Opinions on Broadband providers

[slope]

Have you tried AAISP?  They have Shaun The BT Slayer and others who are skilled in getting sense out of our-favourite-telco well beyond the point where other retailers would give up.  If nothing else they might be able to work out what's going on...

Thanks Kim. Just tried and got as far as -

"Sorry, we cannot offer broadband services at your location"

[Kim]

You could try emailing sales@aa.net.uk and see if a human can get any further.

Sounds like Openreach have cocked something up in their database or something.

[slope]

Ta again Kim - good suggestion - trying to involve a knowledgeable human response.

Am going to ask nearby properties if they have the same problem trying to get alternative deals and providers - and whether it's Postcode wide?

We most certainly only got FTTP in 2018 in our valley as the ancient Hydro Power station further up the 'line' needed it. The whole remote valley profited, but I seem to recall we had to contribute, via BT, to Openreach to connect separate displaced properties along the way, as well as BT/Openreach receiving Welsh Assembly grants?

At least zero roads or trenches were involved, unlike urban folks

[jsabine]

Maybe something about the grants received - if it's not been wired up in the 'normal' course of business, maybe there's no obligation to allow other services providers to use the infrastructure?

[slope]

Maybe something about the grants received - if it's not been wired up in the 'normal' course of business, maybe there's no obligation to allow other services providers to use the infrastructure?

I wondered that and asked the remote rural village representative who coordinated the Welsh Assembly grants and BT/Openreach - who were only providing FTTP to our back of beyond properties cos at the end of the valley/line, there is a hydro power station that need it.

She said she couldn't remember and couldn't find the original 2018 contracts - but would certainly have not agreed to any tie in for long that 24 months, without out the agreement of all us oiks.

Any road up, I've discovered if I enter any of the details of nearest properties to mine, some off which come off the same overhead cabling lines, they have no problem being offered alternative FTTP suppliers.

So it appears to be my/our building only who are stuck with BT. It's a converted Victorian Coach House, in to 2 separate apartments.

More 007/FBI type investigatin' required🕵️‍♂️

[Touche]

Have you tried AAISP?  They have Shaun The BT Slayer and others who are skilled in getting sense out of our-favourite-telco well beyond the point where other retailers would give up.  If nothing else they might be able to work out what's going on...

Thanks Kim. Just tried and got as far as -

"Sorry, we cannot offer broadband services at your location"

I had absolute horrors trying to swap out from Virgin and get BT / Openreach to sort themselves out.
I gave up with them completely and phoned AAISP after looking at the reviews on this site.
Got a very nice lady on the phone who unleashed the internet slayer onto my problem.
It took them a good few weeks to line it all up and get open reach to actually turn up instead of failing ( apparently if I failed
to be in then a £200 bill but if they failed to arrive then my hard luck for wasting my time and I cannot charge them)
Once it was sorted I am delighted with the AAISP service and internet speeds.

[Wowbagger]

A speed test on my 3 router indicates that it's a fair bit slower than using my mobile phone as a hot spot - 18Mbps compared to 37Mbps.

[Morat]

We had FTTP installed last week - after many weeks of stalking Frontier Network vans and asking very nicely when they thought they'd be finished. I looked into the options and got Sky. Out in semi-rural Yorkshire we can't use any of the smaller providers like Community Fibre, Hyperoptic or Airband so from the big ones I plumped for Sky @ 150Mbps. I reckon it's much easier to increase a package than reduce one within the contract and it's still 5 times faster than what we had before.
My advice is to phone Sky and be reluctant, they're usually up for a mild haggle.
This is the broadband bit (I don't need a landline).
 Subscription Name
   
 
Bill Period Date
   
 
Product Cost
 
• Sky Broadband Ultrafast 1 (standard price = £43.00) £27.00
 
• Sky Pay As You Talk £0.00
 
• Sky Talk Internet Calls £0.00
 
Total Subscription Charges (for this bill period) £27.00

I also got a "free" Sky TV Puck thingy with Sky Sports so we can swap it for the Now TV subscription and that worked out a couple of quid cheaper. Sky TV really does add up though!


The speeds and wifi are pretty good too, especially as I'm sitting directly between my PC and the router. Normally the laptops get full rate.

[Wowbagger]

A speed test on my 3 router indicates that it's a fair bit slower than using my mobile phone as a hot spot - 18Mbps compared to 37Mbps.

And recently we are struggling to get any response at all from fast.com. 2Mbps with the added statement "You may not be connected to the internet".

[Wowbagger]

I've just pressed the button on Cityfibre, with Vodaphone. I'm utterly fed up with a really crap connection and the Three website assuring me that there are persons working on masts nearby. £25 per month for 100Mbps with some sort of tablet thrown in as a special offer, and a £50 cashback card to spend with Mr. Bezos. Or someone. Installation date: 5th July. I will be terminating my contract with Three about 5 months early, and I could probably just haggle because their service has been so crap recently. But I'm not sure I can be arsed as long as I get a nice fast connection to the telegraph pole immediately outside the house.

[Feanor]

As reported in other threads, I fall in the twilight zone between the City of Aberdeen where 3 different fibre providers have run fibre, and proper Rural Aberdeenshire, where there are Scottish Gubbinsment funded fibre projects. Looking at the various provider's roadmaps, I'm not going to be getting any FTTP this side of the sun turning into a cold dark lump of coal.

So I've ponied up my cash to Space Karen's Starlink which Just Works, and I'm getting 250Mb download.

[Wowbagger]

Crikey! That's a lot of spondulicks!

