Hi,

If you have sky tv and have been offered Sky Broadband for £0-£10 P/M my advice would be not to take it. Since we have swapped from Wanadoo/Orange to sky broadband it has been hell ever since. Im timing out atleast 10 times perday and im running 8MB, during every timeout i have to get up go downstairs and reset the router. Sky have told us different things by different people (i.e To many computers, Main socket, Faulty WLAN Cards). This internet is only useful for people who browse the internet about twice a week (If its on).
As i get so furstrated by loosing my car on CLC server i have to wait in a very long que to rejoin the host. I also did some research and i 9/10 slagged the internet off with the following:

I recently switch from NTL to Sky, my motivations were simple: NTL is far too expensive and it is very difficult to speak to someone on the help line. The Sky offer looked on paper very attractive from £0 for the 2mb broadband to £15 for the 16mb... For Chrismas I decided to treat my self and went for the 16mb.
What I have experienced since is nothing but torture! The quality of service is terrible, constant drops (ie no more internet!) only solved by switching the modem on and off, and believe me this is very anoying when you have to lift your fat arse form the sofa every 5 minutes! When the internet is working (not often...) I get on average around 0.5mb (instead of the 16mb promised...). I managed once to get 6mb for 2 minutes which is still 10mb off the16mb I have signed for... I got on the phone with the support team after a very long wait (Ntl style...) and they were clueless, and useless... I am stuck in a 12 month contract, I cant wait until the 19/12/07, the last day of my contract...

This is exactly the problems what ive been having then i have to nag you guys thinking it was my pc or the router. I think Sky Broadband are going to do something about this quickly or people will be changing.

Whilst im doing this message can a few people kindly put the suppliers if they recommend them and they dont timeout? Because that would be very helpful because ive lost hope with sky but 0.0001% of me thinks that it will improve. Its clearly not any good for LFS, and hope you guys read this and dont get stuck with a 12month Contract which was the mistake we made.

Thanks,

[MW]NOFEAR

Pretty much all your points apply to Talk Talk's service as well, didn't work all afternoon, constantly drops and times out - sometimes for hours like today, the support's not even worth phoning, complete rubbish. Tried with both the supplied router and a new Netgear one, same dropouts and the like. And the best bit is..when it works, I'm lucky to see 1mbit, even though it "should" be a minimum of 2mbit.

Can anyone recommend a good (cheap) ISP? Would like to change but the only other ISP i've been with is BT.

NTL (Now Virgin Media) would be my first choice, perhaps a little pricey but its realiable. The customer service for NTL in general sucked, but its now under new management so perhaps they will improve in that area.

The modem and the topbox blew because of a thunder storm, they sent an engineer around 2 days later to replace it.. No questions no fuss..

This is the main problem with company's that are providing broadband as a secondary service. They are making a loss on their broadband to make money out of their other services, they therefore have no incentive to provide any sort of quality.
IMO , if you are remotely interested in having a decent gaming connection (low latency/reliable connection) then you have to pay for it.
A 'too good to be true' offer when it comes to broadband it usually exactly that...to good to be true.

@Rtsbasic, what do you call cheap? give us a budget and ill give you a few suggestions.....
I would also recommend having a good look through customers comments here.. http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php#

Quote from Rooble :

NTL (Now Virgin Media) would be my first choice, perhaps a little pricey but its realiable. The customer service for NTL in general sucked, but its now under new management so perhaps they will improve in that area.

Unfortunately in my experience the merger(s) between Telewest, NTL and now Virgin Media have caused the Customer Service and general Service to go downhill rapidly. Then again they've not applied any port throttling or heavy blocking that I've been aware of.

If you're heading down the ADSL route, Eclipse seem to still be pretty good at present (many of our smaller customers are running offices and home-worker connections from them without any problem).

Naturally if you can afford the extra wonga, Any business package should be unrestricted and uninhibited.

Bethere are also touting their 24Mb package again - I'm yet to see anyone who's actually taken it up yet, however.

dmwright:
Request a line test. They should do that for you, which will allow them to see if there's any fault on the line. It will cost them money, so be insistant. It sounds as if there's a fault somewhere tbh. Either that or you live in the middle of no-where. You can also request, if they won't do that, to put your line back into "training mode", whereby the speeds will fluctate for a week, whilst the system finds a stable signal from your home to the exchange. If you reboot your router excessively during the first week, you can cause the line speed to drop as the exchange believes the signal is too scrambled and decreases the speed to compensate.

