Is basically any ISP 100% reliable now?

Zaul22

(Besides Virgin obviously)

They all use Openreach. If the internet goes down it's because Openreach went down. I am thinking of switching because Sky has got very expensive. Does BT/EE or Vodafone really make any difference to anything besides price?

DullGreyGuy

Some are OpenReach end to end, some are their own network locally but then go into Openreach for the main backbone. The ones you mention are all the former. 

Just because they have the same hardware doesnt mean that services dont vary, they are all ultimately buying services from OpenReach and can choose to squeeze more customers in and so have contention issues or buy more services and have less. Ultimately if some hardware fails though all would go down. 

The intercity connections have much more resilience and most failures are local so if you go for a different service that doesnt use open reach locally (eg HyperOptic or CityCable) then local BT users going down isnt going to effect you but at the same time sometimes these company's local hardware fails and OpenReach is still up and running.

No service is 100% reliable. With HyperOptic we have had 2 outages in 8 years from failures (rats eating cable) and both took about 48hrs to resolve. 

onomatopoeia99

Zaul22 said:

(Besides Virgin obviously)

They all use Openreach. If the internet goes down it's because Openreach went down. I am thinking of switching because Sky has got very expensive. Does BT/EE or Vodafone really make any difference to anything besides price?

The reasons your internet connection over an Openreach line might fail are many, these are some of them:

There could be a fault on your line between your master socket and the cabinet, which would be the same for every ISP using Openreach lines.

There could be a fault in the cabinet where it interconnects to the network that provides backhaul to the ISP.  The backhaul network could be BT21CN it could be C&W (aka TalkTalk Business) or one of a number of others.

There could be a fault in the backhaul network, which could be operated by BT or someone else.

There could be a capacity issue at the connection between the backhaul network and the ISP. Underprovision of interconnect capacity is usually due to the ISP cutting costs and not paying enough.

There could be a connection problem between the ISP and the rest of the internet.

So if the internet goes down it might be on Openreach in the first case, but it also might not. Changing ISP potentially changes a lot of things as well as price and anyone telling you its all rebranded Openreach is talking out of their rear.

It is also true that ISPs using Openreach lines can buy different levels of service from BT Wholesale, meaning different response times to faults reported through ISPs.  The more expensive ISPs tend to pay for higher (faster) service levels.

Timalay

No, not all ISPs use the Openreach network.  Where I live, for example.  I have access to three different fibre networks: Openreach, County Broadband, and CityFibre (Litfibre laid the cables, but CityFibre bought them out, and then sold them back).
Fine example of this, Vodafone use the Openreach network, and also use the CityFibre network (offering the same upload as download speeds).

phillw

They are all as unreliable as each other. If their back end database goes down and they can't authenticate you, then you'll have a problem no matter which ISP you are with

I go for the cheapest, which at the moment is sky and I'm aiming for £12 ish a month