Other ISP recommendations

Howdy

Moving house soon and need to choose an ISP, I'm opinions from the BT family.
I don't need a phone line for an actual phone as I knwo some offer lineless packages.
I'm not after the fastest, just reasonable speed and price ie 40mb for under £30.

• No Virgin on my road.
• Plusnet I had a massive fall out with over 10 years ago, might not be available.
• Used to have SKY, was ok, managed to recover my username etc so could use own modem and router.
• I know Zen is good (I have friends who work there as did I) but it's not the cheapest.

I found a few with bad reviews Pop and Onestream so avoiding them unless someone convinces me.

Cheers

 

I use Zen, not the cheapest but they do promise to honour that price for the life of the contract. I switched to them after initially having sky broadband but within 6 months of signing with sky they had hiked my price by a few quid a month so I told them to jog on out of principle.

Customer support is UK based and you don't wait on hold for ever which is great when I had some initial teething problems but otherwise been rock solid. They also offer FTTP if available in your area.

 

I chose Zen as you can talk to a real person that's not reading anything from a script in less than a minute by dialling a number and not doing the "which menu option gets me a human" dance.

 

I've been pretty happy with Sky, don't think I'd care which so long as it is fast, reliable and cheap, most BT related infrastructure setup should be able to provide that.

That said I will probably take virgin next.

 

I'm currently with Sky, but wouldn't recommend them. As stated they have a habit of creeping up the bill after the joining or renewing. I'm only with them because of SWMBO, but even she is getting tired of tv side set up of the menus etc.

The Wi-Fi is pretty shocking also from their Q router - I added on a cheap one just for wireless and it's never missed a beat, while the Sky one was always (and I mean always) patchy. I'll change the whole thing at some point if we stay with Sky, though it's not the easiest to do that - I'm still hoping to go elsewhere though. Wired has been okay though.

As for recommendation, I'm not at that point yet, sorry.

 

Yup will admit that sky hub wifi wasn't good, neither was the mesh with the Q minis in my house, I turned it all off and use my own Wifi but I have found WIFI shocking with every ISP provided solution, the actual internet provided by Sky is decent though, certain when I compare it to virgin for latency in my area and I do expect a degradation when I switch looking at stats from friends but so much streaming goes in in house bandwith is becoming quite important.

Skys Fibre charge hasn't changed the whole time I had it, the TV on the otherhand ..... hence the move.

 

I just renewed my contract with Sky for another 18 months, to stop the bill going up by £5/mo.
I had to claim compensation from them last year, when half of my line dropped for a week, so I got a month free for "service below minimum guaranteed speed".
As my town is currently being rewired for FTTP by Openreach, I feel that staying put is worth it for now.

Currently looking at mesh wifi solutions for the "smart" bulbs & cameras I have installed around the house, but I made sure the Q boxen are wired to the router by gigabit ethernet.

 

I've been on Zen for over 15 years across 4 different homes and they have been consistently great. As others have said, you get a real person on the phone straight away - it's so weird if you call them, you naturally expect to speak to a robot for 5 mins then sit on hold to who-knows-where to start at level 1 support, but with Zen it's a competent person straight on the phone - awesome service.

I've only needed to call them a few times, usually just when bedding in a new home but they are always great. They give you a good router these days too (Fritz.box) so I stick with that. Also have some other services with them, DNS, IP6, etc, couldn't recommend them highly enough!

 

Alot of recommendations about Zen and being able to speak to people, my inside knowledge would contradict the assumption that they all know what they're doing

 

The only snag with Zen is that they won't query a drop in speed until it reaches the minimum specified by BT.

I'm on FTTC and it was initially unreliable. A few years ago Openreach replaced all the cabling from the pole to the socket and I got an immediate boost in speeds and increased stability. Download speeds were (and still are) 70Mbps and upload speeds were 17Mbps. However over the last couple of years upload speeds have gradually dropped little by little to around 11Mbps.

I have queried this with Zen and they tell me that as the download speeds are great and upload speeds are not at the BT minimum for this line of 10Mbps they can't and won't do anything about it. The last time I queried this in January the upload speeds magically went up to 17Mbps about a week after speaking to them but a month later dropped to 12Mbps and now is at 11Mbps a 35% reduction from the 17Mbps I used to enjoy.

Part of my backup regime now includes using Google Drive and there's been a noticeable slowdown with that. My wife is currently working from home and often uploads largish files to the work network which can be painfully slow although to be fair there's possibly network problems at the other end as well.

I reckon another 6 months and I'll be below the minimum upload speed but guess that Zen will only push for it to be at a minimum of 10Mbps rather than the 17Mbps I had for over 2 years.

As an aside giving an example of 'above and beyond'. I recommended Zen to my Mother in Law and she's been very pleased with it to the extent that when Microsoft did that crafty upgrade to Windows 10 a couple of years ago she contacted Zen rather than me asking how to get Windows 7 back. Daniel at Zen carefully took her through all the steps to revert back to Windows 7.

 

I was having a problem with reducing speeds and used Sky support, they just booked BT to come in for a visit, though there are guidelines in Covid times regarding a service level, such that if you have internet they are not inclines to visit, they did and it was painless, but never resolved the issue for more than a week, it turned out to be and issue with Em interference from Powerline devices I use causing interference and the DLM(?) tuning out he speed on my line, strange but true, I had been using powerline for years but shifted my room around and the proximity of the adaptor to the hub was the issue. So I ran a line to another room and used powerline from there no problem since.

Its an issue that I would imagine no tech support is going to find.

 

I've been a user of claranet soho for aeons now. I've just gone FTTP from them - and have had years of happy service with DSL and VDSL after that.

 

Yep - they are! Still doing their thing.

 

We use ClaraNet at work for our MPLS, can't say it's been a great experience, but not as bad as the predecessor I guess!

 

I just checked Zen for availability in the area we're moving to and it looks promising... based on the testimonials above it's hard to go for one of the big names.

 

My loose, wooly understanding of ISPs is that they're 99% of the time reselling Openreach hardware and connections, but are occasionally using their own hardware. This distinction is pretty key to any conversation about whether ISP X is a better bet than ISP Y in a particular location, but I've never found a quick and easy way to tell whether you're looking at potentially getting their own hardware or just resold Openreach hardware. Is there a way? Because if it's all Openreach resellers, the only differences really are the quality of the customer service and the end price, and everything else will be functionally the same.

 

First time i've ever heard of Zen and have to admit their prices are on a par with BT/Openreach so i might give them a try when my contract ends in May 22.

 

It was the price guarantee that swung it for me and they've stuck to it for the last two years. I even got a price reduction without asking which is a novelty!