UK ISPs - which one?

I'm currently with Supanet but thank God my 12 month contract is nearly up. For the last 4-5 months my connection has been OK during the day, but woeful after around 4pm - often as slow as dialup. Supanet can offer no solution (whipping the donkey harder didn't work*), yet everything was fine when I was with Zen on the exact same hardware.

I'm paying £10.99 for "up to 8mb broadband" plus free calls anytime to UK landlines. The free calls part is good, I save a fortune.

But I simply can't put up with crappy broadband any more. I don't want to go back to Zen because that means I have to pay £24.99 per month just for broadband, plus my calls would have to be routed through BT again, meaning I have to pay for 'em.

I need a good, reliable ISP (*NOT* cable!), and one which provides free anytime calls to landlines. Oh, and I don't want to pay much/any more than I am now. If I can't get a good deal similar to what I have now, then I probably just won't bother.

Suggestions? I'm at the end of my rope with cruddy broadband in the UK.


* = made up.

bt option 1 is fine here.

I have Orange broadband Max. It is £24 a month and covers 8mb broadband, free local, national and international phone calls and phone line rental, so I pay BT nothing!.

Broadband speeds overall have been excellent but do slow down a bit during peak times (between 6pm/10pm for me), not massively though and certainly nowhere near dialup speeds. They advertise unlimited bandwidth but in reality they allow around 40-50gb a month before giving off and pointing towards there FUP. My usage is between 20-30gb a month regularly and I've never had any complaints from them.

The 24/7 free phone calls are handled via a broadband line (simply plug a standard phone into the back of their livebox) and works really well, the standard phone line also has free phone calls in the evening and at the weekend.

Since having all this installed my broadband/phone/line rental bill has never exceeded £27 a month. The extra couple of quid is usually due to mobile phone calls. Apart from that, 30+ hours a month are free phone calls mostly generated by my girlfriend :P

I've been with orange ( originally wanadoo ) for several years and pay £18 a month just for the 8mb broadband.

Always been happy with it, seldom goes off and speed is usually 6mb+

I recommend BT, especially after the dreadful service I received from Tiscali. And they have been tremendous... So far...

;)

Could always try Be at £18 a month- up to 24Mb

I'd recommend PlusNet. Been with them for around 5 years now.

http://www.plus.net/residential/broadband/?WT.mc_id=sem_001a&WT.srch=1

I use VirginMedia, which were good when they were NTL but the service has gone downhill (along with the speed) since becoming Virgin. I'm moving house in a few days and will be mostly switching to TalkTalk as my parents use them adn they seem okay. You also pay your line rental to them so you actually save quite a bit of money.

Whichever mobile phone service you are on will offer a discounted broadband (probably) i'm with Vodafone (I work for them too), its £25 a month for BT line rental, broadband and calls. Have had very few problems.

Sky also offers good deals if you take their TV service and live in a area they cover.

Father in law is with plus net, which also seems good.........

Ian.

I'm curious as to the problem wih Cable- or is it just that you cannot get it in the area?

I really think the general quality of service is very low at the moment with them all still trying to sell you 2mb as "up to 10mb"

If Virgin did that i'd get "Up to 100mb" because on occasion my connection goes AWOL and get a rediculous speed for 5 mins.

That in mind, you'll never see me go back to ADSL. That said- Tiscali did a good job for me when I had no choice. Just don't get a reason to call them because you'll be waiting a while.

be broadband, if you can get it. Absolutely fantastic support and uptime, never had any problems with them, and it's 24mb too!

Looking at plusnet-

I downloaded 8gb a couple of days ago, various linux builds. Is that your average "cap" now? seems incredibly low!

I would go with BT.. one of the most expensive but had no trouble.. AOL was awful.. swapped to BT 7 months ago, get my 7mb almost constanly any time of day.. I am a heavy user but ASAIK have never been speed capped.

And I work for virgin.net stay well away from those guys.. they are the cheapest and you get what you pay for. downlaod 3gig a week on virign and ya capped to 512kb for a week.

I am with Sky (£5 a month + 40GB monthly usage) and happy with it.



This is probably the worst out of them and also useless for online gaming

A year ago I would have recommended Virgin Media but now that they are using Traffic Management all day - 6gb limit from 10am to 3pm, 3gb limit from 4pm till 9pm and 1.25gb limit on upload from 3pm till 9pm on the 20mb service.

That's not all, there are rumours that usage caps and phorm will be introduced soon.

The only ISP I can recommend that is any good is BE www.bethere.co.uk. If you're in a BE area then they are second to none.

[edit] Before you join BT Broadband read this. http://p10.hostingprod.com/@...

Could you link me to that?

I always get capped per day- >700mb a day=half speed. 300mb after that, quarter speed etc.

If that has changed it would explain why my connection has been crap-therefore I am inclined to believe it HAS changed.

Still, I would rather be speed capped than lose connection/pay extra for going over.



this is awful and may cause me to switch- though the convenience of "just working" makes cable still prime choice for me.

