Can I try out an ISP before committing to a contract? (Dreadful Plusnet experience)

onomatopoeia99

You want a trial? Here ...

http://www.aa.nu/broadband-trial.html

I use and recommend this ISP. THEY ARE NOT CHEAP. (deliberate caps)

Mirandoch

onomatopoeia99 wrote:

You want a trial? Here ...

I use and recommend this ISP. THEY ARE NOT CHEAP. (deliberate caps)

Thank you, but if I was well-off I'd have chosen a good ISP to begin with, and not a scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel-one. This is definitely one area in which I feel penalised for being poor.

By the way it's just gone half six and the slowdown has started. Got 3.2Mb, but it'll go down to under 1Mb/s and stay that way for hours soon enough, trust me. Yep: last result was 0.1Mb.

I'm gonna check my horoscope 'cos it's literally as random as that whether the next ISP will be any better. The ISPs clearly don't care, because there's no punishment for them to fail to provide an acceptable standard of service.

Edit: Can't post links. I'm gonna keep on trying to post until it goes through.

woody2234

1 what speed are your neighbours getting

2 do you turn your router off all the time or leave on 24/7 which is what most people would recommended

macman

Sounds like a classic case of contention issues if it's slowing down at that time every day.
OP, what speed do the online checkers indicate that your line will support?
Post your router stats.

Swipe

Do this test and report back:

http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/

Make sure you do the further test option and then let us know what your IP profile is.

macman

And test using ethernet from the test socket.

parttimeskint

Sky have a 30 day money back guarantee on any new product so you could get Sky broadband installed and, if not happy with it, cancel within the first 30 days with no termination charges and you would only pay for the service you had used. Virgin also have a 28 day cooling off period I believe.

londonTiger

i think it's the case with most ISPs on a BT line, the fact is the ISPs have very little control when things go wrong. They're just BT resellers (plusnet has actually been acquired by BT).

Ususally an issue on the exchange which is Openreach's equipment. Rarely will changing ISPs fix them problem because the bulk of the ISPs use BTs backbone.

talktalk and virgin offer their own phone service and run their own backbone - but do a review search on these and you'll find that their service is actually much more worse than BT.

I am with plusnet, quite honesltyi go through an eyewatering amount of data per month. Never had an email asking me to reduce it or anything.

more than half a terabyte each month:

Mirandoch

parttimeskint wrote: »

Sky have a 30 day money back guarantee on any new product so you could get Sky broadband installed and, if not happy with it, cancel within the first 30 days with no termination charges and you would only pay for the service you had used. Virgin also have a 28 day cooling off period I believe.

Most useful post so far. As it so happens that's exactly what I decided to do. I pray and hope Sky can deliver a better internet service than Minusnet can.

As for Minusnet, it's a con company. Maybe for some people it delivers, but for me it did not deliver usable internet at any time of the day for a whole month. After a week of phoning up, being passed from pillar to post, bitter complaining, etc., they finally managed to get me the internet, but it still slows to a crawl in the evenings. It may well be "contention issues", but that's not my problem, I'm not paying any less for part-time internet. I'm also being penalised for being a relatively light internet user, 'cos I don't do much downloading and don't do online gaming.

So, so glad to be out of it. I am going to get in touch with the financial ombudsman to have a word about Minusnet's "fees", however.

PS: I had an Open Reach engineer come out and test the line and said it was good. I live a few hundred metres from the exhange and there aren't any problems reported there. Blah blah blah. I see ISP fanboys are just as bad as console ones: you learn a new thing every day.

almillar

I don't see any fanboys here, and I'm not one either.
If all your neighbours, on all their different ISPs, go on at tea time and stream video, your CABINET, before the exchange will be busy, and will be a bottleneck. That's the case no matter what ISP you change to. You're so angry at Plusnet, understandable if they've been unhelpful, but we haven't found the cause yet.
Changing ISP is hassle so you don't want to go bouncing round them, and that's why they don't offer trials I guess.
What speed does samknows.com tell you you should be getting?