Best UK internet provider

[Grym]

Openreach are the most useless engineers in my experience, we had one come round when we first changed to BT, they took over a month to connect us, was meant to take 24hours, and the first engineer that came round, i had to show him how to connect to the internet on my pc, and then how to use chrome / firefox. and all he did was run some speedtests, and changed the router. the speedtests were getting like 60kb/s download, he basiaclly said, he doesnt know whats wrong he will get back to us . the problem fixed it self eventually, now i have the problem of the connection dropping every 5-10mins. yay for BT.
but i have given up wringing them, they just pass you between different departments, and say theres nothing wrong with it. and just make me run speedtests

The engineers generally will not have any knowledge other than the line itself (connecting to your PC isn't part of it) as they were never trained to do so, especially Openreach's pol;icy is "up to the wall plug" (NTE), as long as they plug their laptop in and it works there, they don't need to know whether it works on your PC or not. He wouldn't know what is wrong speed wise, he would need to call the OMC (where I used to work) and we have to do the line test, analyse the result, then tell them the potential issues and then they go and try to locate them.

And yes if you go to London, 100MB Virgin line!!!!!!
I am getting one when I have more spare cash lying around for nothing :P

[Deleted]

I live in sweden right now. Ironic isnt it. But my internet sucks right now (5/1 Mbits).

[Deleted]

The engineers generally will not have any knowledge other than the line itself (connecting to your PC isn't part of it) as they were never trained to do so, especially Openreach's pol;icy is "up to the wall plug" (NTE), as long as they plug their laptop in and it works there, they don't need to know whether it works on your PC or not. He wouldn't know what is wrong speed wise, he would need to call the OMC (where I used to work) and we have to do the line test, analyse the result, then tell them the potential issues and then they go and try to locate them.

And yes if you go to London, 100MB Virgin line!!!!!!
I am getting one when I have more spare cash lying around for nothing :P

but i could have done what he done :P
he litterally just unplugged everything, changed the router and tried to connect again. good job we didnt have to pay for him to come out.

[Grym]

Demon was good, I used Demon before I switched.

Problem is Demon again is still on copper pair thanks to being a BT re-seller. (not a LLU, but actual reseller)

[Deleted]

Sky broadband is fine - 3 years now in a couple of different locations in the UK and never had an outage.

Only problem is that they are the most useless company during the installation phase. 3.5 months it took to get it installed in my current flat.

Lol? Sky is the worst isp out there, I get speeds of 20kb/s download, and not to mention they slow down your speeds at night. DO NOT GO WITH SKY.

[Paladin Racoon]

Personally i would recommend Sky. I used to be on BT but that was incredibly unreliable. My friends with Virgin say whilst its speeds are good, it is also unreliable, especially with getting the speed they're paying for.

On the whole customer service for all 3 are abyssmal so overall i'd say sky is your best bet.

[Deleted]

virgin is meh, but there's not much else i can get here. often really bad issues with ping (WoW specifically) and i hardly ever get my full download speed. should be receiving 20mb but usually only have around 200k/b download speed. sometimes it'll whizz up to 2.4mb speed, but that's rare and doesn't last long.

the UK really sucks for internet. a few big companies own the whole system so there's only a couple to choose from if you want the top speeds, so customer care can be as awful as you like, cause we can't go anywhere else.

[Glomp]

Just note that sometimes Virgin Media and WoW seem to have a battles involving super high pings.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=virgin+media+warcraft

[Deleted]

you're best off asking in the area you're moving to, since it varies so much

---------- Post added 2011-08-12 at 02:20 PM ----------

Just note that sometimes Virgin Media and WoW seem to have a battles involving super high pings.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=virgin+media+warcraft

i thought they fixed it now? but yeah the tech forums is always full of posts about virgin media and wow :\

[Gloves]

Lol? Sky is the worst isp out there, I get speeds of 20kb/s download, and not to mention they slow down your speeds at night. DO NOT GO WITH SKY.

No they do not. I get 1.5mb/s throughout the whole day and sometimes higher during the night, which is the time when I do most of my downloading.

With Sky, I also have a consistent 42ms while in-game.

[Yeren]

Ive been looking arounsxand im deciding between Virgin, TalkTalk and Sky.

Avoid Talk talk with your life, their customer service along with sky's are shocking

Virgin has my vote, if you move to an area with fibre optic your laughing, im on their 50meg package, have ms of roughly 28 40 on a bad day and that is home and world

[Lagwin]

Been with telewest which then became virgin for 8 years, their connection is unlimited on most packages at off peek times(9pm to 9am) although there is a cap during peek times which if you go over caps you speed to 1/5th of normal, and they are fairly expencive if it only the broadband connection you are wanting.
In all the time i've been with them they have had a virtually no problems with connection only very rarely get disconnected(happened once this year)

[Deleted]

Ive been looking arounsxand im deciding between Virgin, TalkTalk and Sky.

Avoid Talktalk at ALL costs. They are complete and utter rubbish.

[Deleted]

I was with virgin, i heard they were having a lot of problems so decided to try a few others (BT, sky, talktalk). whilst virgin customer support isn't great, these guys were just as bad.
they cost the same as virgin for the package, and came up slower. eg BTs 10mb package is a lot less than virgins 10mb.

So back to virgin now, I am using fibre optic, if you're in london i'll assume you'll have it too.

Virgin for the lesser of many evils.

[Warcrafter]

It depends where you live, some ISP will have better internet in different regions of the country.
We had BT, they were crap, slow internet and bad service so we switched to Sky.
Sky has the best packages, good service, rarely lags and good speed.

[Mammoth]

I've got a BT fibre optic 36MB line. Its working pretty damn sweet for me. It has also given me access to their wifi points all over the country.

[Deleted]

Stupid Virgin website. I cant look at most of thwir stuff because they need my postcode but i dont live there yet...

[Krillen]

That is because TalkTalk and Sky LLU BT lines.

LLU - using existing line that is already out there (which owned by BT since ancient time), from the exchange all the way to end user permesis. In the exchange, instead of plugged onto the BT equipment, it is diverted to a DLSAM that is connected to equipment that is owned by other ISPs.

In short: if you have problem with a TalkTalk line, you will call them, then they call Openreach (the team that deals with the ownership of the line as they not allowed to be called BT for fair competition purpose, but in the end they are just part of BT all the same), they then send out engineer, fix stuff, then tell TalkTalk, then TalkTalk let you know when everything is resolved. If fault is outside on the line, easy to fix, if fault is in exchange near DSLAM, good luck waiting for Openreach and the ISP to argue who's responsibility that is.

Virgin own their own lines which makes things a lot easier, BT also own their own lines, but slow on the line building and after knowing the how their team function, I wouldn't go there myself.

Im not a techincial person when it comes down to LLU or whatever, I was going on personally experience. It now does make more sense now though

[Deleted]

Move to denmark instead of england and you won't get any of these outages

on a more serious note, I hope you will have fun at your stay in england!

[Deleted]

Depending on your exact location within London, you might get a really good 20MB connection, or a crappy 5MB.

I'd recommend PlusNet actually, they have very good customer service, call you back when needed, send you text messages, and are generally really really helpful whenever I contact them.

http://www.plus.net/