Cuckoo Broadband - Customer since December 2021.

Back in 2021 I kept experiencing sub-par broadband from a legacy cable provider and FTTP had just started coming onto the market. Cuckoo Broadband seemed to be a good fit for my needs.

- 1 month rolling contract
- Unlimited Data.
- 1% of bill going to charity.

My experience from December 2021 - August 2022

In August 2022 I experienced a fault with my broadband and within 3 hours customer services had booked a BT Openreach engineer to come and have a look. My internet was rock-solid with little to no downtime. Whenever there was faults Alex (the CEO) would respond to clients. He was on-hands and super easy to reach out to.

My experience from September 2022 - November 2023
From September 2022 up and until November this year the FTTP service was rock solid with no complaints.

I started to notice outages, one of them was a fault in the talktalk network but as Cuckoo doesn't have a network service dashboard I had to rely on the managed network services dashboard to identify the fault on my own. Cuckoo made no attempt to acknowledge the downtime.Cuckoo claimed they track faults and do reach out to customers during office hours if an outage occurs however I wasn't able to see this in action.

November 2023
I experienced a few outages caused by the talktalk network.

This Week
My router is refusing to boot up, the ONT is showing a data loss as red. I called Cuckoo Friday morning and was told the router would be sent to me by Saturday, No diagnostics was conducted over the phone to troubleshoot the router, I was told by the customer services rep they aren't techincal and didn't understand why my router's status light was shining amber. I went of and found another provider had documented the issue as being a failure to boot so I tried to reset the router and it still didn't boot. Later on I called back and was told TalkTalk was working on fixing a network wide issue, I was told they was getting BT Openreach out to look at my ONT. Knowing I had access to the TalkTalk Managed Services Dashboard I asked the rep for the incident ID however they said they couldn't hand it out.

Roll on to Saturday, I was told that the provisioning team would need to get in touch and the customer service rep would phone me back within the hour. I waited a bit and the call never came. I called back again, got another rep and was told the department isn't open at the weekend. I phoned back later to explain the router was the problem and to ask if the router was still being sent as I had not got the router nor any emails from Cuckoo about the router (Lack of communication is a common theme with the provider now.) So phoning up again in the afternoon I got though to the same person I raised the fault with on Friday who told me the router had not been ordered by Cuckoo. At this point my trust in the business has erroded and I ended up planning my migration to the next ISP. I won't say who it is but I am having to pay more but by paying more I am hopefully avoiding the experience I've had with Cuckoo.


So what's happened?

Giganet aquired Cuckoo Broadband, Fern Trading then announced in Feb 2023 a merger of brands with Cuckoo going to be the consumer facing option for consumer clients.

So what's happened since this news?

- FTTC has been discontiuned as a product.
- Cuckoo Compass (the chairty 1% per bill) has been quitely discontiuned.
- The founder has stepped aside.
- The rolling monthly contract is now a 12 month contract.

I also went onto the company's glass door to try and understand how this merger has impacted the company and I won't say anything directly about this but it's very interesting observation.

It's sad to leave Cuckoo but I've decided no longer to be part of the flock. I'm moving onto greener pastures and my new provider will cost £20 more a month but I am confident I'll be moving towards a better service.

Things Cuckoo could improve on.

Fault Management - Some ISPs have a fault manager who deals only with line faults and is a single point of contact.

Knowledgebase - Have an article that explains what the router lights mean and the ONT lights. Help the customers help you!

Diagnostics Tooling - Allow customers to run their own diagnostics to help speed up the fault management process.

Network Status Page: Have a network status page that allows normal customers to see what is going on and how your fixing issues. be transparent and honest!

Communication: Don't promise that things will be fixed, Don't magic up faults that aren't there. Stop giving customers the run around and just fix the problems. Send out the router when you say your going to send a router out. If you say your going to call back, please call back.

Would I recommend Cuckoo Broadband in it's current state in 2023? No. Would I have done so in 2021 when it was a start-up? Yes!

Edited by Sun4Lw5LIQy (Sat 09-Dec-23 23:33:08)

Just wanted to provide an update.

My broadband is still down as of 12/12/2023.

