Hi All, I'm on the lookout for a new ISP. We live in Brereton, Staffs and share the Rugeley exchange. LLU operators available are AOL, O2/Be, Sky/Easynet, Talk Talk, Tiscali and Tiscali TV. Not an inspiring list. We were with Be but were migrated to sky and the connection has sucked since the migration. We use a lot of streaming media with a regular usage of 40-60Gb/calendar month (mostly peak as my wife only works 1.5 days a week) Our budget is £18-25/month (inclusive of line rental). Any suggestions welcome. Cable is not an option for us as we live in a close and they would have to dig up a communal driveway (plus the cost is nuts for the 20-30ft needed).
I've been wondering this, how could sky take something that was working well and mess it up like that? It's done it in 2 places I've lived!
Can't you get plusnet? I've been with plusnet a long time now without doubt they are the best I'm getting 13mb unlimited constant no slow downs at anytime
I don't have any good suggestions, but I'm with you on the Sky switchover. I've been having serious trouble with clients who were connected to o2/Be by me personally over the past few years and have begun migrating most of them to BT Infinity.
BE are now owned by Sky and BE users have been/are being migrated. Happened to me about a couple of months or so ago and service has definately got slower and worse (i.e. random disconnections lasting a few minutes at most, usually in the middle of late night online games!!!!). It is a shame because BE were awesome previously. "Up to" 38meg BT Infinity will set you back £23 + line rental. If you already pay BT line rental you won't have to pay it twice. For an extra £3 per month you can potentially get the faster unlimitied package but you will have to go to the BT website to see what is available in your area. The cheaper BT Infinity package has a usage cap of 40GB per month on it. Edit: According to Samknows, FTTC isn't available yet at your exchange: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/WMRUG. I entered a postcode of WS15 2AB into the BT Infinity postcode checker (the Rugeley exchange has a postcode of WS15 2JQ) and it confirms that Infinity isn't available via that exchange yet. Samknows does mention that the exchange has an FTTC RFS date set for 30/06/14 but it could be many months before it becomes available to consumers, assuming that date doesn't change. This is also confirmed with the OpenReach checker (status = "coming soon"). tldr; BT Infinity is coming to your exchange but gawd knows when it will be available. See what PlusNet can do for you, they are owned by BT so would be available to you.
I've always found PlusNet to be very good and their customer service is exceptional if you go with them you will have no problem upgrading to fibre when it is available. And fibre will be available for me this year
When I got switched to sky, things went from bad to worse. I left within 6 days of being switched over...
I'll probably get flayed for this but, , we're with TalkTalk and have been for the last few years and not had any problems. Repeatedly gotten good deals, with them phoning us up offering something and a bit of haggling got us some excellent stuff. We were on a regular ADSL LLU connection to start with, and got the best speed in the village, didn't have any real problems with connection or traffic shaping etc. Now we're on the fibre connection, and it's been great. Constant 38Mb since it was installed, no problems at all. Fibe works out at roughly £27 a month for SimpleBroadband. But weirdly, if you go with the Essentials TV package with fibre, it's only £25 a month.
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to respond! (I've got a lot of research to do now - time for a spreadsheet). Hopefully this thread will be useful to others who are considering a jump.
Also don't forget to check the various cashback sites, I recently signed up for BT Infinity (another victim of the Be sellout) and got close to £120 from topcashback, yes its annoying to sign up to yet another site, but who can say no to the equivalent of a couple month worth of free broadband?
I'm sure there are some happy customers with TalkTalk but my daughter signed up with them and ended up with 3 months of no internet and no phone and got charged for it, in the end they just re funded her and cancelled the contract, she then signed up with plusnet and had phone and Internet within the week. Oh BTW tiscali is owned by TalkTalk I left them and went to plusnet when TalkTalk took them over.
Update - Well our connection to sky can be summed up as sub-standard. We've had dropouts, crawling speeds (1/5th of what we were on with BE) and streaming youtube at anything above 360 is just not possible. We decided to stick it out for a couple of months as Fibre was coming to our area and we've just taken the plunge for Plusnet's Fibre service (40/10 - because we're not rich and at the price we've been offered we'll be saving £8/month over our existing sky deal). We're expecting the engineers tomorrow and I'll let you know what it is like. Does anyone have any tips about switching to fibre (best settings, etc)?
I can say BT infinity has been excellent since we had it installed in January this year. Due to oversub in my area Virgin Media has been terrible. Drop outs, poor connection, complete slow down during peak times. The connection plummets to unusable, I mean I couldn't even load google let alone a other web site. Gaming wasn't possible ping spikes and lag. Switching to BT Infinity has been fantastic, I get my stated connection speeds all the time. Now I know this isn't true for everyone and people report problems with all ISP's. Hell I have a friend on TalkTalk up in Scotland, due to low income his family pay for the cheapest package they offer and wont be getting Fibre what so ever anytime soon. (they all seem to be skipping his area afaik). TalkTalk state that the connection is totally unlimited well his never is, at times his speed plummets to nothing, he streams on twitch (even pixelated is better than nothing) and it becomes unusable when they state that it should be unlimited even on the cheapest package.
Been with TalkTalk for over 7 years. No issues what so ever. Currently on FTTC package. 60down 15 up. As you can see from my stats link, they don't give a sh*** about how much you pull
on sky`s fibre and whilst the ADSL wasn't great - sky fibre is rebranded BT infinity , been rock solid since day 1 and over a year later still ticking away nicely.
His connection will be unlimited but it's the speed that suffers meaning he cannot download as much as someone of a more stable and faster connection. This is what annoyed me about people saying that Virgin, BT or Sky etc were not offering unlimited when they were it's just the speeds were reduced. Either way it sounds like you friend is in a bad area and could do with companies spending money up there to get people a decent connection.
Agreed, the problem is infrastructure costs money and no one is willing to spend it, just look at vast areas of america.