Are all broadband providers rubbish?

davidgmmafan

It would seem so given the reviews here

http://www.broadband.co.uk/broadband/reviews/

Virtually all the recent ones seem to say don't join x company! This makes me wonder if they are all going for growth service standards be damned...

I'm looking at this for a relative who wants to leave Talk Talk but this makes pretty depressing reading. The difference (s) in cost are marginal and there seems to be nothing to pick between them in terms of service.

Are they any well kept secrets I need to know about?

kwikbreaks

Ask yourself a question.
If you get good service for something or other will you go out of your way to post excellent reviews of that company all over the place?
If you got bad service would you let people know about that?

Now you may say of course I'd post good reviews and you may even be truthful but I think you'd be in a small minority in doing so.

If you want excellent service there are companies that will provide it but you won't like their prices. The option most take is to choose mostly on price and hope against hope that all goes well because none of the big players and few of the small ones either are up to much if you get line problems. If you feel you may need a fair bit of hand holding be prepared for a disappointing experience.

Overall broadband services tend to be pretty reliable these days but all you'll read about on forums like this are problems and poor service.

davidgmmafan

That's a good point, what I was confused by is even some of the companies with good ratings on average seemed to universally have poor reviews recently. Plusnet in particular seemed to have gone downhill recently. There is some logic to that as I think I recall seeing an advert where they were offering broadband for £4.99 per month or something like that.

Ironically I've never had aproblem with Virgin broadband but this is the one company she doesn't want to go with...

teddysmum

I think there are very few companies that have neither complaints nor disgruntled customers and ,as has been said ,it is usually the dissatisfied who publicly comment, with a few satisfied people bothering to disagree.

TadleyBaggie

I had Sky for a few years and had no issues, which is more than I can say for BT (who I switched to).

JJ_Egan

<<Are they any well kept secrets I need to know about? >>

Possibly Andrews and Arnold ISP .
ADSL £25 per month .

Personally i have never had a problem with BT apart from navigating customer services .

jas88

I've felt for a while that the root problem is actually the price-centric mentality, as exemplified by this site itself!

With electricity, if one company will charge me £40 when another charges £50, I should switch: it's exactly the same service, whoever I get the bills from. Broadband is the opposite: each ISP has its own level of service and support. Some cut every corner possible, to achieve the "best" price and win over customers that way - then the customers wonder why the service is terrible.

Ever since broadband reached us, I've been with a more expensive ISP than most. As a result, when other people's lines get slow in the evenings, mine stays full speed. When BT have a network fault, my ISP is first to detect and report it (they do automated line tests 24x7 on all customer lines!) - and it will get fixed, even if it takes six Openreach engineer visits or even installing a whole new line - or, as in two cases in the last few years, forcing BT to replace an entire batch of faulty routers. (The early batch of "Infinity" VDSL modems had a problem with VPN connections, and BT's core network had a problem with the newer Internet protocol, IPv6 - both reported and fixed via my current ISP working closely with BT.)

It's the one the previous commenter mentioned, AAISP (Andrews & Arnold) - small, a bit more expensive (£40/month for 80/20 VDSL) but absolutely determined to be the best. Including having spoken to the MD about a fault - on a Saturday morning.

JJ_Egan

Just been reading A&A tech guys dealings with BT Wholesale and how difficult they can be .

jas88

JJ_Egan wrote: »

Just been reading A&A tech guys dealings with BT Wholesale and how difficult they can be .

Oh, yes - at one point, I had an Openreach tech in the room, and the BT guy back in the office asked for him to call him on some BT number - and he refused! So, he phoned my landline and asked to talk to the Openreach guy...

(That fault turned out to be a bad line card on a BT core router in Edinburgh - as soon as they talked to the right bit of BT - network ops in Adastral Park - it was fixed within minutes by diverting traffic onto another fibre link down to England. Shame it took weeks for BT to track down, but A&A weren't going to give up...)

LazyTyper

jas88 wrote: »

Oh, yes - at one point, I had an Openreach tech in the room, and the BT guy back in the office asked for him to call him on some BT number - and he refused! So, he phoned my landline and asked to talk to the Openreach guy...

(That fault turned out to be a bad line card on a BT core router in Edinburgh - as soon as they talked to the right bit of BT - network ops in Adastral Park - it was fixed within minutes by diverting traffic onto another fibre link down to England. Shame it took weeks for BT to track down, but A&A weren't going to give up...)

I had a similar issue a few years back!

Took months! I had to escalate and really pester BT Retail.

Turned out to also be a faulty linecard in Edinburgh...

mgfvvc

davidgmmafan wrote: »

Are they any well kept secrets I need to know about?

The two that have a consistently good reputation are Zen and AAISP.

When I was looking, I couldn't figure out the AAISP packages from their web site. I am pretty techie and the descriptions on their web site managed to go over my head.

I am now with Zen and I am able to talk to someone who has a good idea what they are doing and doesn't talk down to me. To be completely honest they initially misdiagnosed my line issues as electrical noise, but I was able to get good information out of them. When I realised, due to a pointer from this board, that the problems correlated with wet weather, they did a good job of getting it sorted.