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.