In reply to a post by E300:

For the best support, make sure your ISP is really an ISP and not just a brand and billing company for someone else's product is my advice. The less layers between you and a technician at the ISP the better.

I'm not sure about this. Consider Virgin Media, who own and operate their own network... the support, for practical purposes is far worse than many ISPs who use TTB/BTw who then use Openreach.

I'm sure there are many competent engineers at Virgin but if you can't actually talk to one as a residential customer, it doesn't matter how many layers there are.

In reply to a post by ft247:

I'm not sure about this. Consider Virgin Media, who own and operate their own network... the support, for practical purposes is far worse than many ISPs who use TTB/BTw who then use Openreach.

I'm sure there are many competent engineers at Virgin but if you can't actually talk to one as a residential customer, it doesn't matter how many layers there are.

Your are quite right, I should have qualified that somewhat and said only when dealing with smaller ISPs. In many respects when dealing with big companies like Virgin, you are dealing with a reseller just using the same name, in Virgin's case they are selling connectivity from a different Virgin operation that is quite a bit removed from the sales and billing side. Same for BT, when you buy BT Broadband, they are reselling BT Wholesale offerings and BT Broadband is just sales and billing.

If for example you are with Cerberus and have an issue, the network engineers might be sat in the same office. I remember issues with Cerberus and their network engineer was emailing me directly not many minutes later after raising an issue.

Edited by E300 (Fri 25-Mar-22 15:23:53)

Entanet are now Cityfibre.

When I first had FTTP installed, it took Zen a month to resolve an issue with poor throughput. They had to work with Openreach and BT Wholesale to resolve it. It might be better to be with a large ISP in the event of an issue with the core network, but the vast majority of faults are elsewhere.

IDNet have never let me down. Slightly expensive but on the rare occasions when you need support it pays for having people who will take your issue seriously. It's an ISP who have offered dual-stack IPv6 for over a decade now, that's how they run their network.

Thanks, I think I will end up going with IDnet, although I am stuck between Zen & IDnet, I can get faster and less setup costs with Zen (300/47 for £43.99 a month and £19.99 setup) vs 160/30 with IDnet at £42 a month and £60 setup.

Just reading some of the reviews on zen and hearing worse things lately than previous years is starting to make me doubt them.

Edited by brichardson1991 (Mon 11-Apr-22 14:08:45)