ISP recommendations (Not VirginMedia)

guitargeek62

I need to move away from the extraordinarily incompetent VirginMedia as swiftly as possible. 

I had Sky previously, they were fine but the pricing spiked after the contract period ran out.

Key requirements, in order of priority:


1) Must have genuinely competent account management and technical support teams; I don’t want to make that mistake again otherwise!

2) Stable fiber (/re?) o >150Mb/s d/l

Thanks in advance, and feel free to sling refer-a-friend codes over if that benefits you too!

euan

Not EE on the basis that one of their salesmen turned up on my door earlier to cold call see Fibre broadband. 

His response to “no sorry I’m in the middle of feeding my son” was to try and keep selling Fibre broadband as it would only “take a minute”

LionAquaLooper

I hate salesmen with a passion, but that EE salesman you encountered could've been from any company. They're all the bloody same.

Anyway check out Utility Warehouse. Use this link if you ever decide to join. We both get £50

http://uw.co.uk/ref/customer/7X4JQGT

relic245

LionAquaLooper said:

I hate salesmen with a passion, but that EE salesman you encountered could've been from any company. They're all the bloody same.

Anyway check out Utility Warehouse. Use this link if you ever decide to join. We both get £50

http://uw.co.uk/ref/customer/7X4JQGT

+1 been a customer for 8 years, broadband has never missed a beat.

octatonic

Zen.

Axe_meister

Do you have community fibre in your area?

Sporky

octatonic said:

Zen.

Yup. In three years we've had just one outage over 10 seconds (and maybe 4 or 5 shorter ones). Genuine technical support, lifetime fixed contract price, and the Fritzbox router us fairly decent (though I recall it doesn't support the VLAN stuff Octatonic needs?).

I have four of the Fritzes in a wired-backhaul mesh, plus three Netgear wired switches for additional ports.

guitargeek62

Axe_meister said:

Do you have community fibre in your area?

Nope, just the ‘main’ ones for now! I’d go back to Jurassic Fibre (had them at my last place) but they haven’t rolled out to this part of Yeovil yet - new builds eh?!

Snags

Zen, Andrews & Arnold, Merula.

octatonic

Sporky said:

octatonic said:

Zen.

Yup. In three years we've had just one outage over 10 seconds (and maybe 4 or 5 shorter ones). Genuine technical support, lifetime fixed contract price, and the Fritzbox router us fairly decent (though I recall it doesn't support the VLAN stuff Octatonic needs?).

I have four of the Fritzes in a wired-backhaul mesh, plus three Netgear wired switches for additional ports.

I use Ubiquiti products for that, and don't use the Fritzboxes.
I used them for years though and they were fine.

Ubiquiti are mostly great- I can actually do site to site VPN between our flat in London and the home/studio in Oxford, which is awesome.

rlw

Zen.  Five years in and no problems apart from one caused entirely by Openreach being a bunch of bureaucratic and thoughtless twats.   Silly speeds too.  10% better than advertised.

Also, the only Which approved supplier. I think.

blobb

Origin are ok.

boogieman

Worth haggling with Sky maybe? You can usually get the renewal price down with a call to retentions. We don’t get a great deal of choice of providers where we are as we’re out in the sticks but Sky have been decent and solid for the last 3 years. 

theatreanchor

We're also with Sky, and though I hate to say it, they're pretty good.

Sporky

Sky were awful for us. They (or Open reach, we never got the truth out of them) disconnected our line at the exchange. No service for three weeks, with seven visits booked and cancelled when we didn't need a visit at all. Eventually a grizzled old tech turns up, looks at the notes, swears, phones the exchange, and ten minutes later it's all working again.

We cancelled just after this, but they didn't cancel voicemail, so a month or so later I had a threatening debt collector letter demanding payment. Got that sorted out, only it then turned out they'd not cancelled caller I'd either (bearing in mind we no longer had a telephone service to apply these to) and got another debt collector letter.

Absolute cunts. 

m_c

Snags said:

Zen, Andrews & Arnold, Merula.

A&A would get my vote. Not the cheapest, but outstanding technical support, and will deal with any issues as quickly as possible.

bobblehat

If you need a main stream supplier then Plusnet are hard to beat. Have always found technical support to be great with real people based in the UK to talk to.

rlw

You can lead a horse to water.....

Smaller providers top our table

Zen Internet – one of the smaller providers – proves it's possible to consistently offer a great broadband experience. It achieved the maximum five-star ratings for customer service and technical support, along with above-average ratings for its broadband speed and connection reliability. Despite not offering the cheapest tariffs, Zen Internet also earned full marks for value for money, with eight out 10 customers giving it positive ratings for this.

Zen Internet has been the top-ranked broadband provider in our past seven customer surveys, but this year it was knocked off the top spot by London-only Community Fibre, which clinched stellar ratings for its speedy connections as well as customer service and value for money.

Meanwhile, the UK's biggest providers earned scores ranging from pedestrian to pathetic. Four providers supply the majority of customers in the UK – and all four of them sit in the bottom half of our league table. 

Virgin Media's disappointing ratings for customer service earned it last place in our rankings, but the customer score achieved by Sky was only slightly higher. BT was a bit better again, but customers gave Britain's biggest broadband provider a dismal value-for-money rating. TalkTalk beat its big-name rivals this year, coming in 8th place – but still lagged far behind the top-ranked providers.