The internet has been down since 08/12/2023 (5 days and counting.) Today I got to speak to the operations manager who apologized for the lack of customer service being provided by Cuckoo. It seems they are putting less experienced individuals in the call center who do not have technical experience and although they have technical people in the teams the team that needed to reach out to me didn't do so.

My outage has been explained as a "BT MSO". I was told on Friday my fault would be raised but the ticket was closed in the end either by Cuckoo or BTOR no one is coming forward. The BTOR ticket was reopened on Sunday and the updates indicated things would be fixed today. They haven't. Something has gone catestrophically wrong.

When I got back home another cuckoo router sat at my door (3 and counting.) I sent an email back to cuckoo addressing the operations manager and asking him why a third router had been sent out. one of his colleagues reached out to me instead.


Planned migration to a different ISP is set for the 28th December 2023.

Update 13/12/2023
Internet is still down, phoned the call center and was told “good news your fault has been fixed by BT Openreach!” It hasn’t. The customer service representative said “I’m not technical so I can’t answer the question.” I thought GREAT! here we go again. I reminded them this is the 2nd time BT Openreach has closed the ticket down. Why aren’t they booking an engineer out? He said he would book it in but the same person previously lied to me about other elements in Cuckoo so I’m phoning them back to verify the new fault has been raised. I’ve asked for a complaint to be raised about bt openreach but I was told the manager wouldn’t be in until Friday… so I’m being given the run around. So I phoned Fern Trading which put me though to Octopus Investments and I told them since the investment into Cuckoo the company has gone down hill.

No one wants to fix my fault and I’m still without internet. I would avoid this company at all costs. They just send a ticket to BT, BT closes the ticket. They tell me it’s fixed but it’s still down. Over and over and over again.

In reply to a post by Sun4Lw5LIQy:

My router is refusing to boot up, the ONT is showing a data loss as red.

Could you link to an up to date picture of your ONT showing what lights are on and what colour they are as this may help members to give some additional advice.

Sorry you've had a bad experience with Cuckoo, but it does sound like their technical support is clueless.

A red light on the ONT means either a fibre fault or a problem with the Openreach OLT. They should never have suggested that your router is at fault, and not wasted your time sending a new one. They should have raised a fault with Openreach immediately.

The connection came back online at 14:47 after 6 days of outages, I had spoken to Blake who had told me 30 minutes before that Openreach had informed them that there was a fiber line fault and they would need to dig the road up and potentially that was causing issues with the connection. During the call I asked to lodge an ADR and escalate the issue beyond Neil. It seems after this within 40 minutes my internet had been restored. I asked about my interaction in the morning with Oscar but I was told there was no fault report that had been spun up by him (although he claimed he had done so.)

The ONT was showing Green on power, Red on Los and Green on the ethernet port. The inital fault was the bootloader on the old router failing (it was stuck in amber boot-up mode).

Although Cuckoo wasn't meant to send me three routers in the end here's what happened.

1. The original router (I couldn't reset it, it was stuck in amber mode.)
2. The router was preconfigured with the correct SSID but the password was incorrect.
3. The router was preconfigured correctly and I am now writing this update via the new router.

So I believe there was two outages in one.

The first outage was the original router dying. it tanked.
The second outage was with the ONT but it just seemed very strange. everything went down.

Planned migration still going ahead to new provider. The experience from Cuckoo has been subpar.

The fault looked exactly like this but before hand when the router died on Saturday it still had access to PON so it wasn't a network fault but a router fault at that point. On Sunday it appears another fault occured on the BTOR network causing the ONT to show the same fault as in your guide.

Edited by Sun4Lw5LIQy (Wed 13-Dec-23 15:13:04)

Not seen what router you have, but AFAIK with ours if internet was down (red los) then the router light will be orange as that shows a loss of internet.

I think its unlikely both a network issue occurred at the exact same time as your router went pop (although not impossible), for the green ONT ethernet light to be on surely the link is up between the ONT and the router as otherwise it wouldn't be lit.

Hello it was a Technicolor router. It would keep flashing Amber and then solid Amber. It could be that the internet was down so it was showing that colour. Unfortunately the customer support team aren’t technical at cuckoo so if you call in with a fault they don’t know what the colours on the router mean. It’s frustrating but I’m leaving now for a different ISP.

That would normally indicate that the router is fine, but it can't connect to the internet, as the los was red this would seem to confirm that.