I would have included Sky/Now TV in with Plusnet had it not been for my recent experience with them. I think I was on my third contract with them, only for them to lie to me by telling me my credit card company had contacted them and told them to remove my details from their servers!

In reply to a post by hk11:

Are TT really that bad?

Over the years I have found there is nothing very different about any of the ISPs with maybe the exception of Plusnet.

I've had bad experiences from Vodafone, EE and Shell, to mention just a few. Their ADR representatives are just as bad.

Pay peanuts...

I understood TT was no longer in this category?

In reply to a post by hk11:

Are TT really that bad?

Over the years I have found there is nothing very different about any of the ISPs with maybe the exception of Plusnet.

I've had bad experiences from Vodafone, EE and Shell, to mention just a few. Their ADR representatives are just as bad.

I have never used TT myself, but I know plenty of people who have and I have had to phone TT a number of times on behalf of people and their customer service makes you want to pull your teeth out. I thought BT was bad, but TT is worse. That was mainly back in the ADSL days, where a person that lived next to the exchange had problems getting a speed higher than 1Mb/s.

As FTTC came, I had less reason to phone them for people, and they are a lot better at being reliable, but customer service still stinks. The one reason why I don't phone them so much is that the majority of people I know that used TT have moved to another provider.

I am dreading contacting zzoomm if I have a problem, I have heard their customer service can be hit-and-miss, but so far, so good.

In reply to a post by hk11:

No.

Plusnet is one if the few ISPs I have gone back to several times. I wouldn't say they are great, but their employees usually do *try* and help. Their webservers are useless, which is surprising given the business they are in, but like I say most ISPs seem to be the same.

I have never gone back to Plusnet as I never left them until now, but yeah considering that Plusnet belongs to BT, I was pretty happy with them, Customer service was ok and the problem I did have a few years ago was not their fault, but Openreach and to be fair to Openreach, well the people that came out they did try hard to sort out the problem, but it comes to something that they had no idea what the problem was. Thankfully, all I had to do was keep the Huawei modem in place and it worked fine.

If for some reason I had to leave zzoomm, I would certainly look at Plusnet again.

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

Pay peanuts...

Not these days, they are in the same price range as other budget providers.

Seems like you kind of agree with me that they are all pretty much as bad as one another?

It's just a pity these companies don't offer renewals at competative rates. If they did that I wouldn't bother to swap, once I found a reasonable ISP. The whole ethos of these offers they do is to get you to sign up in the hope you then go on at vastly inflated prices when your contract ends. I am noticing most contracts are now 24 months, presumably to claw back the extra costs involved with fibre?

The mid-contract price increases are also very unfair, given they have a guarenteed income for the contract length, but I think Ofcom are looking at these? Not that Ofcom are any real use, but it seems that is all we have to work with.

In reply to a post by bobble_bob:

Their retail department from all accounts is poor. But TTB as a reseller is excellent.

Many other ISPs use TTB's backhaul services from your local exchange to the ISP network for ADSL and FTTC/VDSL services. This is reported to be a quality network.

It could be considered the retail service was sold too cheap for investment, adverts on bus shelters for broadband at £1.99 a month isn't going to pay many bills.

It could be considered the retail service was sold too cheap for investment

I think you have nailed it. Foreign companies bought many companies when the £ was low. The whizzkids borrow money to buy the firm, strip out whatever value they can, load their borrowing debt onto the company, and take it as dividends.

Now the fairytale of low interest rates has ended these companies like mortgage buyers face vastly increased repayments. I don't doubt TT is one of them.