Anyway, duff subject- GfK doesn't want it anyway.

Double post. (Somethings bust with Edit?)

Another *very* happy Be customer (1yr+) here.

My only complaint would be that, because it's an ADSL2+ service, I cant use my trusty old SAR715 router. ;o)


http://www.bethere.co.uk/.

Check here to see if it's available in your area.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/

Zen still seems to be out performing everyone.

Bingo.

Zen were good - the only problem I ever had with them, was the price. £24.99 just for broadband. I also had 1GB of webspace but it didn't support PHP/MySQL or anything.

Wouldn't mind Orange Broadband but I've heard a lot of stories about problems with mail servers etc.

I dislike my Orange Broadband Max (18 month contract, bah what happened to 12 which used to be normal!). It's slow at peak times (my old connection was constant, this is not. And it has lots of down time. Sometimes mini ones, sometimes several hours, sometimes all day (when it is longer than about an hour I call their service status report line.

I do save money over having BT doing the line rental and having a separate ISP though. I hate using the free Internet phone due to lag and crappy sound quality. It's not good for professional calls.

It's still is NTL they bought virgin mobile which gives them the rights to use the Virgin logo for a duration of 30 years. Branson excepted a mixed cash/shares deal that gave him 10.7%. What irritates me is that people mistakenly believe that Branson has control of the company and all the problems are his fault for not doing any thing about it.
And I know of many people that have had as much trouble with NTL with or with out the name change.



Phorm (who have a shady past http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm ) also applies to BT and Talk Talk.

There is a rumor that Virgin Media are distancing them selves from phorm as phorm say that Virgin have signed up. But Virgin claim "Virgin Media has signed a preliminary agreement with Phorm to understand in more detail how this technology works but we have not yet decided if it will be introduced." (so more than likely yes here's a link to the Vigin Bull http://www.virginmedia.com/customers/webwise.php)

There is also the question is this legal? After all prostitution and "pimping" is illegal in the UK (which is what the ISP's would be doing).

I pay £37 a month for a 20Mb (which I do get on the odd occasion depending on time of day and the server) with unlimited down/up load connection.

If they introduce a usage cap then it looks like I and a few others will be looking for a new ISP, as there are cheaper alterantives.

If I do leave Virgin then I will have to run the gaunlet that was labled "NTL HELL". Where people who canceled their sub-scription kept getting billed and threatened with court actions and the bailiffs.

I wouldn't buy a not bundled service these days, they are just too poor value. I currently pay £54 a month to Virgin for:

Unlimited Phone Calls (includes line rental) except to mobile or premium rate or international numbers.

Virgin V+ Service (Like Sky's Sky+ service but includes HD as well as 145 channels and you don't have to buy (or replace it if it breaks) a + or HD box and Virgin V+ box is better than Sky's).

Up to 20Mb broadband (in practise around 14Mbits but I don't realy care and haven't much since I got more than 512kbps).

Additional Free Services: On Demand Music videos, TV catch up service, Free Metaboli account, Many shows and series on Demand.

Paying as much as £24 just for broadband seems a lot for a little to me of course it sucks if your not in a cable area but Sky offers an equivlent deal, I changed my parents from seperate services to Sky's bundle and they saved about £30 and got (effectively) free Sky.

I've been with NTL/Virgin for about 8 years and while I've had some problems I still think they are pretty good and better than most. If you can't get virgin's bundle then at least get Sky's.

Darkheart

I don't want a TV package. I've got enough on with freeview's 50 channels of crap, without paying for another 100 to go with it.

I've heard nothing but good things about these guys:

Be

Yeah, 'Be' don't seem bad, although they don't provide a telephone service. Is it right that BT have free evening and weekend calls now as 'standard' on Option 1?

Finally changed ISP.

Supanet are the absolute worst ISP in the entire world, and that's not a claim I'd make lightly.

I took out a 12 month contract with them in June 2007, which has just run its course. I contacted Supanet for a MAC code due to getting speeds as low as 0.3mbps for the last six months. Supanet offered no solution.

The Customer Services people were just plain rude! He refused to give me a MAC Code "because you're still in contract". I asked when the contract ended and he said "I dunno". ???

After losing my rag with him and telling him to go and copulate with his useless self, I phoned straight back and spoke to another one, who told me the contract was for two years!

Supanet's website says their contracts are 12 months on all their packages. Their FAQ says 12 months. Their packages listed on ThinkBroadband are all 12 months. So why was mine 24?!

Well, it wasn't. It eventually turned out that they sell you a 12 month contract, but add a clause into the small print which states that if you cancel the service within 24 months, they charge you a £39.99 cancellation fee!

I complained to Ofcom about that and got a MAC code within 24 hours. Supanet have also decided that they'd rather let me off with the cancellation fee given that A) There's no way in hell I'm paying, and B) They don't want Ofcom involved.