[MikeFromLFE]

My contract with Onestream is up in a week's time - not that they've told me so (as required).
For several reasons I want to change supplier, not least because of lack of communication.

I'm still on fibre to the box at the end of the road, with string to the house, and despite being 2km from the exchange I get reasonable speeds (45 if the wind is blowing, 20 if it's raining).

For Reasons we want to keep our landline for incoming calls.

The choice seemed to be between "1p Broadband" and EE on speed / value / service

I can't take a provider called 1p Broadband seriously, even if they are promising the earth,  no in-contract price rises, and mixed consumer reviews.

EE have pissed me off by cold-calling me at the worst possible times since I put my landline number into their checker on the website. Unfortunately what they seem to be offering sounds on the face of it very good value, and they seem very well regarded (despite being part of BT).

I'm running out of spoons to deal with this (daughter) but it has to be done, and it'll probably be EE in the end. Mondays job .

[Polar Bear]

City Fibre is coming to Rugby and so we held off this year from just jumping into Plustnet's fibre.  We already get 70+ megabit download which is mostly more than sufficient.  It would not have cost slightly more to go fibre but I hope to get a cheaper deal next renewal with a bit of competition.

The other consideration is whether to keep or drop the landline.

[Wowbagger]

We found, that when Three was working properly, that 30Mbps was quite satisfactory. Recent visits to Fast.com have seen the figure vary widely from 900Kbps to 12Mbps, but the latter figure is about the maximum it supplies now. This time it plumped for 4.7Mbps.

[Feanor]

I've ponied up my cash to Space Karen's Starlink

Crikey! That's a lot of spondulicks!

That's just a part of it!

The Starlink is just being used as a transit to my main ISP, AAISP.
The Starlink is just a tunnel-carrier to connect back to AAISP using L2TP in place of the Wet String.

I'm still paying AAISP, as my actual ISP for my IP routing of my assigned addresses.

[Hot Flatus]

Still pretty happy with the 500-600Mps my Three 5g is delivering for £15 a month.

[Wowbagger]

Still pretty happy with the 500-600Mps my Three 5g is delivering for £15 a month.

As would I be!

According to their coverage map, we are right on the edge of an island of 5g, but our router is only 4g capable. Even then, it's just not delivering.

My phone is connected to EE 5g and, outside, I can get a very high speed. Inside, it's just shown a perfectly respectable 28Mbps.

[Morat]

My contract with Onestream is up in a week's time - not that they've told me so (as required).
For several reasons I want to change supplier, not least because of lack of communication.

I'm still on fibre to the box at the end of the road, with string to the house, and despite being 2km from the exchange I get reasonable speeds (45 if the wind is blowing, 20 if it's raining).

For Reasons we want to keep our landline for incoming calls.

The choice seemed to be between "1p Broadband" and EE on speed / value / service

I can't take a provider called 1p Broadband seriously, even if they are promising the earth,  no in-contract price rises, and mixed consumer reviews.

EE have pissed me off by cold-calling me at the worst possible times since I put my landline number into their checker on the website. Unfortunately what they seem to be offering sounds on the face of it very good value, and they seem very well regarded (despite being part of BT).

I'm running out of spoons to deal with this (daughter) but it has to be done, and it'll probably be EE in the end. Mondays job .

I was on EE before the lovely men in vans put fibre all round the estate. I had absolutely no issue with their service while I had it. I swapped to Sky because they showed availability before EE and I was able to save some cash on Sky Sports. I'll probably hop providers again at the end of this contract unless Sky make me an offer I can't refuse.

[HTFB]

We've been with EE, and Orange when they were Orange, for about 16 years. It's not too expensive and I don't believe we ever need to log into the website, let alone speak to a human*. The ADSL isn't wonderfully fast. especially for upload, so we also have internet over Virgin cable; I think the EE is a touch more reliable.

*Studied non-engagement with EE can work. They were issuing direful warnings for about six months about how they would stop offering 3G SIMs for my mobile and that I should choose a new contract. I sat tight and last month they upgraded me to 4G anyway, for a few pence less a month (which is less than anything on their website) and about ten times, I think, the data allowance. Lots, anyway.

[Bledlow]

Got Virgin cable to the house, & nobody else could provide anything near the same speed until recently. We also had a Virgin copper landline which we rarely used, & when Virgin said that'd switch to the fibre connection (so wouldn't be powered down the wire), we thought we'd drop the landline, & investigate other providers.

Spoke to Virgin & suddenly we have a big price cut. Hmm.

Service has mostly been good. Speed as advertised.

[Wowbagger]

We are sitting around waiting for the Cityfibre bods(s) to come and drill a hole in our wall, run a cable from the telegraph pole about 3 meters from where we want the cable to enter the house, and just get it working. I need to go shopping at some point as well, so I hope they get on with it. They are supposed to be here between 8am and 1pm. No word yet as to when they will turn up.

[Wowbagger]

Chaps are here.

[Kim]

I was quite impressed by how smooth and efficient the our-favourite-telco version of that process was.  (It would have been all done in about half an hour if it hadn't been for some debate as to whether there was mains wiring buried in the relevant bit of wall.)  They've got a cunning arrangement of pre-made cables with the dropwire plugging into the optical splitter on the pole, and a corresponding one pre-terminated for the ONT.  They're brought together and spliced with the magic fibre-splicing machine, and the splice coiled up and protected in a little grey box on the outside wall.

[Wowbagger]

It’s all done. Impressed. Apparently it might be a bit flaky this afternoon because the new kit will be receiving updates, but I have this iPad and my phone on the wifi, which is showing 110mbps. That will do.