V21 - Whats The Service like ?

Aletank

I see https://www.V21.co.uk are offering a 512k uncapped for £12.50 a month. http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?id=EEEFVyVyAVZjXTkAcO
Has anybody any experience of their service etc ?

durain

connected my brother to v21. no problem so far.

sco0ter

A bit of a minefield come May 1st when it starts. As the article says.

"Such products must cut very close to the ‘profitable’ bone."

And with free migration and monthly contracts (if they keep doing that offer) a lot of High Bandwidth users might jump ship which could cause a lot of problems. Thier service just now for the same product is £16.99. Thats £4.49 of a drop. Bundle that with people downloading a lot of data and V21 having to pick up the tab and things could go very bad very soon.

From the time I spent with BTyahoo and had access to thier newsgroups very little of thier users who stayed well within the BT caps would move. These people would pay the extra so they could get thier full speed rather than move to a cheaper ISP with unlimited if it meant thier speed was effected by high bandwith hogs.

I am not saying this was for everyone as I did know a few who rarely used 7-9GB of thier 15GB allowance but moved because they didnt like the idea of caps.

Just my penny worth

dag_2

From the time I spent with BTyahoo and had access to thier newsgroups very little of thier users who stayed well within the BT caps would move. These people would pay the extra so they could get thier full speed rather than move to a cheaper ISP with unlimited if it meant thier speed was effected by high bandwith hogs.

I am not saying this was for everyone as I did know a few who rarely used 7-9GB of thier 15GB allowance but moved because they didnt like the idea of caps.

In my experience, it's very difficult to predict this sort of thing. The things that go in V21's favour are no monthly contract, and cheap migration. So even if it doesn't work out - you can move again fairly easily.

I've been using V21 for two years. They changed over to a different backbone recently - no problems before, and no problems after.

I'm happy to use dial-ups occasionally when ADSL isn't available - but even so, V21 have exceeded my expectations of reliability. Over the past six months, I've used dial-up less than once a month.

Aletank

dag wrote:

I'm happy to use dial-ups occasionally when ADSL isn't available - but even so, V21 have exceeded my expectations of reliability. Over the past six months, I've used dial-up less than once a month.

So it goes down about once a month ?

Hintza

I will say with all AOL's faults it only ever went down once in the last 18 months of broadband.

ggustar

Aletank wrote:

I see https://www.V21.co.uk are offering a 512k uncapped for £12.50 a month. http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?id=EEEFVyVyAVZjXTkAcO
Has anybody any experience of their service etc ?

Go careful they have just charged me £30 for a MAC code as I wanted to leave them and go elsewhere. Its in their agreement they can charge, also when you want to leave them you can only do it by phone 0870 number and needless to say they keep you waiting a long time then spend ages trying to talk you into staying. I'm leaving them next Monday THANK GOODNESS.

At times I was trying to connect to them for hours.

robowen

Aletank wrote:

So it goes down about once a month ?

I've been with v21 for about 10 months and it's never gone down at all. I have never once had to use dial-up.

I don't remember a time when I can't get on...so, I don't know what the other poster is talking about.

Unless it went down in the brief moments my pc wasn't being used.....I dunno

My pc is on quite a lot downloading movies and games etc, so the no limits is great. :T

Customer service is excellent. I have only needed to phone up 3 times, mostly in the early months.
The problems I needed sorting, turned out to be with my browser and not the connection. The phone call was answered straight away. :T


Am I the only happy punter at v21 ??.......I don't think so ! :T

sco0ter

robowen wrote:

I've been with v21 for about 10 months and it's never gone down at all. I have never once had to use dial-up.

I don't remember a time when I can't get on...so, I don't know what the other poster is talking about.

Unless it went down in the brief moments my pc wasn't being used.....I dunno

My pc is on quite a lot downloading movies and games etc, so the no limits is great. :T

Customer service is excellent. I have only needed to phone up 3 times, mostly in the early months.
The problems I needed sorting, turned out to be with my browser and not the connection. The phone call was answered straight away. :T

The same thing happened to me with BT. Never once did it go down or did I ever have a slow download rate. But look at the newsgroups and you will see post after post of service going down and bad speed at peak times. Just because it didnt happen to you doesnt mean it never happens. Are you and the other poster even on the same exchange?.

I am just pointing out that ADSL service reliability and problems can often be Exchange related eg: High contention, equipment problems, and with the whole capping thing coming in some of these unlimited services using BT lines will find it hard to make a profit on High Bandwidth users. That and the fact they will attract a lot of high bandwidth users also could add to problems for everyone on the ISP so in the near future you could be affected.

barginboyrob

i've been a member of V21 since before it started doing broadband, i've had no problems for a while though when V21 changed from ipstream to datastream i did experience a slow down and i keep getting cut off. Also customer service, ignored and closed one of my messages to them.

other then that though it has been a pretty much trouble free time for the past 3 years

GeoThermal

From Fast4's website: "Fast 4 is a subsidary of the familiar V21.co.uk. Fast 4 was launched to give users a "no nonsense", straight forward unlimited connection to the Internet, "

Fast4 advertise an unlimited service but I got my dialup account cancelled for overuse. Is V21 any different?