Broadband contract about to expire

Actually I would agree with Chris in that the hardware and R&D might be good and I would not tar the whole company with the same brush. Unfortunately my (retail) experience with BT support over the past 6 months has been terrible - they have actually paid me a substantial sum in compensation (and they do not do this easily ...). I think with decent support my issues could have been resolved but I have ended up leaving them and moving to Zen Internet. I am paying 'more than I need to' but this is a company that I have confidence in.

I used the recent price hike to leave without penalty. To finish a less than happy year with them they then stopped my service within a day of my call without waiting for the new provider to take over.  And have now sent me an incompreehnsible letter.

Sorry I try not to complain and try to see both sides. The best I can say is that some individuals have offered tremendous support and really tried to help.

My recommendation is Zen but it costs.

Simon, my comments were aimed very much at the retail end of BT that users have to communicate with, and I do think they are poor, even compared to some of their cut price competition, who in my experience have sometimes done a little better despite low prices. That said, I do agree that behind the scenes, there is a high level of commitment that has made our core telecomms infrastructure what it is. I have a friend who was, until recently, operations manager of one of the UK mobile networks, and on top of the high level of responsibility, he would, for example, mysteriously vanish for 48 hours whenever the government raised the terrorist threat level. You can’t put a price on that level of commitment. 

And to be fair I have just spoken to an excellent member of staff who has answered my questions comprehensively and courteously and whole thing dealt with in under ten minutes. Nice to finish on a positive.

Boris786 posted:

 

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My recommendation is Zen but it costs.

 

I've been with Zen for over a decade - yes they're generally more expensive, but the ability to talk directly to someone in the UK on a technical support team who are not reading from a script is fantastic.

If you're lucky with any ISP you may get good performance results, but it helps when they're genuinely interested if there are issues.

Their ADSL service used to allow you to cancel after a month, but with FTTC the minimum I believe is normally a year.

Although BT now own Plusnet they don't seem to have interferred yet with a successful operation. I have been with Plusnet for many years for both home and business use and they have been totally reliable. The speed is a constant 50 mbps and their customer service is good compared to various other utilities.....highly recommended.

With many apologies for the delay, thanks for all the helpful replies on this topic.

Nick, good luck with your choice... one thing I would add, best use an ISP/TP line provider that provides regular proactive twisted pair line checks for your broadband as well expected synchronisation speeds  that you can easily access via the web. I know BT (and any of its service brands like Plusnet) do this but I am sure other ISP/line providers do as well, but best check. It really provides peace of mind, and helps identify when things go wrong where the issue lies, Also if you go true fibre, ie FTTP, then there only a smaller number of ISPs that offer this... 

If you have a BT line number you can use https://www.dslchecker.bt.com

After living with very poor speeds for years FTTP finally became a reality for our rural community a few weeks back. As I’d experienced a number of issues over the years Agreed to an 18 month contract for less than I was paying for the old copper line. I could have gone for 300 mbps but opted for 50 to keep costs down. Works a treat and have not experienced any dropouts since switching to FTTP. 

Personally I wouldn't be picking an ISP based on their supplied router. You can purchase these yourself after the fact and get massively better performance. Or better still get your hands dirty and make your own router from an old PC and PFSense or Untangle.

I use a Draytek 2860 via an Ethernet connection from the Openreach FTTP modem. Seems to work well enough. BT also supplied a Smart Hub for FTTP.

Yeah the top end BT Smarthubs are pretty powerful devices and give you good support for IP TV and bandwidth protection as well as offer effective diagnostics. If you don’t need IP TV or diagnostics, then most half descent routers will suffice. They really are not doing very much on the end of a usual point to point link into your internet service provider other than taking care of your IPv4 PAT/NAT functionality. (And trivial functions like UPnP port control, dhcp, dns relay, and if you want single access point Wifi etc.)