Talktalk Plusnet or Vodafone

Anyone got any reccomendations for one of these 3?

Looking for a budget provider (price is key here) .

I have ruled out Nowtv as all their support is online..

Quite like idea of Talktalk but put off as will have a youview box and worried they still do the stealth £4 charge.

Grateful for thoughts.

I have used my own router with Plusnet and Vodafone. The VDSL service I got was OK with both. There is a certain amount of luck in this. At the moment I am with Plusnet. What I do when the contract expires in September will largely depend on the price.

I would be planning to use the ISP supplied routers -unless on plusnet where I was planning to use a BT HomeHub 6 instead of the [censored] plusnet hub.

Which is a re-badged BT HomeHub 5?

AIUI HomeHubs are no longer issued. SmartHubs are the latest series.

Plusnet past six years, PN routers until last year when changed to BT HH6 bought for £10 on Gumtree. Very happy with performance and price; will stay with PN when contract comes up this autumn PROVIDED the price is right.

My experience is in flip-flopping friends and family between PlusNet and TalkTalk, taking the new customer deals and cashback along the way.

We haven’t been caught by the £4 TV charge after signing up with TalkTalk for line rental and broadband with our own YouView box. Just be careful what you sign-up for, check the confirmation email and you should be OK on that front.

TalkTalk’s latest router seems better for WiFi coverage than PlusNet’s latest offering. PlusNet offer advanced line rental, TalkTalk don’t. TalkTalk like to hike the price on “extras” such as inclusive calls but if you’re just going for simple line rental and broadband that shouldn’t be an issue. Parental controls are better on PlusNet. BT Sport is £10 a month on PlusNet which could be a good deal if you want BT Sport.

Both are “value” ISPs so support is where they save costs. If you can resolve simple issues yourself with luck you can avoid their support in all but the cases of major failures.

Good luck!

All I can say is that I have been with Plusnet for as few years now and apart from an Open reach problem I have been happy, which makes me wonder who on earth I have been looking to move? Maybe price since there are others that are cheaper.

Customer service are ok, not as good as it used to be, but ok.
I presume if you go for Talk Talk and tell them that the box is yours then they will not charge for it, but then you will not be able to use their services.

Post deleted by maxhoyt

Been with Plusnet for 11 years, ADSL then VDSL FTTC.
Until approx. 18 months ago was quite a fan, no administration issues and tech. support, lately via their forum, was always there when infrequently required.

Then they changed their billing system late 2018, well documented issues, I was caught up in the "stuck billing" issue and in my case incorrect contract dates issue which ran over 2 contracts from Dec 2018 to last month, however, final resolution of this produced another anomaly, now being monthly billed for line rental which I always pay a year in advance and is currently valid until this December.
I currently have 2 open tickets one of which dates back to December 2018.

To be fair, I have never actually lost money, but it's hard work, corresponding every month and appearing to just go around in circles to achieve anything.

I've remained with PN to date despite the admin. issues on the grounds that their tech. support was good, that's now changed in my opinion.
Had a tech. issue last month which higher level support basically refused to action on the grounds of "lock down" restrictions, OK, we are in a very peculiar situation at present and allowances must be made, luckily for me, the issue turned out to be "crosstalk" related generated from a fault on a close neighbours line who was with BT, in his case OR had absolutely no issues with repairing this which included a number of house visits by them.

So basically PN service is very much a lottery at present, I personally have had enough, life's too short, I'am off at the end of this contract, pay a few quid more and increase your chances of an easier life and assistance if & when required.

So who would you choose over Plusnet? I looked at a load of options including three's 4G service, but after seeing how bad 4G went with this pandemic, maybe it is not a good idea. I have Smarty on my mobile and it uses the 3 network, before this started I was getting 40 Mb/s, which was faster than my FTTC network from Plusnet, now 4g on my phone have gone down to under 20Mb/s sure I understand that things may be slightly different using a 4G base station than my phone, but I do not think it will make much difference.

I have over the last few months looked at different providers to see what I would get from changing providers, while I may save a bit of money with some compared to what I am paying now, I could knock a few quid off my plusnet bill by going back into a long contract. That is one thing I have been trying to avoid, but I do not think I will be able to get out of going into a long contract.

While plusnet do have some issues, I have seen worse providers and some of them I have not even been with, but had to contact them on behalf of other people and sometimes I felt like I may as well have talked to the wall that is in front of me now, I would get more sense out of it. At least Plusnet does listen and don't seem, to run away with a script, well not the few times I have contacted them.

i will have another look in the next week or so and see what is around again, I did pick a couple, but the prices are higher than if I re-contracted with Plusnet.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I have Smarty on my mobile and it uses the 3 network, before this started I was getting 40 Mb/s, which was faster than my FTTC network from Plusnet, now 4g on my phone have gone down to under 20Mb/s sure I understand that things may be slightly different using a 4G base station than my phone, but I do not think it will make much difference.

