Cuckoo

Hi all,

I’ve been lurking the website and forums for many years (decades!), but I’m finding it really hard lately to research ISPs so decided to register and hopefully some kind folks can help with my questions..

My Sky contract is coming to an end and I’m looking to move to a mid tier/bottom end of premium ISP. I noticed Cuckoo offered some reasonably priced FTTP products and they include a decent router (Eero Pro 6E), they also have good reviews on MSE for customer service. Further research though tells me that things may have gone downhill and I’m very confused by it all.

If they booted out a bunch of BT Openreach customers earlier in the year, why are they still offering products based on it?

There’s talk about parent companies (giganet?) and TalkTalk LLU, can someone explain in simple terms who they actually are?

Does anyone have any feedback in terms of their performance, reliability, congestion (outside of the OR network)? Sky have been OK, but once or twice a year there will be some kind of routing issue or unannounced maintenance around midnight and it’s starting to get a bit frustrating. I’d rather pay an extra £5-10/M for something more solid.

Many thanks in advance,

This may help - https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/01/fern-t...

I was (am?) with Swish fibre and cannot complain. The service has been 99.9% available and always gives me the 900/900 speed I pay for.

Latency on the BQM has increased recently but cannot see the increase from 5ms to 10ms on my side so expect it to be a BGM issue.

Thanks for the input.

I think I’m getting confused trying to understand which ISPs are currently ‘good’ performance wise, what choices are actually available (via Openreach) and how people are comparing latency and performance.

Was looking at IDnet yesterday, but I understand they’re using Zen backhauls (which is supposedly higher latency and poor single thread speeds). I used Zen over 20 years ago and they were considered one of the very best?

If I order Cuckoo using Openreach product, what backhauls would I be using? How much of it is Cuckoo’s own?

I'm on their own infra and the package I have is 900/900 (usually <5ms latency) which is not something available on OR so what package are you looking at? If it is asymmetric then likely an OR offering.

I was under the impression they solely used their own infra but maybe they have branched out since the re-organisation.

Single thread speedtest

Edited by smouty (Wed 09-Oct-24 12:26:49)

There’s no alt-net fttp here, so I am just looking for Openreach based products. But not all providers using Openreach are the same, so I’m trying to learn how do I go about understanding which ones are better?

Look else where, after the really poor handling of some of their customers (on the Openreach network) being forced over to a company called Home Telecom you really can't trust them not to do it again.

Cuckoo is owned by Fern Trading who have a bunch of broadband businesses.

Edited by PCJM40 (Wed 09-Oct-24 16:18:01)

I would be very wary of moving to Cuckoo as PCJM40 has said they did their reputation no good at all with the removal of some or possibly all of the Openreach supplied customers and trying to automatically switch them to Home Telecom. A lot complained and were allowed to leave and find a new supplier. This was in February this year. Cuckoo Shock

Strangely in September they changed their tune (excuse the pun and announced that they had a new deal with BT Wholesale to supply Openreach FTTP services again. Indeed I have checked a nearby address which I know has OR FTTP and Cuckoo are saying it is available.

I don't think I would trust them much, who knows what will happen next.

In reply to a post by SubspaceEddie:

There’s no alt-net fttp here, so I am just looking for Openreach based products. But not all providers using Openreach are the same, so I’m trying to learn how do I go about understanding which ones are better?

Same as with other things you buy: asking existing users, reading online reviews etc, and it depends on what you mean by "better", i.e. what's important to you.

I am with Aquiss, one of the smaller providers, and they are very good for customer support: they are technically competent, you can raise tickets online, and they answer them very quickly. I also get static IPv4 and IPv6 which is important to me, but may not be for you.

Price examples are £45/month for 300M (for me this is the sweet spot) or £55/month for 900M. There's no setup charge, the first 6 months are half price, the contract is only 12 months, and there are no in-contract price rises. This is the sort of no-nonsense approach that I approve of.

Note that you have to provide your own router, which is one reason for the short contract length. That also suits me fine.

I’ve been researching by reading posts here and on an isp review forum, plus comments on other social media and tech forums.

What’s clear to me is that the waters appear much muddier these days - it’s been over 10 years since I shopped around for a subjectively reasonable quality ISP and everything has changed. Many ISPs pooling resources or belonging to parent companies makes things even less clear. Aquiss being associated with both CityFibre and Entanet, for example.