Also beaware that whilst you can get upto XMb, doesn't mean that you will get upto XMb due to distances, etc..

Moving to OFF TOPIC.

Plusnet's throttling and general policy of buying less bandwidth than that required by its customers, I personally find offensive.

I see they don't feature in the top 10 of broadband providers - something that doesn't remotely surprise me at all.

Generally, Virgin is still performing fairly well, though those who came to the table from Telewest generally see a degredation in service where those who came from NTL see either improvements or no change. Evidently, they went the NTL way where customer service is concerned, which is a shame when all is said.

I've just got off the phone with tech support, and they've done a good job of sorting out the problem I had. One of the hops in my route to the UKCT server had fallen over the other night. Net result of that was a doubling of the ping. I just called them with the IP of the hop that keeps falling over, and I have a promise that they'll address it immediately next time I notice it's broken. They'll do that, even though the ping to the server is only ~30ms when it's bad. I can't really complain, I guess.

If the quality of service is that bad, go to your local Citizen's Advice Beaureau, you'll probably be able to get out of your contract.

I'm on Sky here and I've had no problems whatsoever. I'm getting about 6mpbs which is the maximum my line can hold while still being stable. I have never had the internet disconnect. Towards the end of the training period I got some time-outs from LFS and the internet occasionally went really slow but I've had no problems since.

My mum is on NTl/Virgin Media for the internet and phone, the service has got to be the worse she has ever had, but she's stuck to them because apparently she thinks that they are the best when it comes to the internet, not sure on the price but iirc she is paying something along the lines of £21 for 2mbit broadband. But the internet power is constantly going due to the modem conking out all the time, but I don't think that the modem will get replaced at all, we will just have to wait and see eh.

Personally I would prefer to go to BT broadband, I will ask my mum to see what she thinks about it after I've looked at their website.

Quote from Xaid0n :

My mum is on NTl/Virgin Media for the internet and phone,

A friend of mine just singed up to NTL/Virgin Media, the transfer was meant to only take few days but instead they were without their net for 3 weeks!! When i spoke with NTL for them they did all sort of checks to check the line, and yes they even forced me to restart the pc and their crappy router to see if that fixes the line, obviously it didnt as i already tried that!! duh! retards.

In the end it was another few phonecalls before they managed to get an engineer around their house to have a look at it, he said there is something wrong with their line and that it will need to be reconnected again to the box outside their house, but as it wasnt his job they had to wait another week for it to actually be replaced. The engineer tried to blame it on their carpets as the ntl cable led underneath them saying that friction and static build up was causing his net to bugger up.. rofl!

NTL is by far the worst service especially their customer services which are located in Deli I know 3 people who are with ntl and all had probs.

Sky is the same!

I am with bulldog, yes the company was really shit when i joined with them but now they have been bought out by Pipex service has gone up and I am very pleased with them.

The BT home hub thing looks interesting but i can image it will be pants too after a while.

Best to look for smaller isp's as they provide the best service untill they get big enough or some other big company buys them out!

yeah true, when we had the ntl tv the boxes were forever not working and not giving signals (which is silly considering the network is underground), since having Sky tv put it there is only probs with storms really other than that everything is fine with it.

My mum has had to phone NTL countless times to sort out the phone charging (they still charging for caller display although mum doesn't have it on anymore) and she has to wait usually half an hour to get through to someone, pretty lame service really.

To be hopnest i think you get good and bad reviews of every company. From ym personal experience of being with telewest (now virgin) for the last year and half i have not had any troubles. The waits on the phone are long sometimes but always got the help i wanted. Another reason i like them is because since they lost sky one, phoned to end contract and they have left me with the channels i had before but for free. So now i only pay for phone and internet

I am with bulldog, 16mb down 1mbit up,its very reliable and usually get a constant 13mb down on speed tests,
I have heard bad things about bulldog but i have never had any problems with them, the other bonus is its run on a monthly contract, my subcription can be cancelled at any time,

I live right next to loughborough university so my area is pretty well hooked up i presume.

http://www.bulldogbroadband.com/index3.asp

And there pretty cheap