal experience of what the service you receive from your ISP is like, is limited info, as what you see may the person wanting info may see something completely different and where ever BT are involved the chances of that being the case somewhat are quite possibly increased , It's not that you are giving misleading info, but it's how not only the OP interprets the information given but what others who may well read this thread interpret too

You may have a satisfactory service 24/7 issues that you may or may not of had with the service you pay for may of or may not of been easy tasks for support to deal with too many variables , and with any big ISP they think nothing of loading their network with customers it's more of a numbers game to them, But can BT's infrastructure really cope , in every area?

And for a balanced report of what Plusnet is like, you could of mentioned about the frequent peak time issues that are still ongoing for some of there customers, or pointed them to the Plusnet community forums, as you have said the referral fees aren't worth writing home about

Edited by tommy45 (Sun 11-May-14 22:56:20)

Tommy! In your eagerness to try to justify your insult, you now just typed several lines of tripe.

Amongst other things you have willy-nilly mixed up BT, (Retail? Wholesale? Openreach?) infrastructure with the throughput capacity rented by individual ISPs. Something that ISPs have to have whether using BT Wholesale, TalkTalk Business, C & W or Daisy (direct).

Utter twaddle I'm afraid.

The chances these days are very much that the ISPs with 500k+ customers can offer a higher probability of consistent throughput than the smaller niche ISPs.

In my case I migrated from O2 LLU with which I was perfectly happy to IDNet FTTC when my cabinet was enabled, as O2 never offered FTTC. I went to IDNet precisely because of concerns about the big boys. It cost me nearly £24 per month for 20, maybe 40MB per month. (I was using under 10GB).

At the end of my 12-month term I felt I was paying a huge amount for no apparent reason, as I spend an awful amount of time here and am well aware of different ISPs' performance and Customer Service reports. I migrated to Plusnet for a higher allowance at £16.49pm.

Eleven months into my 18-month term, just for the hell of it plus future-proofing, I upgraded to their (then new) 80/20 Unlimited service at £19.99pm, restarting my 18 months. Soon to end.

Am I happy? Compared to all the ISPs I keep an eye on here, which is most of the ones commonly mentioned, you bet I am! Not just on my own account, but seeing how other customers' problems are handled.

A few Plusnet customers are repeatedly raising ongoing issues. That isn't surprising given somewhere between 650k and 700k customers. At least one of them has said they are happy with their overall experience and will not be moving away asap.

You also misrepresent what I said. Half a dozen or more referral fees are significant. However they do not influence my recommendations in the slightest. I cannot of course answer for anyone else.

Peak time issues, as I in fact posted a few minutes ago to someone who had been experiencing such and is now not doing, possibly due to my earlier advice to them, do seem to arise on at least one of the many Plusnet gateways. A change of gateway usually solves it - the issue not being the overall capacity of the Plusnet provision. Simply a duff gateway or two that needs sorting out. I agree that isn't good.

As for your denigrating my recommendation as merely being due to my personal experience of Plusnet and that being limited info, I will leave the OP to decide which of us knows what he is talking about.

Who are you with now, seeing as Be no longer exists? Which ISPs do you recommend to the OP and why?

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 11-May-14 23:24:14)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In my case I migrated from O2 LLU with which I was perfectly happy to IDNet FTTC when my cabinet was enabled, as O2 never offered FTTC. I went to IDNet precisely because of concerns about the big boys. It cost me nearly £24 per month for 20, maybe 40MB per month. (I was using under 10GB).

A very similar story to mine except that I went to IDNet from Be. I stayed with IDNet a bit longer but felt that they were losing interest in residential users. Then I nearly had a bad experience with my allowance and a DoS attack. Their lack of concern over the incident meant I went elsewhere.

Like RobertoS I am with Plusnet. It's costing me less than IDNet for an unlimited package and reliability is the same 100% I had with IDNet. Curiously my upstream is now marginally faster as well.

I am not with zen.
My input is that all the big four try to lock you into long contracts. If Market 1 then Plusnet, Sky and TT plus BT may not be best options
Seeing the 7 year with Zen threads and, the fact that there is no long term tie in on ADSL, they are worth a look. The phone is a much of a muchnes whatever the supplier and easy to move broadband if not satisfied.

