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Right, 

Who's competent? BT aren't, in anticipation of a house move and despite several phone calls from me checking they had the date right, they've still managed to disconnect my current internet and say they can't restore it for another 2 weeks. Genius. 

So, using this spell of contractual freedom to browse around. Our new place apparently doesn't receive Virgin Media, and I've not heard of many of the others. Does anyone know how good NOW, Sky, talktalk, vodafone, plusnet etc are?

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Since the fibre roll out, I've found BT to be by far the best, but a little expensive.

I'm using Sky now with a TV package deal, but it's a nightmare if you wish to use your own router as the one they provide is shite (unless you're well versed in Wireshark). 

Edited by PieFacE
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Everyone apart from Virgin has to deal with the incompetent rocket polishers at Openreach, but in my experience, AAISP are the best at kicking them up the arse, and the only ones who you can call and have someone on the phone who actually knows anything about networking if anything goes wrong. You pay for it though.

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  • 5 months later...

Bump on this thread! 

I'm going to give notice to leave Virgin Media. I have the whole whack with Sky Sports, BT Sports, VIP TV and decent internet (costs a ridiculous amount).

Kids only watch Youtube or Netflix and never watch "normal TV". Thinking of just getting a Broadband package and BT Sport (I access another Sky Sports if necessary).

Any recommendations? 

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15 hours ago, pas5898 said:

Bump on this thread! 

I'm going to give notice to leave Virgin Media. I have the whole whack with Sky Sports, BT Sports, VIP TV and decent internet (costs a ridiculous amount).

Kids only watch Youtube or Netflix and never watch "normal TV". Thinking of just getting a Broadband package and BT Sport (I access another Sky Sports if necessary).

Any recommendations? 

Don’t sign up until you’ve cancelled VM, you’ll find they will slash their price through the cancellation process. First your call will go to India Where they’ll offer you something like £2 a month off. If you reject it and insist you’re cancelling the call will be moved to a UK call centre where they’ll offer a better deal. If you still don’t like the deal they’ll put the cancellation through. They will then likely call you back over the next days with even better discounts.

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Yeah that.

My BT had gone up to £57 a month for 70mb Broadband. I could get VM 100mb for about £30.

Spoke to BT and they slashed it to £29.99. Which is actually cheaper than I've ever paid them, even when I signed up :D

 

£30 a month seems about the going rate for 70-100mb broadband at the moment. At least around my area

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8 hours ago, Genie said:

Don’t sign up until you’ve cancelled VM, you’ll find they will slash their price through the cancellation process. First your call will go to India Where they’ll offer you something like £2 a month off. If you reject it and insist you’re cancelling the call will be moved to a UK call centre where they’ll offer a better deal. If you still don’t like the deal they’ll put the cancellation through. They will then likely call you back over the next days with even better discounts.

 

5 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

Yeah that.

My BT had gone up to £57 a month for 70mb Broadband. I could get VM 100mb for about £30.

Spoke to BT and they slashed it to £29.99. Which is actually cheaper than I've ever paid them, even when I signed up :D

 

£30 a month seems about the going rate for 70-100mb broadband at the moment. At least around my area

Thanks Both. I'll be sure the try that! I'll aim for £30

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14 minutes ago, pas5898 said:

 

Thanks Both. I'll be sure the try that! I'll aim for £30

I get the 200mb BB from Virgin and the full house TV (all channels apart from Movies and Sky Sports) for about £57. Think it includes a landline too but I don't even have 1 plugged in.

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  • 11 months later...

I asked sky to upgrade my broadband from the basic essential package as there are two of us working from home and it isn't the quickest. 

Long story short - their engineer refused to do the work cos he needed a cherry picker to get to my dish (he wouldn't stand on a flat top porch roof) and then said he wasn't allowed to come more than 2 metres inside my house cos of covid. So i cancelled the upgrade. This was in December 

Since then, my bb has been dire; frequently dropping to the extent that i have been using my phone as a hotspot.

Am i being paranoid ? Are sky deliberately mucking about with my connection in the hope I'll go back to them and get some sort of upgrade again ?

Well if so, sod em cos i have signed up with virgin fibre optic. Yes, i know virgin have shite customer service but these days can anyone get through to any CS without having to jump through automated hoops and chat bots ?

Edited by mottaloo
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7 hours ago, mottaloo said:

Yes, i know virgin have shite customer service but these days can anyone get through to any CS without having to jump through automated hoops and chat bots ?

