Broadband - Which is the best?
 

At present I am with BT Broadband and paying £27 per month (with a speed of 576kbps) for the honour of problems and trying to get them sorted out via a Call Centre abroad whose employees cannot understand.

Any body recommend another provider or can give me a website that compares them all.

I used 'adsl4less' for a while and had no problems - they also have a 1 month contract period!

I've just gone over to TalkTalk. £22 for free calls to UK and Europe (not mobiles though). 8Mbit at the moment, although it goes up to 8 soon.

Tech support is good once you get through, but of course it's overloaded, it's a very good deal.

This link may help with comparing a selection of ISPs.

Just one word of advice:

NEVER AOL!!!!

If you are within a cable area, the service is pretty good - at least in my experience.

A phone / TV / broadband package can be very cost-effective.

SD

Echo the never AOL bit!

I've been with Freenetname (you get what that implies) for a number of years and they've been reliable 99.9% of the time.

Sky Broadband on the surface at least looks good.

Are there any pitfalls that anyone has come across yet?

I'm with Pipex, as are quite a few of my friends, and it has worked well for a number of years.

Now on 2Mb - whether you will get to 8Mb (or any speed for that matter) depends both upon your service provider and where you live.

Agree don't touch AOL.

RC

Broadband = Telewest/NTL

ADSL = Plus.net

Tiscali and Onetel are worth consideration IMHO

I wouldnt touch NTL, Wanadoo or BT personally.

Also avoid AOL at all costs:yuk:

Zen = #1 without a doubt.

Eclipse are very good too.

I use both of the above in a commercial context.

You pay a bit more for a good service, not a load of t0ssers who contract out "customer support" to India.

Avoid Clara in particular.

Eclipse here as well. Certainly more expensive than some but in 18 months I haven't had a single problem. No cap on downloads and a 1 month contract. I would like to pay less for broadband, but just don't want to lose the good service. You pays your money.........etc

I'm with Pipex in Essex and PlusNet in Norfolk. I've had no problem with either.

Pipex was expensive (£23.44 a month); last month they screwed up my bill (they didn't debit the credit card) and threatened to cut me off. A slightly miffed phone call later, and they discovered a £17.99 package with the same effective service (a 30GB cap, but I never download that much a month anyway).

There are many folks who've had serious problems with the new 8Mb setup - at least with PlusNet - but I have to say it works fine for me. The actual speed as shown by ADSLguide varies between 2Mb and 5Mb (so far - three weeks' experience).

Agree absolutely not AOL.

This isn't very relevant anymore but back in the bad old days of dial-up modems, the name of the ISP game was to get as many customers as one could, loading up the system to the point where it was nearly but not quite falling over. At that point you maximise your profits. You will also have roughly the same number of customers leaving as you will be getting new ones, but that's OK provided the system is fully loaded. Customers are irrelevant to the big picture.

Pipex was one of the most notorious players in that game.

Broadband is different, in that an ISP has no modem banks** and phone lines; indeed has no physical existence other than a building somewhere, with a fibre connection into BT's ATM network, and from there on it all goes via BT. The only customer presence an ISP needs is the support line, and that is what you pay for (or pay a bit less for, if it is in India). A lot of ISPs are also evidently run by what I call crooks (like Pipex and many others were back then) - IMHO only a crook will subcontract support to a monkey call centre and charge a premium rate for calling it.

The actual technology for creating a reliable ISP is no rocket science and is well known. It just costs money to implement properly.

At current prices, anything less than say £18/month is likely to be a bunch of crooks, will give you hassle, and won't last. I don't smoke but the difference between a good ISP and a crap one is roughly one fag packet per month.

(** the better ISPs do have a deal with some network outfit to provide a dial-in number, for modem and mobile users)

Well, the Pipex person who answered the telephone to me had a very non-Indian accent. He was sharp, helpful, and we were all done in about two minutes. What he said would happen, happened.

PlusNet I've never spoken to - I ordered the service online, and it was connected when they said it would be, and worked straight off.

Plusnet's customer service is excellent. The staff have been very helpful and knowledgable in the times I've needed to call them (which isn't often) and they send you regular, frank and honest updates about their performance and what they are doing to improve. Their packages are cheap as well. I'd highly recommend them.

Gosh Keef...you sure you didn't dial your boss' number by mistake?:}

Pipex.

Never had to call them in the three years I have been with them. I think that £23.44 is still a bit high even for 2.2mb but the overall service and reliability is great. It is only at moments like this, when people want to check out the services, that you realise that a trouble free service is taken for granted.

I will stay with them I expect.

I note that Powergen and Abbey National are closing their Indian call centres following customer complaints...

I had an almost unintelligible response from Dell's Indian call centre, so gave up and pestered Dell until I found someone who could answer my questions. I gave them an exceptionally low score on the 'How did we do' web thing, so they called to find out why - and they were told in no uncertain terms!

96% of LLoydsTSB managers have been stated as considering that customers are receiving a poorere service since the outsourcing started. But, ever since discovering the number of my local branch (they really hate you finding that out!), I've been spared the annoyance of using call centres which I cannot really understand.

I feel sorry for the Indian employees who are being taken advantage of - and contempt for the greed of companies cutting costs in this way.

Anyway, back to Broadbean ISPs - I'm with Virgin.Net and find it excellent. I'm getting 5216 Kbps download and 448 Kbps upload; no monthly download limit and it costs £25 per month which I can pay by a standing charge to my credit card - for which I get airline miles.

Wouldn't touch AoL with a barge pole!