Pay Up Front Broadband, is there such a thing

spottydog

I would like to buy my father a years broadband connection for christmas as I'm leaving the country so it will be a good way to keep in touch.

Is there any company that offers a years access paid up front (i.e. no monthly direct debit) as I don't want to keep money to cover it is a UK bank account or pay a fortune for transferring small amounts of money over?

markdavey

spottydog wrote:

I would like to buy my father a years broadband connection for christmas as I'm leaving the country so it will be a good way to keep in touch.

Is there any company that offers a years access paid up front (i.e. no monthly direct debit) as I don't want to keep money to cover it is a UK bank account or pay a fortune for transferring small amounts of money over?

A number of the cheaper ISPs offer annual pay up front contracts, example below: -

https://www.e7broadband.com/index.html (dont know if they are any good though!)

Try the following site for a virtually complete list of ISPs: -

http://www.adslguide.org

Hope that helps

Mark

mike_paterson

www.e7broadband.com let you pay upfront for 1 or 2 years

Rex_Mundi

I would give it a lot of consideration before signing up with E7. They have had nothing but problems on their network now for quite a few months. A lot of their customers have been complaining a lot about all speed issues with this network on the ADSLGuide E7 forum (find it HERE ).

You can check out a couple of comparison sites to see how their own customers rate this company. Have a look HERE (third from last), or have a look HERE to see how the ratings for this company (1064 E7 customers voted last month) have gone down in the last six months (people say Tiscali have a bad network, but last month E7 got lower scores than them from their own customers).

I know E7 offer the opportunity of paying a year up front, but this is not so good if you receive really bad service in return. Wouldn't it be an option to sign up on a monthly contract with an ISP and pay each month by direct debit from your account? This would broaden your choice massively.

mike_paterson

Rex_Mundi wrote:

I would give it a lot of consideration before signing up with E7. They have had nothing but problems on their network now for quite a few months. A lot of their customers have been complaining a lot about all speed issues with this network on the ADSLGuide E7 forum (find it HERE ).

You can check out a couple of comparison sites to see how their own customers rate this company. Have a look HERE (third from last), or have a look HERE to see how the ratings for this company (1064 E7 customers voted last month) have gone down in the last six months (people say Tiscali have a bad network, but last month E7 got lower scores than them from their own customers).

I know E7 offer the opportunity of paying a year up front, but this is not so good if you receive really bad service in return. Wouldn't it be an option to sign up on a monthly contract with an ISP and pay each month by direct debit from your account? This would broaden your choice massively.

REX - all you ever do is bad mouth e7 - you do not even use them - I believe you use Zen at 3 times the cost. As you know I have had great service as have many others. You will also know that the speed and support (although variable and subject to the nuances of BT) are generally better than the likes of Tiscali, BT etc. The forums have the same old people continually spouting the same old rubbish - they are going bust etc. - it only takes a few and as you know every isp has problems - expecially those using the BT network !

A lot of reviews and ratings are done by spoilers anyway and are not policed well at all. Some have far too small a sample size to be deemed acurate.

Rex_Mundi

I think it is only fair that people have all the information available to them when they are making a choice over an internet provider.

The complaints at the ADSLGuide forums are varied and have been going on for a long time. You know full well that the problems with this ISP are nothing to do with BT. The problems exist on the E7 network.

If Tescos were selling a DVD player for £50 that worked perfectly and I was selling the same player for £20 but it only worked well part of the time. Would you consider my deal a bargain or a duffer? This is equivalent to E7 at the moment. Yes, they are cheap, but a very large number of customers are not receiving a good service all the time. Does this make E7s supply a bargain or a duff service.

I thought the quote from smj (in another E7 thread on this site) regarding E7 was very much spot on (quote)...............

Mike - I agree unlimited 2M broadband for £10 per month is bloody great value. But only if you get anywhere near 2M ! I even had to resort to using my old dial-up modem last week as it was so bad with E7. So £10 a month is pretty poor value when I cannot even use the service.

I will carry on bringing this info to members of this site. What they do with the info is their choice. This is better for them than paying up front for 1 or 2 years then finding out afterwards that the service is not working as it should.

Can you answer me why the ratings for E7 are so low if as you claim everything is fine?

You keep on about my Zen connection, but like I've told you before. In return for paying more I've never had one single problem or slowdown since I joined them. This is the complete opposite of what E7 customers have had. This is reflected also in Zens ratings. They are always towards the top end of any comparison table because we always receive a top class service.

WebJunkie007

Back to the original topic:

Whilst I understand your rational for wanting to pay a year upfront - I wouldn't recommend it. The last year alone has seen such a drop in broadband prices and increase in speeds that if you pay up front you may end up paying way more than you should have for a service which will be considered too slow in six months.

mike_paterson

Rex_Mundi wrote:

The complaints at the ADSLGuide forums are varied and have been going on for a long time.