Yet these major providers continue to cling on to their market dominance. If you’re with one of the Big Four, it’s worth exploring whether there isn’t another available provider that deserves your custom more. Our research shows that the grass really can be greener.

Which? Recommended Providers

Which? Recommended Providers (WRPs) are the cream of the crop. We only give this accolade to broadband companies that get a customer score of 70% or more, and have committed to Ofcom schemes designed to ensure fairness in the telecoms market.

That's not all. We know price is important, so we give the award only to those companies that we feel charge a reasonable price for their services. If they charge too much, they're not eligible to be WRPs, whatever score they get in the survey. 

This year only one broadband provider has met all of our requirements – Zen Internet. It earned four or five star ratings in almost every category, 85% of customers were satisfied, and Zen has committed to Ofcom's codes of practice and automatic compensation scheme. Unlike the other big broadband providers, it promises to keep the amount you pay fixed for the full length of your contract, too.

Which? broadband survey results

We survey thousands of broadband, home phone and TV customers each year, so we can help you to choose the best service. In January 2024, we surveyed nearly 4,471 broadband customers and asked them about their experiences. We report on all providers that have at least 50 respondents.

digitalscream

This isn't encouraging, particularly since Virgin Media have just bought up my local-fibre ISP (Upp). I tried to move to the only other local gigabit provider, and they were a spectacular disaster. When the connection died four days after installation - on the Friday of Easter weekend - the response was, "Do you have a mobile phone you can use until Tuesday?". So I cancelled the service, and they sent somebody out on the Monday to fix the connection.

He came to the door and said, "I think I see your problem, your cable's hanging down and not connected", as though that might have happened without me noticing that the kit inside the house had the cable ripped out. No, my dude, I did that myself to put the old connection back in.

When I called to actually cancel, I had to explain why. They said, and I quote, "Well, you have to understand that we're still a very new company <they've been going for three years>, so we're still figuring all this stuff out.". 

So...there really are companies less competent than Virgin Media. At least, that's the hope.

guitargeek62

rlw said:

You can lead a horse to water.....

Smaller providers top our table

Zen Internet – one of the smaller providers – proves it's possible to consistently offer a great broadband experience. It achieved the maximum five-star ratings for customer service and technical support, along with above-average ratings for its broadband speed and connection reliability. Despite not offering the cheapest tariffs, Zen Internet also earned full marks for value for money, with eight out 10 customers giving it positive ratings for this.

Zen Internet has been the top-ranked broadband provider in our past seven customer surveys, but this year it was knocked off the top spot by London-only Community Fibre, which clinched stellar ratings for its speedy connections as well as customer service and value for money.

Meanwhile, the UK's biggest providers earned scores ranging from pedestrian to pathetic. Four providers supply the majority of customers in the UK – and all four of them sit in the bottom half of our league table. 

Virgin Media's disappointing ratings for customer service earned it last place in our rankings, but the customer score achieved by Sky was only slightly higher. BT was a bit better again, but customers gave Britain's biggest broadband provider a dismal value-for-money rating. TalkTalk beat its big-name rivals this year, coming in 8th place – but still lagged far behind the top-ranked providers.

Yet these major providers continue to cling on to their market dominance. If you’re with one of the Big Four, it’s worth exploring whether there isn’t another available provider that deserves your custom more. Our research shows that the grass really can be greener.

Which? Recommended Providers

Which? Recommended Providers (WRPs) are the cream of the crop. We only give this accolade to broadband companies that get a customer score of 70% or more, and have committed to Ofcom schemes designed to ensure fairness in the telecoms market.

That's not all. We know price is important, so we give the award only to those companies that we feel charge a reasonable price for their services. If they charge too much, they're not eligible to be WRPs, whatever score they get in the survey. 

This year only one broadband provider has met all of our requirements – Zen Internet. It earned four or five star ratings in almost every category, 85% of customers were satisfied, and Zen has committed to Ofcom's codes of practice and automatic compensation scheme. Unlike the other big broadband providers, it promises to keep the amount you pay fixed for the full length of your contract, too.

Which? broadband survey results

We survey thousands of broadband, home phone and TV customers each year, so we can help you to choose the best service. In January 2024, we surveyed nearly 4,471 broadband customers and asked them about their experiences. We report on all providers that have at least 50 respondents.

Thanks - I wish I'd thought to check there before signing up to VM!  



I've now signed up with Zen and should hopefully* be live with them by the end of the month, thanks for all your suggestions and feedback.

@digitalscream - good luck, I mean it!   When I have the energy I'll write up my horror story with them, but it started brilliantly with an mis-sold products (i.e. missing extras that had been promised), and then their engineers severing my existing OpenReach cable while running the VM one to the house. I've had 18+ hours of phonecalls with them now over the past three weeks - I will never knowingly use VirginMedia or any of their partners again.



*the only caveat there is any dependency on OpenReach schedules for organising the repair/replacement of the line that VM broke.

digitalscream

@guitargeek62 - I suppose the main difference is that I won't be on the normal Virgin Media network. My ISP has been bought by their nexfibre brand, which is for their proper FTTP connections and managed by a whole different subsidiary. Of course, all the account management stuff will still be done by their main office, but the network engineers are completely separate.

This could be a good thing, or it could mean incompetence rolls downhill. Time will tell.