Choosing broadband provider

Evening all,

We are moving house soon and will be dropping Sky (hurrah) in its entirety.

So, given we are not especially demanding of our broadband how do we choose a provider? Reliability is more important than anything else if that helps.

Zen. Think I’ve spoken to them twice in ten years and one of those resulting in the price going down.

In reliability it’s very hard to beat virgin in my experience if you are in an area it’s available.

Currently with Zen on FTTC speed about 21mbps, No problems with them since 2004. City fibre have not long installed full fibre in our street, their partner is VF I can get 910Mbps for the same price im paying for zen 🤔

Zen cannot provide me with Full fibre, stick or change.

@bruneep – is there a reason why they can’t provide it you. If you have FTTP in your area then Zen should be able to be your ISP

@oldnick – another vote for Zen 🙂

If you have FTTP in your area then Zen should be able to be your ISP

Cityfibre do not share their network with other Communication Providers, so Zen can’t use it. If the FTTP was Openreach, Zen would be able to resell it.

Another vote for Zen. The only difference that matters really is customer service and when my fibre went down a couple of weeks ago I went from a couple of common support questions (the usual switch it off and back on again) to an arranged engineers visit in about 25 minutes, engineer turned up next day and replaced the failed fibre coupling at the telegraph pole and restored my gigabit fibre connection within a couple of hours.

I’d say that’s the best endorsement I can give, conversely a neighbor has been fighting with BT for close to 6 weeks now just to get his broadband connected and it’s still not done, he was none too pleased when my engineer turned up and it wasn’t for him!! 😀

from zen CS

At the moment, OpenReach don’t have any plans to upgrade your area to full fibre FTTP, but they add new locations into their build plan every three months. With the 2025 Copper Switch Off they are doing a lot more work to upgrade the infrastructure. I also checked with CityFibre, as we do have a partnership with them. But in your area we aren’t their chosen partner so it would be with another ISP via the CityFibre network.

Thanks Bruneep, good to know there is some collaboration going on. I’ve got Trooli installing outside but sticking with my FTTC for now

Another vote for Zen. Not the cheapest, but one of the best.

In reliability it’s very hard to beat virgin in my experience if you are in an area it’s available.

This shows how much these things vary geographically. My towns Facebook group, and streets WhatsApp group, report weekly Virgin issues with connectivity lost for hours at a time. In comparison, my Plusnet FTTC has had one 10 min drop that I’ve noticed in 20 months of working from home.

This shows how much these things vary geographically. My towns Facebook group, and streets WhatsApp group, report weekly Virgin issues with connectivity lost for hours at a time. In comparison, my Plusnet FTTC has had one 10 min drop that I’ve noticed in 20 months of working from home.

It does vary. I’ve found Virgin very reliable since they first dug up our old street for their cables when they were Nynex.

I’ve also found folks cursing their broadband supplier when their network/WiFi problem has been much closer to home. I fell into the same trap on a few occasions until I found I had a bad patch cable once and dodgy router firmware updates a few times. @timmys I expect your town and street folks are savvier. [edit – comment disparaging Facebook removed]

This shows how much these things vary geographically. 

Very much this. Our Virgin broadband has been pretty much bulletproof for many years but the last 12 months have been difficult. The messages I see seem to indicate power issues at the main hub in the local town, had a few downtime periods recently for “network upgrades” and everything seems ok again.
Definitely check locally on what quality of service people are getting.

Definitely check locally on what quality of service people are getting.

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Do thinkbroadband provide local area comparisons? Or OFCOM?

I expect your town and street folks are savvier.

No, as in most situations in life people = idiots. The majority of posts are people saying their “wifi” is down. But the ratio of posts about Virgin:(all other ISP’s) is about 9:1. And usually any post about Virgin sooner or later includes a reply from someone who actually has the ability to use a phone and status checker to confirm it is a known outage.