NOW Broadand User Comments Please

An elderly neighbour is considering Now Broadband as they can have 63Mpbs for a year at £20 calls included and can get £100 Quidco - which means less than £12 a month. As they are very reliant on the phone and have video calls to their chidren who live in Australia I have done a bit of digging and have 4 concerns. Sky have a LLU at our local exchange

1. There are lots of complaints regarding the very poor WiFi range of the supplied router but I am not sure if this is the one that they still supply.

2. Problems with porting their telephone numer both in and out. I have seen complaints that customers were simply allocated a new number despite asking to keep the old one.

3. Are the problems with leaving to join another ISP now resolved. I have read of other ISP's not wanting to take on NOW customers.

4. Are they reliable payers of Quidco? I have read suggestions of some problems.

All these problems might be the customers fault or ancient history but they might not..........

"Calls Included" - not all calls though. UK 01, 02, 03 calls only.

Charges for 08xx, 040, international and others .

They say they will try to port numbers - how hard will they try? Your neighbour needs a cast iron guarantee first.

That is the sort of thing that concerns me. They are keen to save money but...........

I think NOW include 60 minute calls to 01, 02, 03, 07 mobile, 0800 & Isle of Man. Pretty much everything else - 070, 084, 087, 118 & international is chargeable, but this is standard fare for 'included calls' packages.

NOW is certainly attractively priced, my BT contract is up soon and I think I would have a go if I could get it here - unfortunately NOW BB won't have me, being on a small exchange requiring a split wholesale WLR/FTTC arrangement. Oddly enough, Sky BB is available.

You do read of a few moans with many of the lower cost providers, including NOW, most seem to revolve around poor customer service.

I left Now TV/Broadband earlier this year, earlier than my full contract length(I switched to Three 5G broadband because I can get a 350Mb connection). I still got £90 cashback(TopCashback) even after I left them and one of the other good things about Now is their early termination charges are very low if you sign up on one of their discounted deals like £20/month with free calls(check out their section on early termination showing how they calculate it - typical ISPs will charge you a lot of money if you end a contract early, Now is very cheap in comparison). Another good thing about Now is UK based support which is always much easier to deal with.

You can essentially use any router that supports DHCP client mode with "Option 60/61", you have to extract your credentials from the Now router(using simple piece of software) and enter them into option 60/61 on the new router.

Occasionally you might bump into an ISP that may charge for migration from Sky LLU back to BT but if you're switching between the big ISPs I doubt this will be an issue.

Purely anecdotal but I've helped two people migrate to Now Broadband with no issues.

1. No complaints about WiFi range. One person was replacing an old PlusNet router and the other a more modern BT Smart Hub 2. I didn't take any signal strength meaurements thought.

2. Number "port in" happened OK in both cases.

3. Can't comment, one person moved and ceased the connection, the other is still with Now.

4. One person yes, took about 6 or 7 months. The second we're about 3 months in and waiting.

My general feeling is that if everything goes smoothly with a budget ISP, they meet most people's needs. If things go wrong then their lack of customer service can be a pain to sort things out.

This is not aimed at anybody in particular but it's come up twice in this thread now. LLU isn't relevant when we are talking about FTTC or other Openreach GEA services. I'm fairly sure this is coming from SamKnows as they haven't really advertised that their availability checker is a decade out of date now and not relevant - they still list TalkTalk as Carphone Warehouse, for example.

BT Wholesale are a customer on the Openreach GEA network the same as anybody else - in this case Sky.

Fair point about my use of the term LLU, however in the past I've had personal experience(while on VDSL) of some ISPs refusing or charging for migration from ISPs like TalkTalk and Sky. Maybe it no longer happens now, but it did at one time.

In reply to a post by Spud2003:

You can essentially use any router that supports DHCP client mode with "Option 60/61", you have to extract your credentials from the Now router(using simple piece of software) and enter them into option 60/61 on the new router.

You don't need to extract the credentials anymore, you may still have to send something in 60/61 but it's less fussy about what what something is, it may need to contain a @ or a . (I forget which worked) and you may need to pre-encode it into hex depending on if your router does that bit for you or not.

As others have said their early termination fees are reasonable, which is actually pretty much the reason why I left them, when I got starlink I dropped one of my FTTC's and that was the cheaper one to lose.

Edited by dragon2611 (Fri 22-Apr-22 13:29:41)

There was an update posted by a Sky employee on their forums that says as long as you use a router that can pull an IPv6 PD allocation then you'll get an IPv4 from DHCP.

Been with them now for 2 months after leaving TalkTalk (purely for price, had no issues with talk talk).

1) We have a 5 bedroom house (3 bed with a 2 bed extension) and their hub covers the whole house no problems.
2) Telephone number ported in with no issues at all, didn't even notice the switch as even the TalkTalk hub established a connection when it changed over so didn't actually need to change the hub if I didn't want to.
3) Can't commend.
4) Tracked on Quidco for £88, no updates and no estimated payout as of yet.

I will say that using the Now Hub, we have changed the DNS settings to 1.1.1.1 on every single device as A) their DNS seems to be SUPER slow causing websites to take 5-10 seconds until the content starts to load and B) the DNS settings cannot be changed on the hub itself.

Thank you for all the comments.

In the end they got a price match offer from their existing provider & decided that it was easier to stay put.

Now does seem to be a good alternative which is definitely worth considering in the future.

Thank you again.

Edited by chris52 (Sun 24-Apr-22 09:00:25)

just a small point for others, the wifi part is made to a **price**, so it is usually not that good...

you may be lucky now, but a lot of house have big lumps of metal about, ruining signal...

getting a separate wifi router has many benefits! a lot of security options, and possibly to add storage and or a network printer!

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/wifi-ro...

Edited by comnut1 (Sun 24-Apr-22 13:13:45)