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.