And it’s the same for almost all ISPs I read up - everything is a rabbit hole and I’m getting a bit lost!

What I mean by better is: Demonstrably good or excellent performance with regards to speed, latency and overall uptime. An ISP where (outside of the BTOR network) they have a generous and well controlled capacity buffer that avoids congestion. They should have sensible geographical routing and resilience in place for peer failures. There should be zero to minimal packet loss even at peak times. Am I asking too much, as these things certainly used to be possible to search and find in days now long gone? Should I just accept almost everything is now homogenised?

Aquiss does seem a reasonable taster option though, with the 6 month half price deal and short 12 month contract. I also prefer to supply my own router and I like the idea of a status page and ticket system. I feel confident I won’t be taken through all unnecessary hoops or ignored should I actually ever have any issues.

In reply to a post by SubspaceEddie:

Aquiss being associated with both CityFibre and Entanet, for example.

I just want to be clear for anyone reading this, to clear the waters so to speak, that Aquiss is NOT linked (parent company) to either CityFibre/Entanet in anyway. We are independent private limited company, which has remained the case since Aquiss was founded.

In reply to a post by SubspaceEddie:

What I mean by better is: Demonstrably good or excellent performance with regards to speed, latency and overall uptime.

I think you'll find all the major providers are much of a muchness with regards uptime and throughput. They all *have* to run a pretty reliable network, or they'll receive millions of complaints; and they all have to meet their peak-hour speed guarantees. If you suffer a fault it's more likely to be down to your own local loop or a local exchange area issue. Some providers are better than others in communicating such issues (Aquiss have WhatsApp updates, AAISP have their status page etc).

If you absolutely cannot live with downtime, then buy a second link from a second provider using a different physical network (e.g. Virgin, 4G/5G, Starlink)

Latency can be a different matter. There are a couple of well-known providers who have LNS pools in both London and Manchester and balance sessions between them, and I've seen people in the London area complain when their sessions sometimes get terminated in Manchester. If an extra 3-5ms of latency matters to you, you might want to avoid those providers.

I regularly SSH to servers in the west coast of the USA, so 150ms of latency doesn't bother me

If you need the absolutely best transit and peering, AAISP would likely be your best bet, due to their responsive network team. I've heard people say they've reported issues with performance to a particular destination, and within an hour their engineers have investigated and put in a BGP workaround to reroute the traffic while the issue is escalated upstream. But on the flip side, there was a pretty terrible story earlier on in the year where all their customers were put on "upgraded" LNS firmware which regularly crashed, but for months they kept trying to "fix" the problem with newer firmware (still broken) rather than rollback - which they eventually did. At least they were open in their communication, but it goes to show that there's no "perfect" provider out there.

I have no complaints whatsoever about Aquiss. Any questions are usually answered quickly by the MD himself. In nearly 3 years with them I have only suffered two short periods of loss of service due to third-party network issues. Monthly billing is faultless.

That said, in a competitive market there are other factors that come into play. Price is clearly one of them. For example, Aquiss has an exceptional new customer offer but unlike some other ISPs it is not available to existing customers who might choose to upgrade their package after a number of years as an Aquiss customer. IDNet, for example, limits its opening offer to once every two years. It also allows existing customers to upgrade their packages without taking on a new minimum term contract.

IDNet and Zen are arguably better value price wise than Aquiss in the mid FTTP range (300 to 500Mbps).

Given that FTTP is significantly less problematic than FTTC, then a choice of ISP really comes down to what matters to you as a customer. Do you want a static or dynamic IP; is CGNAT a concern; what happens at the end of the minimum term contract re pricing etc? Technical support is less of a concern these days than it once was.

I have looked at Cuckoo and I posed some specific questions that the sales were unable or reluctant to answer.

In sum, Aquiss is working well for me at the moment but it needs to remain competitive compared to its peers (IDNet and Zen) for me to stay with them.

Thanks Martin I appreciate the clarification and I have applied to transfer to Aquiss.

I think some of my confusion came from this discussion when I was researching: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/aquiss.189...

Is it correct to say that Aquiss use what was previously Entanets network (who were bought by CityFibre)?

