Ever since my original ISP was taken over by TalkTalk, Broadband service delivery and speeds have been on a downward spiral, I am supposedly on a Business Tariff with a lower contention ratio, but service evenings and pm hits abysmal levels. It difficult to establish if the issues with saturation of the local BT loop, or with TalkTalk, although I suspect the latter. Current Download speeds are 1.6mb and upload .6mb, and that’s at a good time in the day!!!!!!!

An option is go to Virgin Media Cable, who are offering 30/60/100mb options, this would be a Broadband only deal, seems comparable cost to current costs, not interested in bundles with TV and phone

Any experience out there guys?

You won’t beat Virgin IMO. £40/month gets phone and TV as well.
We pay for 10MB and I’ve checked it more than once at 9.6-9.8mb. Aroiund the end of this year they are doubling their speeds for free too.
IME, very reliable and worth every penny

PlusNet have been pretty good here, can get an intermediate level of service that gets less contention, and high (60G) allowance per month..

What PP says when I have checked mine it ha salways been spot omn what it should be and it has never failed me

We’ve been with Virginmedia since it bought NTL World (and Cabletel before!) I am a fan, service has been first class, bandwidth has been stable at the quoted bandwidth. (We also have TV and Phone with them). My son has them at Uni – just the BB and it seems as good. I have no idea what the allowance is, but two sons at home using BB, me working from home (and using STW) has never generated a warning email about usage.

I’ve finally managed to switch from Talk Talk – had endless problems with intermittent problems on the line, variable speeds (never higher than 7-8mbps) and they refused to acknowledge that the problem lay with the line.

In the end I binned them off and went to Orange (got a special offer cos I’m with them for my mobile). Line checked and fixed by an engineer (the problem was at the neighbourhood box where it went from fibre optic to copper), they’ve supplied me with a router and straight away I’m on a consistent 15mpbs. For half the price.

Virgin here, mines currently around 50-60 meg and very reliable, have ps3’s xbox’s, laptops, phones, ipod touches all running and it is faultless. Have the phone and full tv package with tivo up and downstairs. Th on demand tv is first class, head and shoulders above Sky, and having proper utube on the telly is great fun…. 😳

Virgin, FTW, another happy customer, quick bbi with a v+ box for recording……..never had any problems and bills seem pretty reasonable too.

Virgin, their broadband is ace.

My recent experiences with upgrading my Virgin broadband would suggest that their call centre support sucks but their on-site engineers are fairly good. Since I got the upgrade my broadband’s been pretty good. Before it wasn’t bad but hampered by a creakingly old cable modem.

I’d love to have fibre broadband. But, where I live, it’s good old creaky copper.

Free from work though 😀

Ok , I am convinced and signed up, just wait for the team to install.

I found a speed test website with Geo mapping, and compared to my 1.6mb speed, all the local Virgin ones mapped locally were 10mb min speeds, seems impressive

Virgin are good when they work. Their customer service is appalling though. Saying that, our phone and TV have been perfect from day one. Great service, nice and cheap. Broadband…. many issues. I had to get middle class down the phone at them to get some decent help.

Oh, and their stupid engineers are prone to leaving the cabinets wide open all the time too. The one on the corner of our street has now been open for a week. I’m astounded no kids have lit a fire in there yet or pulled all the cabled out. I’m lead to believe about 5 or 6 people have highlighted this to Virgin (including me)but they clearly don’t give a toss.

When it works though, very, very fast. It’s good tonight.

Consistently 10mb, which is what we pay for. Massively reliable. Went patchy for two days last week (just in and out randomly) , which is the first issue in 8 years with them and their predecessor.

cant beat virgin media fibre optic, been with them since they were telewest/blueyonder – never once had a problem.