Broadband provider recommendations - BT Infinity?

[suburbanreuben]

Took me longer to find out than expected. Apparently, the BT bill is about £49 per month - this includes line rental and BT Infinity. Seems expensive compared to above.

Richard

It is! I'm paying BT £27 a month with BT, + £15 line rental. They sent me a flier a while back promising to cut my costs to £22 +£15 " as you're a valued customer". (I've been with them for 10yrs +). They are offering new customers free infinity broadband for 6 months and £15 +£15 line rental for a year.
Sky are offering Free unlimited for 12 months +£15 line rental.
I'll be saving over £300 !
Ihave tried to change a number of times,to talk talk once and plusnet most recently. I arranged two appointments for plusnet "engineers" and twice they failed with no reason offered.
Hopefully Sky are a bit more switched on.

One problem with BT call centres is cultural. Phone themup with a problem and the operator willassure you that they, and they alone, have the answer to your problems. They'll promise to sort it out, and promise a call in 24 hours to confirm you're sorted, which you seldom are. Sometimes they do actually make the confirmation call,only to be very disappointed to find you're still fecked. They're trying, but getting through to someone who can actually help is like banging your head against a wall.

 

[drcarlos]

I've had infinity in two different properties now with broadly similar speeds and apart from a dodgy hub3 (in the first house) that was replaced in a couple of days things have been decent enough. They are not cheap though but the hub5 is a decent standard piece of kit, that is well specced and reliable. Sky is cheaper overall but they scrimp on the kit and their second gen hub is utter junk with outdated wired and wireless tech that cripples any fast connection due to it's slow speeds. So if you move to Sky you need to budget for a decent router (and that's over £100) otherwise any fast connection you have will be limited by the hardware they supply.
I am looking into moving to Sky but only if I can continue to use my BT hub5 otherwise it will cost as much to buy a decent router totally negating any savings i'd make.

Carl.

 

[JamesM]

I was with AOL for nearly 20 years

Were AOL around in 1994??? :?

 

[Neil]

I was with AOL for nearly 20 years

Were AOL around in 1994??? :?

In absolute terms, yes.

As an ISP in the UK? Well they've been around a while, I can remember when their free CDs "to get you started..." seemed to accumulate on my desk.

Compuserve and pipex are who I remember dealing with in the early / mid 90s.

 

[MrW]

Re:

I’m with TalkTalk – offering broadband for £1.75 a month, plus if you join from clicking on this link, you'll get a £50 Love2Shop Voucher!

http://talktalk.fandi.st/share/1043-LcMvpGJd-

They really aren't as bad as some people make out, I've been with them for 3 years, and had no real issues.

Currently paying £7.25 a month for unlimited calls and downloads plus TalkTalk TV (which I don't really use, but it's included anyway) and paid the years line rental up front which works out to be about £15 a month.

Significantly cheaper than the competition, and they have a brilliant online community team should you have any issues.

 

[ajm]

Re: Re:

They (TalkTalk) really aren't as bad as some people make out, I've been with them for 3 years, and had no real issues.

And that's the point - you really don't know how good or bad an ISP is until you do have problems (unless they're really horrendous with more customers than their infrastructure can handle - and I'd class TalkTalk as being close to that.)

Obviously with companies this size you can have very different experiences each time you call - but I can say that over the years both Orange and TalkTalk have repeatedly come very close to bringing me to complete despair. (My job means that I end up speaking to these people on a regular basis.) With TalkTalk staff, the complete lack of the most trivially basic technical knowledge coupled with a refusal to admit defeat and pass the case up the chain to second level support have left me nearly speechless at times, beyond angry.

There are few things more mentally crushing than to waste literally hours on the phone going through the usual elementary fault-finding rubbish (which naturally I've already gone through before bothering to call), intermittently spending long periods on hold, before the fool on the other end starts at the beginning of the script again (including asking your name, phone number etc) as they've run out of "solutions"! (Unsurprisingly, as the line is dead and nothing short of an Openreach visit is going to fix it)

Most consumer ISPs are like this to a certain extent, with mostly clueless first level support staff, but TalkTalk/(incorporating AOL these days) are definitely the very worst I have to deal with.