The problems relating to speed have been intermittent - As far as I know threhave been 2 occasions when e7 have not been able to upgrade network components quickly enough. One of those times is now after a massive growth due to their recent sales campaign. I have been told that the network upgrades will be complete withn the next 3 weeks.

Rex_Mundi wrote:

You know full well that the problems with this ISP are nothing to do with BT. The problems exist on the E7 network.

That is not necessarily true - there are a lot of people posting a the moment that they must be in a parralel e7 world as they get excellent speeds ! If it was down to the e7 part it would be very unlikely to beso variable. The only 2 real problems I have had were both caused by BT equipment failures and both times I was extremely well compensated by e7.

Rex_Mundi wrote:

Yes, they are cheap, but a very large number of customers are not receiving a good service all the time. Does this make E7s supply a bargain or a duff service.

A small number of people are complaining. This is normal. This happens wih virtually all isps. You like to report about what other people are experiencing.
At least I am talking about something that I am actually experiencing ! As I hae stated before E7 has provided me with the best customer service that I have ever experienced from any company. This is even more amazing when the worst companies on my list are also telecomms providers!

Rex_Mundi wrote:

This is better for them than paying up front for 1 or 2 years then finding out afterwards that the service is not working as it should.

They do not have to pay up front for 1 or 2 years - there is aso a monthly option.

Rex_Mundi wrote:

Can you answer me why the ratings for E7 are so low if as you claim everything is fine?

Can you explain why they used to be so high if these problems have been around for ever ???. As we all know these ratings are very dodgy anyway - small samples, poor authentication - open to spoilers etc.

Rex_Mundi wrote:

You keep on about my Zen connection, but like I've told you before. In return for paying more I've never had one single problem or slowdown since I joined them.

You keep going on about my e7even connection. In return for paying much less I would appear to have had as good a service as you !!!

Each to his own - I'll certainly be renewing with e7 when my 18 months is up.

Rex_Mundi

Can you explain why they used to be so high if these problems have been around for ever ???. As we all know these ratings are very dodgy anyway - small samples, poor authentication - open to spoilers etc.

E7s problems started in reality around Aug/Sep. The ratings at ADSLGuide reflect these problems by users giving the company much lower ratings than they used to have. 1064 people voted for the September ratings. This is not a small sample IMO. These ratings gave E7 their lowest score yet. The same month sees 1236 Zen users ranking Zen the highest (in every category) out of all the ISPs listed. The numbers of people voting for both our companies are large enough to give a fair idea of what the customers think of their service.

I'm not anti E7. They used to offer a good deal and a fair service, however, there have been ongoing problems with this network now for a few months and they are still not fixed. While these problems are ongoing this company is not giving value for money. I think it is fair that people realise this before they commit themselves (after all it costs them 3 months money to cancel if they are not happy).

paul_h

Rex_Mundi wrote:

...after all it costs them 3 months money to cancel if they are not happy.

That is correct, but 3 months at £10 is less than some charge for a month. Also, don't forget that a monthly contract costs extra on most ISPs, otherwise you would be expected to fulfill your minimum term payments.

The dslzone rating has also been skewed by people piling onto it from the adslguide forum - before this started the other day, they were rated 9th... :rolleyes:

I also suspect the encouragement being given to posters on the E7 forum to rate E7 negatively is also skewing the ISP rating on adslguide.

E7 is not perfect, don't get me wrong - there have been recent problems which have resulted in poor speeds, and online gamers seem to have ongoing problems with latency. There has been a short outage whilst I have been with them, but no ISP can guarantee 100% service - Eclipse, a well respected ISP, had a major outage last week which took much longer to correct than E7's outage. Freedom2Surf had a major outage recently which lasted all weekend, because there was simply no one there to fix it at the weekend - E7's support is generally very good indeed.

That said, speeds are now very good and I currently have no complaints about speed on my 512k connection - but I only use it for internet browsing, email, voip, and a fairly reasonable amount of http downloading. I don't game online or use peer to peer software.

Here's a speedtest I've just done, not bad for a 512k connection.

I can sympathise with people who are having problems, but these problems are not universal and for £10 per month (or less) I find it suits my needs - a useful compromise between quality and price.

theloft

poor old spottydog, asks a simple question and gets a debate about whether E7 are any good or not. It is well known that Mike_P is the great champion of E7, to a point which is unusual, especially in view of mounting criticism on these threads and elsewhere!!

Anyway these 2 companies also offer 1 year upfront deals:

https://www.euro1net.com https://www.v21.co.uk

Do your research, look at ISP review & ADSL guide, then make your choice.