[Closed] What's the best (and most reliable) broadband deal?

IME Zen. Defo the more expensive end, but the connection hasn't gone down in the 2-3yrs I've been with them. A mate has also used them for at 6-7 years and never had a problem either.

Plus they have genuinely helpful English-speaking English people in Englishville on the end of a freephone number who'll pick up immediately and help you out with anything relevant to their service.

Others will no doubt swear by various ISPs which is fine - I'm just giving you my tuppence (having experienced loads of providers (business and private) since the early 90s.

zen.
avoid plusnet like the plague, never getting cheap and cheerful broadband ever again.

+1 for zen they also do 1 month rolling contacts

Alternatively firefly - similar costs to zen, and similar levels of service (been with them for many years and never had any problems).

MrSmith - Member

zen.
avoid plusnet like the plague, never getting cheap and cheerful broadband ever again.

Other side of the coin is I have been with PlusNet since 2003 and even with my wife working from home we have never lost our connection and the speed is superb, not on their cheap package mind.

Happy PlusNet user here too.

Virgin at home, Plusnet whilst we are renting here (home is basically a building site at the mo) both excellent.

I may have read that plusnet are part of BT.

Have been on Pipex for about 10 years now (although they're now owned by TalkTalk IIRC). Can only remember 2 unplanned outages in that time.

slainte 😀 rob

If your on a cable street its got to be Virgin.

ADSL24 here and they're excellent not cheapest but very stable connection.

Plusnet here. It's cheap, and also cheerful.

No problems at all.

I have virgin and have no complaints.

[img] [/img]

Virgin here for the last 7 years, absolutely no problems. Speed is consistently better than the Sky,BT and other users locally according to the speed test results in local area that i use to test regularly. I pay for 10MB and get 9.8MB on the speed tests, other providers locally are getting 2-4MB and thats with some paying for 30MB broadband!!!!

I'm on Virgin cable, getting 2.4MB. Paying for L (10MB) Doesn't usually bother me, but can be a pain watching iplayer sometimes.

Sounds like I should be asking questions. What can they actually do, though?

Sounds like I should be asking questions. What can they actually do, though?

They can send an engineer to see if there is anything they can do, failing that you would probably get a discount on your service or a freebie chucked in due to poor service.

Worth a punt. If you have a virgin phone line, just dial 150 to get it sorted.

Other side of the coin is I have been with PlusNet since 2003 and even with my wife working from home we have never lost our connection and the speed is superb, not on their cheap package mind.

had lots of trouble with them, hours sitting on hold and no internet for days at a time, there was a website set up by disgruntled customers and the MD ended up sending out a lame apology after a group complaint to oftel.
never again, i don't care how cheap they are or who owns them now.
zen are no1 for a reason and i'm happy to pay for that service.

if i was to move it would be to be.com. owned by bt but they offer the fast upload speeds i need for ftp'ing big files.

I went through this a few months ago.
Our exchange is a rural one and isn't LLU'd, so went to BT. It has been good so far with nearly 8MB dowload speed.
If your exchange is LLU'd, have a look at who has a presence.

If your exchange is LLU'd, have a look at who has a presence.

You can use www.samknows.com to find out what's in your exchange.

One more for Zen

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all ISPs coming through a standard phone line going to be pretty much of a muchness? Isn't the maximum speed governed by the actual line and not the provider?

With the only way of improving above a certain level getting someone to install a faster cable, i.e. Virgin....

Yes and no.

The bulk of ADSL offerings are BT Wholesale resold by Honest John's Used Internets or whoever. The actual service will be identical at a technical level, the difference is purely in the wetware; ie, who you pay and who answers the phone when it goes wrong.

LLU is a different animal. Basically, the ISP gets to install their own kit in the exchange, so the technical service can be considerably different (in either direction). One universal constant is it's almost invariably cheaper.

Sure, the bottleneck is (usually) going to be the copper between your house and something more interesting, but there's more to a connection than maximum speed in the same way that there's more to a camera than megapixels.

[img] [/img]

Hmm that's slow, try again with somewhere closer.

[img] [/img]

I just had Plusnet fibre optic installed 🙁 After comments above I'm now wondering if my house will implode!!!

Had virgin cable for the best part of 10 years - maybe an outage every couple of years. Never ring them.

I just had Plusnet fibre optic installed After comments above I'm now wondering if my house will implode!!!

Interesting reading perhaps:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4661-ispa-awards-2011-finalists-announced.html

Sounds like I should be asking questions. What can they actually do, though?

They can sent an engineer round to check out your connection. Had one check mine out a few weeks ago as I was getting poor cable modem stats, he found a dodgy component in the street connection box and fixed it. Modem status page now reports perfect stats.

To view your Virgin cable modem stats:-

Visit http://192.168.100.1/ (your modem config page) Click the "login" link and enter root/root

Then click the "Downstream" menu item.

What values are you getting for "Downstream Receive Power Level :" and "Downstream SNR "