Tesco LLU - Any customers out there?

Just researching broadband for my new flat, and was thinking either Xilo (Be 16Mb) or Plusnet Extra.

However I see Tesco are pitching in at £2.50 a month for 12 months, plus a £30 gift voucher, if you take your phone line rental with them.

From their website checker, they seem to have LLU in my area ( which I gather will be C&W ? )

Problem is, it seems ludicrously cheap - to the point of setting off my suspicion detectors.

Anyone out there with them at the moment, and if so, how's your service?

Well If you went direct to BE there doing half price broadband for 12 months and you could get 60quid cash back via quidco not sure if this is just for full price broadband

Cheers - that seems a very good offer.

I'll see if I can take them up on it now (even though I don't move in till after the offer ends) - and unlike the Tesco situation, I have (positive) experience of Be myself.

Still be interested to know what sort of service Tesco can be providing for £2.50 a month tho...

You get what you pay for I suppose..


Talk talk do there broadband cheap but when they took over AOL back in 2007 I think Aol went from excellent to rubbish..

As for BE there support is in Bulgaria and is amazing and you can understand them unlike the indian call centres of Talk talk not sure on Tesco but cant see them doing UK support 24-7

In reply to a post by gordon_k:

Still be interested to know what sort of service Tesco can be providing for £2.50 a month tho...

From what i know Tesco broadband (C&W LLU based) is quite good. No throttling & UK based support. However they do have a 100GB FUP per month and their default SNR is 9 db so you will lose speed unless you use a broadcom router which can be tweaked. Why are they so cheap? Simples...its full LLU

That sounds pretty good for me - I use about 60GB a month I think.

From what I gather, the one thing they do intend to throttle is P2P traffic, as it's not time critical. So might slow down Dropbox for me, but that's about it.

They say they don't throttle streaming video, which is one of my concerns, but of course what companies say and what they do is not always the same thing...

I see Plusnet are also doing a half-price for 12 months offer at the moment - I'm kinda spoilt for choice...

Choice between a LLU (Tesco) isp over a BTw (Plusnet) isp? LLU everytime. LLU operators have far more bandwidth so less likely to suffer from peak time congestion,no silly peak time data limits, no DLM (or can easily be switched off in the case of TallkTalk) and considerably cheaper. No brainer really

In reply to a post by baby_frogmella:

Choice between a LLU (Tesco) isp over a BTw (Plusnet) isp? LLU everytime. LLU operators have far more bandwidth so less likely to suffer from peak time congestion,no silly peak time data limits, no DLM (or can easily be switched off in the case of TallkTalk) and considerably cheaper. No brainer really

That makes sense to me.

But I'm noticing that on the ThinkBroadband ISP comparison thing, Plusnet seems to rate consistently higher than TalkTalk (for example) for speed and reliability. I do think people tend to let their customer service frustrations spill over into their other ratings though, so that may not tell the whole story...

Is that Tesco deal partial LLU or 21CN WBC? Broadband only does seem possible according to the Tesco web site so that might indicate partial LLU (SMPF) or 21CN WBC.

If Tesco use 21CN WBC or SMPF why would that be better than Plusnet 21CN WBC? Of course if one's exchange is not 21CN enabled then SMPF would be better than IP Stream...

In reply to a post by 4M2:

Is that Tesco deal partial LLU or 21CN WBC? Broadband only does seem possible according to the Tesco web site so that might indicate partial LLU (SMPF) or 21CN WBC.

If Tesco use 21CN WBC or SMPF why would that be better than Plusnet 21CN WBC? Of course if one's exchange is not 21CN enabled then SMPF would be better than IP Stream...

AFAIK if your exchange is C&W LLU equipped, Tesco offer both full LLU and partial LLU broadband - so you can keep your line rental with BT if required. Obviously full LLU will be the cheapest. I do know that Tesco can supply broadband using 20CN based BTw (if no C&W LLU) but whether they can do that on 21CN BTw as well (again if no C&W LLU) then i've got no idea. Either way, BTw based Tesco broadband will be more expensive - i think their BT 20CN based broadband (up to 8 meg) is 18 quid a month

Edited by deleted (Sun 09-Sep-12 07:21:34)