Vodafone, Now or Sky

Hi, I'm currently with Now on the 80/20 FTTC. I've been with them for over 6 years without any issues recontracting for 12 months at a time, Now want me to go over to FTTP offering no deals for the older package. I know sky & now are essentially the same, but sky's offering is slightly better 500 for the price of the 300 speed on Now, with Vodafone even cheaper for a higher speed package. I'm wondering if to move to Vodafone as how I see it is it's openreach network anyway , with isp profiles, is that right? Would congestion on one mean congestion on the other? And then the router, I've been happy using the SR203 sky with now the last 4 or 5 years.

I'm totally stuck what to do

The OpenReach part of the connection is only part of the chain from you to a website. Your FTTP connection will get you to the exchange.

There will then be backhaul from the exchange to the ISP (some use BT, some have their own links). Where you are in the country can have an impact as an ISP that takes all their traffic through London might not be good if you are in Edinburgh.

From the ISP there are then likely multiple connections to the Internet - some ISPs may have better peering than others. The peering may also depend on where you are going to as an ISP might have great peering to one part of the Internet but terrible to somewhere else.

ISPs could run any of those points at low or high contention, if they have higher numbers of users then they may be better at sharing bandwidth pools or they might try and run them hotter to provide cheaper connections.

Then you have the question of what happens if something breaks - how much resilience do they have in the network, can they cope if one of their peer connections fails. What sort of contracts do they have to get things fixed.

Add on the level of support you receive and how good their service desk is at responding to any issues you get.

In summary - all ISPs are not the same. Equally, some people report much better service than others even on the same ISP due to many of these factors and their specific usage of the Internet.

Sorry, doesn't help with what you should do but may help to describe that selecting an ISP can have an impact on your overall service but your experience may not be the same as someone else's. In general most people will be fine with most ISPs. But, what you will see on most forums is the people who have had a problem - that may be reflective of the ISP or it may just be reflective of an individual experience that others don't see.

We have been with Vodafone for several years, currently on a low speed (150Mb/s) FTTP contract. On the whole it is reasonably reliable and the speed we get is a few percentage points below the nominal contract.
We still have the THG3000 (grey rectangular) router which we received when originally signing up on ADSL. As a new customer, you'll get the newer white oval cylinder shaped "Power Hub" . You can use your own router if you don't want digital voice or their 'Pro' plans.

Their technical support is variable - depending on which agent you get, i.e. whether they know what they are talking about or are reading off the screen (which has the information you can get from the website) and before you get to talk to an agent you have to answer all the questions their bot generates. You get emails offering 'upgrade' deals and deals on mobile contracts but from one of these we actually renewed mid-contract getting the same deal for a lower price.

We were with Sky many years ago but got fed up with in incessant selling of other services by phone as well as email so changed provider and told them to remove us from their database.

Going to more or less the same with all of them, the difference will be price and customer service. I know people on different services from the larger ISPS and they all seem happy with what they have.

If you have a Alt net there, look at them.

Hello all, firstly thank you all so much for your input, secondly apologies for not replying any sooner. I've not got around to changing deals due to personal circumstances, but it's being done this week.

I keep looking at the 910mb Vodafone through the MSE link with cashback in the form of a voucher like Amazon or similar, it also has the assuring next 2 price rises that Sky/Now don't offer, so that could mean any amount next April. I just need to look at the routers, and if I can split the ssids on the Vodafone one.

You've all been a great help

According to this post on Reddit they have changed the term for splitting bands to 'compatibility mode' on the Power Hub interface

Thank you, hmm almost like vodafone don't want it changing, are you aware of a budget router that works on all ISP with FTTP?

As far as I can see Compatibility Mode does split the frequencies. The 5/6 GHz retains the original SSID and you give a new SSID to the 2.5 GHz
>How does WiFi compatibility mode work
>Setting up Compatibility Mode

Fritzbox seem to be popular as alternative routers but I have no experience.