Bizarrely, TalkTalk Business are fine - good, even! I'd seriously consider going for a "business" package regardless of the ISP as the pricing is often similar but the customer service usually far better.

 

[MrW]

Re: Re:

They (TalkTalk) really aren't as bad as some people make out, I've been with them for 3 years, and had no real issues.

And that's the point - you really don't know how good or bad an ISP is until you do have problems (unless they're really horrendous with more customers than their infrastructure can handle - and I'd class TalkTalk as being close to that.)

Obviously with companies this size you can have very different experiences each time you call - but I can say that over the years both Orange and TalkTalk have repeatedly come very close to bringing me to complete despair. (My job means that I end up speaking to these people on a regular basis.) With TalkTalk staff, the complete lack of the most trivially basic technical knowledge coupled with a refusal to admit defeat and pass the case up the chain to second level support have left me nearly speechless at times, beyond angry.

There are few things more mentally crushing than to waste literally hours on the phone going through the usual elementary fault-finding rubbish (which naturally I've already gone through before bothering to call), intermittently spending long periods on hold, before the fool on the other end starts at the beginning of the script again (including asking your name, phone number etc) as they've run out of "solutions"! (Unsurprisingly, as the line is dead and nothing short of an Openreach visit is going to fix it)

Most consumer ISPs are like this to a certain extent, with mostly clueless first level support staff, but TalkTalk/(incorporating AOL these days) are definitely the very worst I have to deal with.

Bizarrely, TalkTalk Business are fine - good, even! I'd seriously consider going for a "business" package regardless of the ISP as the pricing is often similar but the customer service usually far better.

I suppose it depends on what the 'problems/issues' are...

I called TalkTalk customer care once, it was a nightmare I'll admit, but their UK based web forum is a great source of information, and as I have already said, I haven't had any issues (loss of service etc etc)

I'm still on copper, getting a very stable 18Mb download which suits me for now. As soon as Openreach upgrade the cabinets to handle more fibre where I live I can add that for £5 a month.

At the end of the day, the infrastructure is all BT's (unless you are on Virgin) so the service is dependant on that, irrespective of who your ISP is.

I'll happily recommend TalkTalk to anyone, and for what it's worth, when they email you notification of your next bill, you have 24 hours to log in to your account and clear the balance and get 15% discount, which stops the direct debit automatically.

In this day and age of bills getting bigger and bigger, this can make a difference.

 

[ajm]

Re: Re:

At the end of the day, the infrastructure is all BT's (unless you are on Virgin) so the service is dependant on that, irrespective of who your ISP is.

Not quite all the infrastructure is BT's; BT provide the connection between your house and your ISP which is likely to perform the same regardless of ISP choice. From this point however the throughput of your Internet connection depends on your ISP's own network which can be a real bottleneck; the speed at which your router syncs to the exchange will not be any different but the actual speed you can download data at certainly can be, particularly at peak times...

 

[legrandefromage]

Our village has just been upgraded to a BT fibre network but only for BT customers, I'm with sky and am currently finding their TV expensive - so, am looking to take BT up on one of their offers for free fibre for 6 months. We had an absolute nightmare with Talk Talk so will not go back to them.

Sky have been good but without any news of upgrading to some sought of fibre network, I'm tired of trying to get work done on a 0.9 - 1.8meg fraudband

 

[ajm]

Our village has just been upgraded to a BT fibre network but only for BT customers

I didn't think that was possible - I was under the impression that the FTTC rollout was on the same basis as the ADSL one was years ago... i.e. you're not going to get Virgin / Sky but you could use anyone else who resells BT Wholesale / Openreach products?

I'm particularly interested as BT are in the process of rolling out fibre on our exchange too - I was hoping to stay with TalkTalk Business* as their price for FTTC is basically the same as I'm paying them for ADSL.

*(I would never have touched TTB given my experiences with TT but over the years my original ISP, Freedom2Surf, has been bought over several times and ended up as TTB)