Opinions of Pulse8?

I regularly call my mum (in care home) via landline as I have a £1 Anytime calls deal with BT and what they rebranded as BT Fibre with Halo 1 in 2020. I am currently out of contract (May 2019) and pay £44.03 a month. BT offer me a £3 saving if I re contract for 24 mths!!!

On my Asda mobile contract I can get 5hrs of calls for £7 or 3hr 20mins for £5 over 30 days - otherwise I am PAYG.

IDNet are £38 plus £5 for 5 hrs calls
Zen are £34.99 without calls
and Pulse8 are £33 with an hourly call costing 60p

My UK TP Link Router stats for my Archer VR900 running v3 software are

Upstream Downstream
Current Rate (kbps) 19999 71908
Max Rate (kbps) 22664 73252
SNR Margin (dB) 7.2 3.1
Line Attenuation (dB) 19.1 8.8
Errors (pkts) 35941 537

Average daytime via Speedofme is 69Mbps and around 50Mbps peak time - wired. Exchange Rugby. https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/exchange...

Pulse8 obviously come up tops and here is my predicament. Years back I used another small ISP and received very poor service, hence my hesitation. What are your opinions of Pulse8, any problems with calling or issues - I understand they use TT Business.

If it wasn't for lockdown, I would visit mum several times a week.

Thanks in advance

You will very rarely find any complaints here about Pulse8. Almost always people being pleasantly surprised after worrying like you before taking the plunge.

As an aside, I think you will find their off-peak calls are only 0.8ppm, not the peak time 1ppm . Aren't they metered by the second as well? I forget.

Edit:

Calls charged to the nearest second.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 24-Jan-21 13:28:58)

I have been using Pulse8 for ADSL Broadband and calls for 4 years +
Recently, for the first time, there was an internet and phone problem. Within36 hours, after contacting, problem was resolved
Call costs depend on use, in my case half cost of Anytime. Also there are no call set up costs for any call.
Continuity and support excellent IMO.
Contract is also only 1 month.
My Mobile, Monthly contract, is £7 for unlimited calls and 3gb data on monthly with Virgin via CPW.
I keep landline calls as many of our friends and family do not have mobile phones. Costs for them to ring mobile number would be excessive.

Edited by flippery (Sun 24-Jan-21 14:15:30)

In reply to a post by blfamily:

Pulse8 obviously come up tops and here is my predicament. Years back I used another small ISP and received very poor service, hence my hesitation. What are your opinions of Pulse8, any problems with calling or issues - I understand they use TT Business.

Pulse8 should definitely meet your needs, the only issue might be a TT Business full LLU (MPF) account. Personally I would prefer to keep the line rental with the BT wholesale network together with broadband on the TT Business network as a combined account from the same provider (SMPF). Generally speaking it is sometimes considered advantageous to keep the line rental with BT wholesale if one were to potentially migrate line rental and/or broadband to another provider in the future due to any problems with a current provider.

However the greater flexibility of SMPF may indeed be outweighed by the cost advantages of TT Business MPF resold by Pulse8.

Good luck.

I was with them a few years back and I along with a few other TBB regulars had single thread speed issues, which Adam escalated to TTB and eventually got resolution on. I did have slightly variable single thread speed test results thereafter, however I did have a similar variation with IDNet when I was originally on their TTB backhaul.

Since I moved onto IDNET's BTw backhaul, I haven't had any variation, although how much of this is down to the exchange / backhaul and how much is down to me learning what the best iMac / Browser / AV combination to test with is anybody's guess.

What I would say is that Adam and Sam were always very keen to assist if there were any perceived issues with their service.

It's also worth that you get High Priority Business Grade (Care Level 2 - 48hr target fix) phone support as part of the standard package.

Not had any issues with Pluse8, they have been fantastic.

They even resolved a porting issue BT couldn't fix with Openreach, as soon as I moved to them!

One caution to note in my case, BT (who I was previously with) did not terminate my account on my day of transfer and continued to charge me. They claimed this was because the Telephone element of my service did not transfer over (this could be true).

This was resolved with a call to BT CS post transfer.

Switched from Zen about 6 months ago. Phonecalls MUCH cheaper. Download slightly faster, ping times better but uploads slower. I suspect its the change in backhaul provider. Support good and very quick to answer.

Thanks everyone. I signed up last week and just waiting for details of my go live date.

For some reason the migration failed.

Pulse8 said OR blamed BT for putting a stop on the order. BT said nothing was wrong and checked OR to see the migration was still going ahead, chat on BT Comm Forums said it was Pulse8s error.

It did cross my mind that perhaps TT were at capacity at the exchange?

No disrespect to Sam at Pulse8, he tried his best.

I will continue to look for a BT replacement

In reply to a post by blfamily:

It did cross my mind that perhaps TT were at capacity at the exchange?

There is no such capacity limiting at provider level at exchanges.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 12-Feb-21 11:08:46)