Can anyone give me a basic breakdown of how data flows with Aquiss as ISP using BT FTTP please? Sorry for likely butchering terminology, but something like this:

My ONT
BT Openreach fibre
BT ‘aggregation’ (?) point (scoops up connections from larger area?).
BT wholesale to London DC? Aquiss equipment?
Entanet/CityFibre backhaul?
Peered to outside UK (which peers?)

From what I gather as a customer, they've got two networks. I was originally on their older network, which used Cityfibre IP addresses announced from AS8468 (Cityfibre/Entanet). But I have now been moved to their newer network - which involved me changing IP addresses, although not username or password - and the new addresses are announced from AS215066 (Aquiss Limited)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I am with Aquiss, one of the smaller providers, and they are very good for customer support: they are technically competent, you can raise tickets online, and they answer them very quickly. I also get static IPv4 and IPv6 which is important to me, but may not be for you.

Price examples are £45/month for 300M (for me this is the sweet spot) or £55/month for 900M. There's no setup charge, the first 6 months are half price, the contract is only 12 months, and there are no in-contract price rises. This is the sort of no-nonsense approach that I approve of.

Note that you have to provide your own router, which is one reason for the short contract length. That also suits me fine.

I will second this. Aquiss has sorted any issue i've had promptly and politely.

To answer the original question, I was on Giganet with Openreach from Feb 2023-Aug 2024 with their 500/70 service.

At tbe beginning they were very responsive to questions, seemed knowledgeable. They were also offering 1-month contracts, and I knew cityfibre was 'coming soon'.

Early on I had some ipv6 issues and whilst a little slow (impatient?) all resolved in a week though I did have to speak to the MD. It was an eero software bug.

Generally the service was reliable, though I found some speedtest sites wouldn't give full speed. others would. Only once I had a serious outage/slowdown, but did seem to get occasional minor issues with certain sites I never really got to the buttom of, but always seemed minor. I suspect it was peering related.

This summer they took away the ipv4 static & ipv6 prefix I'd had, and doubled my latency (4-5ms -> 8-9 ms). It took weeks to get any reply. They offered to reinstate the statics (1 year free) but never followed through. I got so frustrated at the lack of communication and decided to leave.

Very close call in where to move to. It came down to Aquiss vs EE.In the end I decided I didn't need static (I use a cloudflare tunnel for a barely-used website anyway) and whilst I wasn't a fan of EE customer service/pricing, I know their network is very good (reliability, peering etc). A secondary factor was EE mobile discounts though tbh the price saving is a bit of a con. Just 1 month contracts.

After my order was in I learned that aquiss (I think) moved fully to bt wholesale ?? which could be the best of both worlds! Too late for me really.

EE has been flawless on both ipv4 and ipv4 (by far majority of my traffic is now ipv6). They have so much peering. I use opnsense as router. As it happens I needed to use an extra AP (to reach outside for car/camera). Had intended to upgrade to ubiquity but found that the old EE hub actually performed better on wifi 6 that either wifi 6 or 6e on the amazon eero. Odd...!

No sign of cityfibre here yet. There's been talk for years. Some of the city (Brighton) has it but rollout seems stalled.

Does Cuckoo still re-sells TalkTalk business network if an Openreach area?
And I was told they only supply CGNAT at the moment with no option of static ip, does anybody know if this DHCP or PPOE connection ?

I am a former Cuckoo broadband customer. I joined when Cuckoo was reselling TalkTalk Business as its FTTP product.

Here are some of the issues I faced.

1. No Network Status Page. My internet would regularly go offline and I would end up having to use the TalkTalk Business Broadband Network status page to identify if my exchange was having an outage. Cuckoo would promise to provide a call back but they didn’t happen.

2. My internet dropped dead on a Friday without any reason from Cuckoo after I had been a long and loyal customer who paid up every month. My line went down and I was fed many different stories about what happened. My line was deprovisioned by accident, my router died and they sent 2 additional routers. The promise of an update from open reach never came. I ended up having a call back from a manager at Cuckoo apologising and asking if they could hold onto me. By then I had gone with a different ISP.

3. They got rid of Cuckoo Compass which was a charity pot that included money going to a good cause.

4. In the past when I had an outage the issue was fixed quite quickly but when the founder left the company I noticed a down tick in performance from “customer support” it just felt like I was paying for a service that had been sold off and no one knew what was going on. I was told at the time they was hiring new staff and training them up.

For me the ISP just wasn’t mature enough for what I needed.

Just my thoughts on the matter!