hi.after four years of suffering talktalk broadband ive had enough.the speeds seem to be getting worse and worse.whats the go to provider for speeds and service.i was thinking bt but..?

Zen – not cheap but great service.
Or IDNet – much the same.

I’ve had great service from both – and good interactions with support when I’ve had to (mainly changing service/speed from memory)

I think it depends where you live to a certain extent – the the router helps – but agree the Talk Talk customer service is poor.

Jump on to uSwitch, that might give you an idea what your potential speeds can be.

I’m on with Plusnet and find them good but their router is poor. Compatible with the BT ones (as the BT own them) so I got one off eBay and it’s working great.

Had Sky before them, BT before them. All much of a muchness if you’re comparing fiber with fiber.

However – just tried to change my Mum’s talk talk broadband to someone cheaper and faster and they wouldn’t release her landline number. Which is not a problem for us as we haven’t had a landline phone for donkeys but was a real issue for her, so we stayed with them and upgraded to a new router and package which is faster and she’s paying less.

Gone back to Plusnet after having nowtv.
Wifi and router was terrible.
No problems and decent customer service.

I’ve been with Zen for years and always been happy with their service (although they aren’t the cheapest…) that said I generally only need to contact them once every few years (and it’s just been an outage that isn’t listed on their status page yet).

Whether they’d be any better than TalkTalk for your situation I don’t know, you’d get better CS but they still might not be able to fix the underlying issue if it’s OpenReach or router/WiFi related

I moved from Plusnet to BT.

BT router is very good, their complete wi-fi offering is excellent if you have a larger house or really need decent wi-fi throughout. I moved family mobiles at the same time so got a few linked deals. I’ve had no issue with customer services but then I’ve not really had any reason to use them other than to get more wi-fi disks.

I can send you a referral code then we would both get £50 amazon voucher……

A recommendation for a provider is totally dependent on your location. You need to talk to people who live near you.

Unfortunately, 90% of people are totally incapable of differentiating between their broadband and their “wifi”, so that is a much harder task than it should be.

We recently switched to NowTV for ~£24pcm including an anytime calls promo, router wi-fi seems slower than the Post Office one so far, but at the mo 2.4/5 GHz are synchronised and on the old BT router it was advised to split them.

Zen – after was recommended on here previously. Signed up and really impressed.

As above, check other factors about speed. These include: lots of neighbours now working from home, children hogging bandwith to game/school work, crappy router (IME, No.1 issue) and dodgy wiring (IME, issue no.2) into the house, also check your computer isn’t the slow issue (something we have had with colleagues) as it grinds through the updates, data and outdated hardware.

We have had good speed and service from Plusnet, I got a dafty cheap deal on Vodafone uber-fast at the start of lockdown so we are currently with them. It is a better router and noticeably more stable than the Plusnet router.

We’ve previously been with plusnet and their customer service was excellent – in the early days they quickly arranged for openreach to come and put a new master socket in as the old one was playing up. That’s probably helped with our broadband connection in general which has always been excellent since.

Last year went with Now Broadband – excellent reliable connection such that I didn’t need to use customer service.

Now back with plusnet & will probably bounce between the two as they both tend to offer great deals for ‘new’ customers, particularly with cashback.

Supplier has little to do with the actual connection speed/reliability – that’s more down to local infrastructure and so you’re really in the hands of customer service from your provider to resolve with openreach mostly. I’d give top marks to plusnet for this…. others may disagree.

Gone back to Plusnet after having nowtv.
Wifi and router was terrible.

Router and WiFi aren’t really that much to do with your provider. Sure, they might offer a cheap/free option but do people use them? It is very easy to replace with another.

Zen for me too. Rock steady fast connection and a support desk that actually know what they’re on about.

Be watching this thread as just discovered my mum is paying circa £80 a month for her phone & broadband (adsl) with BT!

I’m a cheap bastard so went with Post Office who are now Shell. Plusnet before who were fine, just dearer and for what we do (work and YT/Prime streaming) seems fine.

tried to change my Mum’s talk talk broadband to someone cheaper and faster and they wouldn’t release her landline number

I see you’ve resolved it another way, but that must have been a misunderstanding. Porting a landline number to a new provider is normal and Ofcom would come down on them if they didn’t allow it. Normally the processing to keep the number is done by the new provider, so it may be that TalkTalk meant it wasn’t for them to release it to you, it was the new provider to arrange direct with them.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice-for-consumers/costs-and-billing/switching/switching-landline

If you actually need a decent connection, for example you work from home, then a retail ISP might not be the best idea. I can’t fault Andrews and Arnolds (aaisp.net), they’re definitely pricier than some but their reliability is astounding, they guarantee no contention on any infrastrucutre they control, and when there is a problem with the infrastructure (line fault needing OpenReach for example), they are *militant*.

@greybeard – that was my understanding too. It was the new provider that cancelled the order and told us that the reason was because TalkTalk wouldn’t release the landline number. I had no way of checking and as lockdown’s been hard for my elderly Mum and her patience and energy for talking to customer services is shorter than usual I thought staying with them on a new contract was the easiest way of her not paying £55 a month for the worst broadband speed I’ve seen for years…..

Another Zen customer here, used to be with Talk Talk and BT, and had nothing but trouble. In these days of increased requirement for internet reliability they can’t be faulted. Yes there are cheaper options, but that’s true for most things in life. I’m happy to pay slightly more for 100% reliability and the customer service has always been impeccable.
You pays your money etc…

thanks for all the replies .some really good imputfor me to consider .im wanting reliabilty rather than price.not heard of zen before will check them out.

For the not-very-bright-about-these-things; how is Zen better than anything else? It’s still coming through BT pipes isn’t it?

Do they buy more bandwidth per customer than other suppliers or something?

Most of the above will just backhaul from BTwholesale or TalkTalkBusiness so most likely you won’t see much improvement whoever you switch to.

Have you asked current provider to check the line?

I’ve just gone to John Lewis which I think they use Plusnet. Must admit I think it’s the new router that makes it much better than the old BT service but I’m getting slightly better speeds constantly for half the price of BT.

I’d always change the router first. They don’t maintain performance over several years. And likely don’t offer good stable performance from the get go.

It’s a relatively easy and cheap thing to do before committing to another contract.

It won’t solve every problem but I do think it explains a lot of issues people have.

On a home level I’ve been with talktalk for over 10 years (for work I’m with a much better provider) – but I just didn’t use their stock router.

Only reason I haven’t changed away from talktalk is because I think service is largely poor from all the retail offerings. I.e everyone is looking to change from their current provider.

Market driven nonsense.

I don’t understand what people think the company are providing?

Your speed has nothing to do with your provider.

Are you just talking about the odd occasion when their are line issues and they call open reach to fix ?

We had a few issues with our Sky internet provision and after a lot of investigation I realised it had nothing to do with the speed down the line. It was the fact that nearly all “free” boxes are rubbish. Which is unsurprising as they are free. They’re gonna be the cheapest things a company can get.
Wifi extenders just make things worse IMHO, so I got a TpLink Deco M4 Mesh system for £130. Turned off the wifi in the sky box and let the Deco system manage all the connected (wifi and wired) devices, with 3 being prioritised (work pc for one!).
Much fast speed, no dropouts, no dead zones, perfect wifi across the whole house.
I think the main issue with the Sky router was that it couldn’t cope with the amount of connected devices so when a few asked for data at the same time it stole the data or connection from another device. I think it struggled with more than 5 devices, and I have 9 connected (there’s only 2 of us in the house!).
The good thing is that if I change provider it won’t make any difference to the house network.