We're very sorry, but due to unforeseen circumstances of this pandemic that's been going on for a year, our advisors are busier than usual, and the expected wait time is 4 days, please enjoy listening to 3 badly compressed pop songs.

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12 hours ago, mottaloo said:

Well if so, sod em cos i have signed up with virgin fibre optic. Yes, i know virgin have shite customer service but these days can anyone get through to any CS without having to jump through automated hoops and chat bots ?

Been with Virgin fibre optic for about 3 years and never had to call them. Been flawless 

In fact, had an email from them today saying they have upgraded my package free of charge as a thank you. I signed up for the 50mb package. Just ran a speed test and download speeds are 109mb

 

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I’m having an absolute mare with Sky / Openreach.

Switched to Sky from Virgin, all supposed to be setup on Tuesday and it’s Saturday and we still don’t have any broadband or even phone line, called sky every day this week and it’s just ‘yeah there’s a note and it’ll be all done tomorrow’, tomorrow turns into today and then yesterday and still nothing.

Called them just now to be told the next update will be on the 25th, wow, they just got both barrels from me.

Now on the phone to virgin with our tails between our legs asking if they can switch our broadband back on.

Really unhappy customer.

 

Edit - now virgin cannot switch us back on as apparently our space in the local network has been allocated to someone else and there’s no room for another addition. I wish I’d never switched.

 

Does anyone have any particular recommendations for a good temporary solution for home WiFi? Need something decent to tide us over until Openreach sort their pissing selves out.

Edited by bannedfromHandV
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On 20/02/2021 at 10:33, bannedfromHandV said:

Does anyone have any particular recommendations for a good temporary solution for home WiFi? Need something decent to tide us over until Openreach sort their pissing selves out.

A 30 day contract with a unlimited data sim card. Smarty at £16/mth or ID Mobile at £20/mth. Both use the Three network. Pop the sim card into a phone and use as a hotspot or a mi-fi box.

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2 hours ago, stuart_75 said:

A 30 day contract with a unlimited data sim card. Smarty at £16/mth or ID Mobile at £20/mth. Both use the Three network. Pop the sim card into a phone and use as a hotspot or a mi-fi box.

Cheers, ended up doing this through my current mobile provider (Vodafone) and it’s cost me a lot more!!!!

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The state of broadband providers in the UK is frustratingly violence inducing. It’s so expensive, so spotty and the customer service levels should be used as evidence in court as to what provoked a falling down style rampage in customers. Gah! I just want decent reliable broadband for a fair price and if something goes wrong to easily speak to someone to sort it out. 

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  • 4 months later...

Feb 20 to Dec 20 working from home with Sky = Shite, changed to Virgin

Dec 20 to June 21 working from home with Virgin = Stopped working within 2 weeks, engineer came out and found nothing wrong with equipment. Went to local green box and it started working again. That was January. Since then its been pretty reliable but it seems there is an outage in "my area" now and they are working to fix it. Sending engineer out on 29th June, if they are fixing the outage why do they need to send me an engineer. Plus if they are waiting until 29th I will be cancelling the old DD... after checking various websites they appear to have a lot of "outages" all over the country and the customer services are pretty awful. I work for a Software company that supply quite a lot of business critical software all over the world and if we performed like this we wouldn't have many customers left.

So far it's been down for approx 8 hours today, my data is getting a pounding as having to use my phone as a hotspot for work. Apologies for putting this on here but Virgin didn't seem bothered about it 🤬

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Virgin is bloody good when it works, but when it doesn't, they're absolutely **** useless. I used to live in a student area, heavily subscribed and it just wasn't worth it. I'm back with them now I've moved and it's grand, 6 years with no downtime at all.

In student areas, they're completely milking the infrastructure and taking as many people who will pay as they can. Additionally, all these years later, it's still a hodge-podge of disparate infrastructure put together by the various companies that were bought out over the years. It's a crapshoot really.

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  • 9 months later...

Has anyone here got a FTTP connection in their home? What I mean is a direct fibre from the street terminating in the house. Speeds, from 100-900meg from whichever ISP you go with.

My Plusnet contract has less that 2 months to go and I refuse to keep paying £28/mth for crap over copper lines. I see Vodafone and TalkTalk offering the cheapest "Ultrafast" products at the moment, just wondering if anyone had experience of either company or any other FTTP ISP?

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