Yet another which ISP...

I've been on VM cable for years but an upcoming house move means that is a good time to consider changing back to ADSL. I have no idea who half the ISPs are any more. Back in the day I was with Nildram.

I was looking at Zen as they used to be good but are they rubbish now?

There's also A & A. I don't want to spend money on a phone line I don't use and they seem to offer some bare copper wire rental option which appeals. Do other ISPS offer this? I'm looking at their 1TB home option as most of the others have monthly allowances that I'd burn through in a week.

I use tons of data. I live on netflix/iplayer and upload a fair bit too. VM isn't offering anywhere near the speeds they should so I don't think normal FTTC is going to be actually any slower. Best I get on VM is about 70MBit usually and the traffic shaping/management is awful. When it was the 100mbit top level I'd get 90-100mb all the the time. Now it's 200mbit I never see anything like that speed.

Any recommendations? The A&A isp VDSL option is £60 pm a month all in which is right at the top of what I'm willing to pay really. I'm currently paying about £46 a month to VM for just broadband and it's a slow service but it generally is always on apart from a few hours a year when it's suddenly off for no reason. I use google DNS so their DNS problems haven't affected me.

I'm not sure whether there is a legacy BT phone line in the new place so I've assumed it will have to be a new one. This makes it difficult with some providers as they only let you try and order knowing a phone number.

Are there any stats on general uptime of VM vs BT Fibre? The lack of out of hours support with A & A is a concern.

Have you used the address option of this checker to get speed estimates? Please copy and paste the VDSL lines A and B, and the name of the exchange.

Don't just use the postcode checker - it cannot really be relied on.

Already used several different checkers so I have a good idea of what speed I should get. Upload should be better and download is not that much slower than actual current speeds.

For me it was a no-brainer.

I migrated to AAISP just about 4 weeks ago, and couldn't be happier - highly recommended.

NJSS

I like Sky due to no traffic shaping and no limits. Its cheap at £15p/m plus line rental, appx total of £33 per month. I don't even have a phone plugged in but it was still cheaper per month to take it with a phoneline.....like when I was with VM it was cheaper to get a deal with TV even tough I didn't want the TV but was cheaper at the time than just phone and broadband. Fibre max is what you will want, 20mb upload.

You cannot place an order with the prior owners telephone number as this belongs to them not you.

You just need to provide the address to the gaining provider, chances are there is a line already there but the previous homeowner will have ceased this line when they moved out. In this case often BT openreach have already physically disconnected the line and the new ISP will set things up as if you are getting a brand new line, sometimes this results in a fee.

I have both BT Infinity Unlimited 1 and TalkTalk Fibre Large. Both services work flawless and have no slowdowns. Here is my BT speedtest on 52Mbps product at peak hours: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

BT - their router self reboots every 14 days, other than this I get 14 days of solid connectivity without a drop out.

TalkTalk I can go months without a drop out, but their provided router has a few minor firmware bugs which you may not notice.

BT I pay line rental around £19 + £11 for infinity so £30 a month
TalkTalk - I got a retentions offer so I pay just the cost of line rental at £17.70 a month I believe.

Spending £60 a month is probably an overkill.

EDIT: All major ISPs, Sky, BT and TalkTalk do not have traffic management of any kind. I have been with Sky last year and it was very good - just the Sky Hub was poor, so if you choose Sky ensure you get the Sky Q Hub which is an optional extra.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sun 02-Oct-16 15:33:00)

Sky is out as it's Murdoch.

I was with BT Openworld and they were dismal so I'm not giving them money again. TT and BT are high up the complaints chart per 100,000 customers so I don't think I'd risk using them.

Uno keep popping up. What are they like?

In reply to a post by teabelly:

Uno keep popping up. What are they like?

Someone posted this today, which might be worthy of a look.

Matt

Yes complaints are high as customer service frankly is not that good.

For most users who do not have much reason to call customer services these ISPs are much cheaper and often offer as good of a service.

If you really care about CS there are many smaller players, however be prudent as some of the traditional smaller providers have recently had significant complaints, do your research before paying higher and potentially getting worse. To date, the small ISP I would recommend is A&A and or uno seems well respected. Personally I cannot justify the high cost.

EDIT:
In truth I have had to call my ISP twice this year for a fault and I spent around 4 hours on the phone. It did get resolved though. If I was paying £70 a month to another provider I am sure I would have had an engineer out in 15 minutes and saved 3+ hours... Alas, for me, saving £40 a month or £480 a year is worth more than 3 hours of my time. Everyones different.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sun 02-Oct-16 17:04:14)

I don't think I can use Uno as I'm not 100% sure there is a copper pair there. They don't offer the ability to order with a new line so it would take far longer to organise. There was some small print saying that was coming soon as an option.

A & A do everything apart from cheap. I figure it's only a year and they may include things in the installation that cheaper ones would charge extra for so the difference in the first 12 months may not be as high as expected.

Edited by deleted (Mon 03-Oct-16 08:59:43)