Alternative to BT please (business phone/broadband)

[kevkojak]

I've just had an absolutely ridiculous bill from BT - £190 for a month, and the call charges on that total less than 20 quid!!

I have TWO lines running in (one for the phone and broadband plus an independent line for the card payment machine) which does bump the price a bit, but £40 late payment charge (all because I refused to go on direct debit when they pressured me for it), ridiculous line rental and charges put on by them (not requested!) for listings in the phone book and all sorts of other shite. I'm fed up of them, bill used to be about £100 a month and it seems to go up by a serious chunk every month.

I get cold-calls almost every day with companies trying to get me to switch, but they are all total unknowns and I'm not going to give my business to a fly-by-night. Any GOOD recommendations please? And sorry to sound ungrateful but I would prefer recommendations from personal use only rather than "a friends cousins Dad uses..."

Really looking forward to some responses, BT have had it, they are one of the worst outfits I've had the misfortune of dealing with.

[willie_gunn]

I was in a similar position to yourself.

Up until mid 2016 we had BT for our home telephone line and then a separate BT line for my office phone and broadband.

Broadband was painfully slow - so I upgraded to Super Fast Broadband which proved to be neither Super nor Fast! I could dial into a conference call or attend a WebEx, but I couldn't do both. The bill for my office line was consistently running at over £150 a month. I complained and they sent a BT engineer out who basically said that (a) the bandwidth was as good as I was going to get, and (b) there was no likelihood of ever getting BT Infinity.

Then the village where I live had Gigaclear installed so I signed up and I swapped over.

To say it is like night and day is an understatement. I now pay just over £50 per month for approx 200Mpbs line speed. It doesn't always hit that, but the days of worrying about speaking using a VOIP phone whilst on a web conference are long gone. Using Cloud for storage is now a reality, as is live streaming TV and films.

I still have the BT phone line into my office but the only calls that come in are asking me about the recent crash I was (not) involved in, so I will cancel that in the New Year too.

Gigaclear has had a few outages, but the difference in the way they handle these compared to BT is like chalk and cheese - I am notified via text if there is a problem, it is fixed in short order with text updates as necessary, and they contact me afterwards to tell me it is back up and running and to apologise for the temporary loss of service.

Hope this helps.

[Nogbad The Bad]

Zen Internet.

https://www.zen.co.uk/smallerbusines...band-packages/

[kevkojak]

Cheers for the tips but I don't want separate broadband, I want an alternative to BT with phone line and broadband. A full package - and it needs to have two phone lines so the card machine is independent. Rather a technophobe so I'm really not sure how to ask the questions I want answered to be honest, I might just need to phone around.

[Nogbad The Bad]

Cheers for the tips but I don't want separate broadband, I want an alternative to BT with phone line and broadband. A full package - and it needs to have two phone lines so the card machine is independent. Rather a technophobe so I'm really not sure how to ask the questions I want answered to be honest, I might just need to phone around.

I pay Zen for my line rental, calls & broadband.

Why the two lines, backup for the card payment machine if the line goes down ?

[kevkojak]

I pay for Zen my line rental, calls & broadband.

Excellent, that's what I need. APologies the website just looked like an internet provider.

[willie_gunn]

Cheers for the tips but I don't want separate broadband, I want an alternative to BT with phone line and broadband.

I may not have made it clear - with Gigaclear I get broadband.

That broadband gives me both internet access and a "regular" phone line via VOIP. Because it is a corporate service I get to use the self-same number I would have were I sitting at a desk in one of our offices.

Gigaclear also partner with Vonage, who offer VOIP, see https://www.vonage.co.uk/home/partne...kmQ36T-VU6l2g0

The Vonage phone plugs into the Gigaclear router.

You can even port your existing phone number: https://www.vonage.co.uk/useful-info...-phone-number/

[ViperStripes]

I can set you up with a company called Focus Group. Because Business Cost Management is my day job they'll put you on preferential rates for anything coming in from me. I'll give you one of the Directors direct contact details by pm.

BT will no doubt charge termination fees but unless you are in your first year then those penalties will have a very good ROI with the savings you'll make.

[AsifG]

Zen for me too

Had an account with them for years. Not the cheapest, but decent quality and good vfm