Not really any difference, in most cases a modern handset is significantly better than 4G routers. As everyone is stuck in one location (at home) at the moment, there is a lot more load on the networks. People using unlimited data to stream video in separate rooms is the best guess I’ve read.

(Interesting, if you "Delete" a post, then edit it back into being, your sig does not re-appear).

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 17-May-20 22:02:06)

My new OnePlus 8 Pro phone beats the pants off my old Huawei P10 Lite with the same physical Three SIM. Both on 4G. The Huawei was slightly better than my Three B311 router.

Maybe I should edit my sig!
…
Done.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

My new OnePlus 8 Pro phone beats the pants off my old Huawei P10 Lite with the same physical Three SIM. Both on 4G. The Huawei was slightly better than my Three B311 router. Maybe I should edit my sig!

The 8Pro is LTE category 18 download, and it has 4 x 4 MIMO, which means 4 antennas on the phone.

If you are lucky to live in a Three area where the mast has been upgraded to the new design with 4T4R thenyes, this allows more data to get through the air between your handset and the mast over LTE. Just wait until that mast gets 5G New Radio (NR) support, as that will increase speeds aggregating NR with LTE.

The B311 is a low Cat 4 device upto 150 Mbps, and no MIMIO. Similar to a Samsung Galaxy S4 from 7 years ago.

Yes, I saw it was 4 x 4 capable in the spec. One of the reasons I went for it.

I'm looking forward to a trip into one of the 5G areas around here. The nearest looks to be about 11 miles away.

Who would I choose over Plusnet?
In the current market probably BT but that could well change before my PN contract ends in December.
There are a few very well respected ISP options such as AA and Zen but their cost certainly reflects the level of service and support offered, out of my league.

The point of my original post was to state that from my experience with PN since their billing system changed towards the end of 2018 their service has been very poor for a lot of their customers while many have been lucky and have remained unaffected and/or not required any tech/admin assistance to test the system.
Have a browse of the PN forum to gauge the ongoing complaints level.

I have always paid line rental yearly in advance, certainly saves money, however, it also becomes a factor which ties you to your contract for at least a year, I believe I would have a very good case for penalty free exit from my current PN contract all be it likely having to involve OFCOM, however, it's very unlikely I would be able to retrieve my pre-paid line rental by any means.
On these grounds I would not choose to pay yearly line rental in advance with my next ISP at least in the first contract period.

The choice of ISP is ultimately with the individual and will always be a compromise between cost and expectation of level of service, all I can state again from my experience is that Plusnet would not currently be on my list of ISP contenders.

I was with Bt years ago on ADSL, after the hassle I had with them I said I would never go back to them, yes I know plus net belongs to them, but it is slightly better, at least I can understand them on the other end of the phone, and they do treat people with a bit of intelligence, BT just reads off the script and will not deviate one bit. So I can not see myself going back to BT, also they are more expensive than others and seems to pester their customers to add stuff to their service.
The other thing with Bt is the length of their contracts, I do not want to be stuck in a contract for 2 years, I do not really want 18 months if I can help it
Zen and AA is certainly out of my price bracket, I could afford them, but I fail to see the point in paying that high a price unless you need that level of customer service

Thankfully I have had no problem with plusnet's billing, I had a look at some of these sites that show you best value Broadband, but they are a waste of time as they all show the same providers but in different positions, which just proves the point that they get paid by different providers and give you the one that they get paid more to recommend. Uno is still on my list, the other two is three and going for 4G or staying as i am.

We were with PN for many many years at a number of properties. Basically their DSL provision was very good and reliable however their back-end systems can be problematic if you have issues with them. We finally left after having issues with their Line Rental Saver 2 years running and which they were unable to fix, or even show any signs of fixing. PN's backend phone provision had a few glitches along the way but nothing too major.

As others have said there's a lot of providers at the bottom end with little to differentiate between them. We eventually went for Vodafone and have been pleasantly surprised. We use our own router & modem but did initially use the supplied router/modem which worked fine. Setting up things like fixed IP address, getting PPPoE username/password for our own router, phone set up was pretty painless using the web support and on-line chat and we've had a few months of faultless service with reasonable speeds etc.

Not to say that the other providers wouldn't have provided a better/worse service but Vodafone has been OK here.

Just to say that Zen's 40/10 and 80/20 packages appear to be cheaper than BT and Plusnets normal prices after the initial introductory discount has ended.
PN offered me a deal to stay with them which is cheaper than Zen, if they had not I would have transferred to Zen.