In my limited experience of ISPs and what I've read on various sites,most of the time one gets performance which is more to do with the line between computer and the exchange than what the ISP does.

It's when things go wrong that the difference in suppliers can make all the difference.... especially in dealing with OpenReach.

If you need (as opposed to want) 24/7 service be prepared to pay for it.

Before committing yourself to an ISP, try them out by asking a technical question by email and make phone contact to get some idea of how the do things.

By far the best advice I can give is to go with an ISP that shows confidence in their ability to provide a good service by having a rolling one month contract .....OR factor into your costings the cost of breaking a contract.

Likewise take into account that there may be a cost if you transfer from one LLU'd ISP to another .Doing this before the event will save you (and us) from the anguished and indignant postings we have seen all to often over recent months.

One definite thing to do, regardless of who you sign up with is to get an email account completely separate from any ISP.

Lastly keep hard copies of all correspondence and keep electronic copies on a different device and/or mail box.

I hope you get the service you want but be prepared to change if things don't go right for you....it's not like getting married or getting a mortgage!

In my limited experience of ISPs and what I've read on various sites,most of the time one gets performance which is more to do with the line between computer and the exchange than what the ISP does.

Largely that is correct. However, the actual ISP network and their onward links can be key to whether you can actually achieve the speed at which you are connected. If they don't have enough bandwidth then peak time performance will almost certainly have problems. Often this is where the cheaper ISPs fall down - fine if you are only a casual user but if you are doing big downloads or doing a reasonable amount of streaming then it isn't just your connection that defines how good your broadband is.

Take a look at Andrews & Arnold:

http://www.aa.net.uk/broadband.html

If you have any questions give them a ring or tweet @aaisp

Good luck

In reply to a post by ian72:

In my limited experience of ISPs and what I've read on various sites,most of the time one gets performance which is more to do with the line between computer and the exchange than what the ISP does.

Largely that is correct. However, the actual ISP network and their onward links can be key to whether you can actually achieve the speed at which you are connected. If they don't have enough bandwidth then peak time performance will almost certainly have problems. Often this is where the cheaper ISPs fall down - fine if you are only a casual user but if you are doing big downloads or doing a reasonable amount of streaming then it isn't just your connection that defines how good your broadband is.

Actually paying more doesn't ALWAYS give you a better connection. I've been with niche ISPs such as Zen, Goscomb etc on their 8128/832 Kbps connection on my knackered 20cn exchange in the past and every evenings speeds slowed down to 2meg from 7+ meg. And guess what? as soon as Talktalk llu'd my exhange in 2010 and I transferred over I got a constant 17 meg day & night and downloading at least 1tb each month.. and I was only paying a fiver to TT (+vlr). So this notion you always have to pay £60 pm to get a decent connection is rubbish. ...as coms users are finding out

Actually paying more doesn't ALWAYS give you a better connection

Never said it did. I said:

Often this is where the cheaper ISPs fall down

Not ALWAYS and definitely didn't say paying more got you more. I said paying less often gets you less - you get what you pay for in most cases. For a straight ISP if they are low cost then something has to give - the line rental is going to be the same so support or onward connectivity will suffer and often it could be both.

Or did you reply to my post in error as you seem to be suggesting my post is wrong and yet nothing you say is in contradiction to my post just looking at it from the opposite end. Starting with "Actually" suggests you disagreed with me and then didn't?

TallkTalk is interesting - to sustain high bandwidth at their prices means they must be subsidising the connection with other parts of the business. They cannot provide good speeds at the price they charge if people actually are using the network without making a loss on the connection.

In reply to a post by ian72:

TallkTalk is interesting - to sustain high bandwidth at their prices means they must be subsidising the connection with other parts of the business. They cannot provide good speeds at the price they charge if people actually are using the network without making a loss on the connection.

On BT Wholesale, that's true. On LLU MPF there is a large initial outlay, but after that if there are sufficient customers, the individual pricing doesn't have to be very high at all. Of course having mandatory line rental on MPF is what really makes the low broadband pricing viable.

So, £5 a month covers the broadband rental, the network infrastructure (including switches, firewalls, etc), the services (DNS, email - if available, etc), support and onward connectivity.