Even though I'm sorted now, I've still filed a complaint with Ofcom as their website is misleading customers. If its a 12 month contract there is no reason at all why you should have to pay a cancellation fee beyond that. I wriggled out of paying by arguing about it, but how many people just pay up? Probably a lot and its not right. Supanet said in a letter to me, that they'll discuss the wording at the next management meeting, but that's not good enough. I want a change to be enforced by Ofcom.

Anyhoo, I'm now getting free anytime calls with British Telecom, and 16MB broadband with O2.

Its all good. And I'm only a quid a month worse off.

Ha! I can categorically state that you're wrong, as I used to work for the worst ISP in the world. (Admittedly, this was in 1999/2000.) At one point we even had 1 (that's one) customer at a time going through a single dialup connection, running through an ancient desktop PC plugged in to the main phone socket of the office.

It's an entertaining story...

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/~eezypeezy/
(I designed that great 'e' logo, by the way, which I was very proud of until someone pointed out that it looked exactly like the Internet Explorer logo.)

The staff said, shortly after I jumped ship...

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/~eezypeezy/comments.html

Ah, my old workplace, a cutting-edge communications establishment...
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/~eezypeezy/ezeboxes.html

Um, this was a long time ago. I bailed out as soon as I could...


You should really have reported this to Ofcom, the industry regulator, as this is against the Ofcom regulations that all UK ADSL ISPs should be observing. They can still hold you to a contract but they MUST provide a MAC upon request. (Oh, wait, just read that you did this. Good.)

Actually, you said quite a lot about Ofcom, sorry (got carried away with the 'worst ISP' thing), but your point was contractual; yet any ADSL provider must provide a MAC if requested, regardless of any contractual bickering which may follow.

Well, I say "Ofcom" for clarity. Ofcom don't actually deal with broadband complaints directly - they're farmed out to one of two regulators to which all ISPs must belong to one or the other. One being CISAS, the other is Otelo. However, Ofcom do want to know if an ISP is bad just so they can keep tabs on the situation.

When I asked Supanet which ombudsman they belonged to, they told me it was CISAS. So I checked the CISAS site and there was no mention of Supanet on their member's list. They only told me the truth when I queried this - they're actually with Otelo.

I've emailed Otelo today almost pleading with them to enforce changes to Supanet's T&C. I don't want a change to be left in the hands of the people who thought they could get away with extortionate cancellation fees in the first place.

One other thing - Supanet told me in a letter that they would not give me a MAC code until I paid them £39.99 - I thought this was way out of line. I have this in writing and have asked Otelo if they want to see it.

The ISP you worked for do sound like crap. But Supanet really do stink! I'd have been better off on dialup at times.

I really like the virgin media TV package. The On Demand stuff is great. I don't really watch TV like i used to anymore. No more letting the TV rule when you watch it. Plus you can fast forward the adverts! Can't beat that.

I wasn't aware of those caps though. I always thought Virgin Media was uncapped. That's really disappointing to hear that. Well saying i don't notice it though :o)

Who did you change to Gfk?

[Edit, oh BT]

BT for phone calls, O2 for broadband.

Having that in writing sounds great! Please see it through!

I've been working for a large British telecommunications (AHEM) company for five and a half years, yet in all that time I've never heard of Otelo or Cisas, which is very interesting! We're well aware of the Ofcom regulations, of course. (I've generated MACs every other day for a good few years.) It sounds like it might be worth threatening Otelo with reference to Ofcom if you have trouble getting anywhere...

Certainly, no ISP has the right to charge for a MAC, or to deny one based on a minimum contract term. They can argue that you owe them £x.xx, but they still have to provide the MAC on request, minimum contract or not. Sic 'em!

(BTW My current internet connection is a very unreliable (yet surprisingly sometimes great) mobile USB job, since I don't yet have a new phone line after moving. £25 for 7GB, to be used within 30 days! Ouch! Then you get charged £1 per Megabyte! Bar stewards! Another few weeks, all being well... )

Try these guys, they are reasonable and have great 24-7 support, reliability etc..
www.netpivotal.co.uk

Edit,
oops, i thought you were after hosting (sorry, late night last night).

I'm on Virgin Media 20mb line at the moment and mine isn't capped.
I recently re-installed my laptop and re-downloaded all my Steam games again (must be well over 20Gb) and it's still running at full speed.
I've never had any low connection speeds.
It's sad really that I'm moving house on Monday and the new place can't get cable.
Be is looking favourite from what you guys are saying.

More!

Checked online banking today only to discover that Supanet have fraudulently used my debit card to take monthly payments from my account after I cancelled the direct debit and informed them that I had done so! I don't owe them anything, I'm no longer using their service, I paid for it in monthly advance. I have no idea how they got my card details.

Just called the bank and told them - they've said their fraud department will deal with it now, cancelled the card and are going to get in touch with supanet.

For the love of God, do NOT use Supanet!! I've dealt with some crap companies in my time but this takes the biscuit.

Supanet are in big trouble now.

I'm so bloody angry I could punch somebody.

No, wait, ouch! *ducks*