In reply to a post by hk11:

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

The cheap ones, sure, pretty much all of them. It's the main reason they're cheap. Some expensive ones are as bad and are very poor value.

Most of the extra cost goes towards support. Most networks are much of muchness, with extra investment in capacity relatively small as regulations on performance are pretty strict.

To be honest TT are quite bad. I was a TT FTTC customer on a 2 year contract. The Customer Service is a big scam. I was promised that I'll get a new telephone line as part of a 2 year deal. But instead an Openreach engineer came and refused to install a new line and only installed an NTE5C Faceplate.

I could've signed an 18 month contract with a £70 amazon voucher and bought that NTE5C Faceplate separately from amazon. But I was basically cheated by live support chat in order to persuade me to take their deal.

The internet service is also quite poor. Although the speed is fine, latency is fine. But when it comes to reliability, it is not good. Throughout the 2 years every 10 days or so the connection would go down despite the router showing as connected! This meant that the internet was connected to the FTTC exchange but the TalkTalk connection would go down.

Even if you had a high connection up time, it means nothing as many of these days there's no live connection but the router will show as connected!

Also every few weeks TalkTalk would announce scheduled maintenance's. During this maintenance the internet connection will be down for at least 10-20 minutes. Those maintenance's are random and I only had to login to their website on the day the connection was down to find out that my service was down due to their scheduled maintenance. What is this maintenance for? Why so regularly?

Now I am with BT FTTC last 13 months and this service has been rock solid. I've never had my BT service go down even if the router showed as connected. But with TalkTalk the connection will show on but the service will be down, no internet connectivity but router settings will show connected.

Anyone else who is a TalkTalk customer will tell you the same experience as myself! If anyone says they've never experienced this, they'd be lying!

Although I'll be honest, it was still miles better than my previous ADSL EO Line service. But my ADSL EO Line service was faulty. TalkTalk was my first FTTC package that I signed up in February 2020, it was good as my first experience. But I don't think I'll choose TalkTalk in near future especially with Community Fibre being available here now.

Oh, and on top of that after the 2 year contract had ended my £20 monthly cost went up to £36 and eventually £40 a month! I quickly switched to BT Home Essentials 2 for £20 at that time. TT tried to lure me again by price matching for £20 a month. But that wasn't good enough when their service is so poor to begin with.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

I was promised that I'll get a new telephone line as part of a 2 year deal.

Not sure this was TT's fault, with best intensions from the TT rep Openreach are always going to use existing E and D sides to a property unless you order a new service before cancelling the old one once its up and running. The engineer on the day will use the routing they have been provided with unless they can prove a fault exists.

Highlights why I do everything by email as firms tend to promise you the world on the phone then deny it when things go wrong.

My neighbour is with BT and like you sings their praises, but I realy only need a basic service.

Costs doubling when contract ends is typical and Ofcom should step in and stop this, but they won't actually do anything that helps the general public.

The forced fibre rollout is good for those that need high speed, but they shouldn't be forcing people to pay double when they don't need the speed, especially when the new lines don't even include a phone.

Nothing wrong with charging extra for support, but the actual connection is pretty much universal.

I'm just hoping my new provider will actually read what I send them in the event of a complaint as my old one certainly did not.

In reply to a post by hk11:

Highlights why I do everything by email as firms tend to promise you the world on the phone then deny it when things go wrong.

My neighbour is with BT and like you sings their praises, but I realy only need a basic service.

Costs doubling when contract ends is typical and Ofcom should step in and stop this, but they won't actually do anything that helps the general public.

The forced fibre rollout is good for those that need high speed, but they shouldn't be forcing people to pay double when they don't need the speed, especially when the new lines don't even include a phone.

I know a couple of people with BT and sing their praises as well, but they are not cheap and even then their customer service is not great when things go wrong, as it is difficult to understand the person you are talking to and like Talk Talk and others they go by a script and won't go from it. For new customers for 36Mb/s it is £32.99, that includes phone and full fibre, they will not allow you to go to FTTC if there is fibre available and they shove you into a 24 month contract. EE is the same, but about £4 cheaper, but again forced onto fibre with a 24 month contract.

This seems to be the norm these days, a 24-month contract, I thought we had gone away from this. It seems the only way to get a shorter contract is to got with Shell or Onestream, or maybe Sky.

You are like me, only need a basic service, I went to Zzoomm because of the price and it was cheaper than others, even if I stayed on FTTC, I have no need for super duper speed,, having 500Mb/s have not made a lot of difference in how I do things. Granted, download files to the PC is faster, but I can wait.
Zzoomm offered me a good price that was cheaper than FTTC and a 12-month contract, if Zzoom was not available to me, I would still be on FTTC via something like shell or one stream since their prices are better than what Plusnet was offering and one stream offers a 12 month contract for their 36Mb/s package for £25 a month.

Edited by zyborg47 (Sat 05-Aug-23 22:49:00)

I really got cheesed off finding offers that when you clicked on them, told you they were not available.

In reply to a post by hk11:

I really got cheesed off finding offers that when you clicked on them, told you they were not available.

I know of people who had that problem, I did not as I never really looked that hard when I was with Plusnet, towards the end of my contract I had a look to see what was available and then just as the contract ended Plusnet came up with a decent offer.
I notice on your sig you have been with a lot of providers, I presume most of them were in the ADSL and dial up days. I changed a fair bit in dial up days, ADSL I think I had 5 different ones, BT, Eclipse, Metronet, AOL for a month, and another which I can not remember the name of, just before I went to allpay wireless broadband for 2 years and then after that moved to Plusnet for 9 and now with Zzoomm. If all goes well I expect I will stay with zzoomm as long as they keep going and offer a good service and don't go crazy on their prices. I can't be bothered to go through the hassle of getting another FTTp connection and to be honest now I am away from Out of reach I prefer to stay away from them.

Can anyone else resell via the Zzoomm infrastructure like ISPs do on Openreach infrastructure? If not that wouldn't be a deal breaker for me.

In reply to a post by dect:

Can anyone else resell via the Zzoomm infrastructure like ISPs do on Openreach infrastructure? If not that wouldn't be a deal breaker for me.

I don't believe Zzoomm wholesale unlike Openreach or CityFibre. The third (much smaller) multi-ISP network is Fibre&Wireless, but then all the others are ISP owned/run infrastructure. (toob, building in my town has some agreement with CityFibre, but it seems only one way, CF areas can buy toob services, but I couldn't buy from a CF using ISP like AAISP sadly).