I can't remember how much an LLU rental was but I'm pretty sure just the line was higher than this not so long ago. I cannot believe at £5 a month there is any profit and I believe it would be subsidised by other areas of the business.

SCRATCH THAT - Apparently they are now selling one for £3.50 per month with first 6 months at £1.75. Clearly there must be a profit at that price?


EDIT: If this Openreach link is correct that full MPF rental is £83.92 per annum plus VAT. That is £8.39 inc VAT per line. Am I looking at the right page? If so, then surely any broadband service has to be more than that per line just to get anywhere near covering costs?

EDIT 2 : OK - I may have misunderstood the costs? Full MPF is much more than Shared MPF so does full MPF at £8.39 per month also include the voice line rental from Openreach? If so, then charging £15ish for voice plus £3.50 for broadband would give some leeway for other costs/profits. Anyone know if this is how it works?

Edited by ian72 (Mon 12-May-14 14:55:13)

The £8.39 per month is for both voice and DSL parts of the line.

The price rises in April have made MPF and SMPF much more equal in terms of price. Hence why Simply and other TalkTalk stuff went up in price recently.

That makes TalkTalk proposition more understandable to me then. Assuming that the amount of profit they make on voice is outweighing the costs of all the broadband infrastructure/support needed to sell at £3.50 per month.

In reply to a post by ian72:

That makes TalkTalk proposition more understandable to me then. Assuming that the amount of profit they make on voice is outweighing the costs of all the broadband infrastructure/support needed to sell at £3.50 per month.

Yep. Sky and Talktalk pay Openreach a flat fee for use of the copper, there are no additional usage charges for them to pay Openreach for MPF. Therefore in order to make a profit, Sky and Talktalk need to push as many services as possible over that line, hence mandatory line rental when broadband is required.

The mandatory line rental already makes a net profit on MPF irrespective of any call charges, against what they pay Openreach for MPF. The cost of broadband increases that net profit.

It's a "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap" model, it relies on them getting lots of customers, since it relies on lots of small, incremental bits of income to cover the cost of running their LLU infrastructure. "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap" doesn't necessarily mean it's poor quality, but the model does need lots of customers to work.

It's in stark contrast to providers who rely on BT Wholesale. As soon as BT Wholesale providers pull in big numbers on unlimited, they are shelling out huge sums on charges to BT Wholesale for bandwidth.

TL;DR - it's profitable to break free from BT Wholesale if you have enough customers.

Plusnet probably are running their gateways too hot, by that I mean there may well be enough overall capacity across the entire span of gateways but with not much headroom meaning it doesnt take much of a misbalance for gateway bottlenecks to occur and hence jumping resolving issues.

Since its pretty much always solvable by jumping and it doesnt happen that often, then I accept it, usually for me the issue occurs after plusnet do a rebalance, so they kick me off and then I may need to manually jump again after that and is ok until they do another kick. Plusnet staff before were claiming its BTw congestion and not their gateways and the reason jumping works is that people then go over a new BTw route, that may be true, but obviously only they know that, I havent found any other BTw based isp's tho where users have BTw issues resolved by hoppping on and off ppp.

By comparison I remember when I was an entanet customer via a reseller, the days when they had their ALT or whatever it was called that would throttle down to 2mbit under worst conditions, it eventually became a common occurance for entanet to effectively be a 2mbit service all weekend. Plusnet's issues are nothing like that, so it puts it into perspective. On the other hand infinity was pretty much flawless, 24/7, no hopping needed, no TM, but also no static ip and 'almost' no uk support.

VM of course I give the congestion crown to, I had some very severe congestion during my years on VM. That I would been grateful for even entanet's 2mbit.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 13-May-14 19:19:36)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Plusnet probably are running their gateways too hot, by that I mean there may well be enough overall capacity across the entire span of gateways but with not much headroom meaning it doesnt take much of a misbalance for gateway bottlenecks to occur and hence jumping resolving issues.

I think so too, but hadn't thought to quite that depth.

Wow wasn't expecting to kick off such a debate.

OK thanks guys, will take on board your advice and will select someone soon.

Hopefully it will all go smoothly, but I know where to come if I am having any problems.