With this sort of thing going on in the UK I can't believe that you haven't either risen up and stormed the BT tower, with ceremonial guillotining of the chief executive and/or his secretaries, or all committed suicide. As an (expat) Brit it really does surprise me what my countrymen put up with.

Over here in my part of Europe, the local provider is UPC who are not great either, but everyone you speak to is local, and you can even go to their office across town and yell at them in person (did that once, they gave me a brand new modem for free) :}

Plusnet help desk is in Yorkshire and they answer your calls with a background of 'On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at - as long as you can cope with the accent it is NOT in India:ok:

Daughter needed land line and broadband in the flat she has just moved in to. Her last place was Virgin equipped, and once they had got it up and running, (about 3 weeks!!) it worked fine.
However, where she now is is not Virgin's cheapest area.
Talktalk did not get a look in as their service is non-existent.

So plus net deal for unlimited non-fibre at £2.50 a month for 12 months, plus line rental, (paid as a lumpsum) was the cheapest.
As Mixture says, paying such low prices means that service might not be the best. But while it works, (grand total of 6 days from order to active broadband), she is not moaning at £2.50/month. And the call centre is in the UK.....

PS - the young, huh!! - she has free landline calls over weekends. What on earth do I want a land line phone for she says. She only uses her mobile.

I do some work for various smallish companies out here and none of them have landlines, we all use mobiles. The entire office complex I'm currently in doesn't have any landlines at all - if there's a "desk phone" it's VOIP. Welcome to the future :E

- which is being held back by HMG and BT and their insistance on landline broadband:mad:

When I was in the UK I had cable broadband, no landline :cool:

...and you still can in a relatively small number of locations, mostly 'urban'. Since your 'time' HMG were 'persuaded' by the monopolistic BT to give them all the public money to enable "95% of UK properties" to have 'slow' speed broadband down the copper/aluminium landlines (owned, as luck would have it, by BT) fed from fibre cabinets (owned by BT...) by 2017.

You are still 'stuffed' in many many parts of the UK with poor or no mobile (2G) signals and no cable.