Full fibre broadband at last! Recommended ISPs?
Had an email from CityFibre to say I can now get “ultrafast broadband”.
I don’t need anything fancy, just a fast reliable internet connection for streaming and internet. I reckon a speed of 70 odd would be more than adequate.
The list of potential providers is huge and only Vodafone, TalkTalk and Zen were names that I’d heard.
Any steer on good and bad provider experiences would be very gratefully received. Also, anything I don’t know I need but should look out for?
Thanks
In law's got Community Fibre today and cancelled Virgin.
Been great so far but their router only has a single ethernet port which I wasn't expecting.
When my virgin renewal is due I'll get community fibre too. It's available on our road now but wasn't 6 weeks back when I had to renew.
Vodafone always have really good offers come up with CityFibre. £32pm for 900mbs. Probably not much more than your basics speeds and £125 gift voucher.Originally Posted by David_D
https://www.hotukdeals.com/share-deal-from-app/4045414
Vodafone have mixed reviews for customer service but decent deals.
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Thanks. Had a look but London only at the moment and I’m in the frozen north.
Thanks. Great price!
Lucky you they have/are tearing up the pavements around here but no idea when they will put some actual fibre in all their purple ducts.
Happy user of fibre internet for over two years now. We, all the addresses in the hamlet where I live, chipped in and had we struck a deal with a company to put in the ground and into our homes in the summer of 2019. Once installed, we had the choice of 3 providers. I checked which of them had the best reviews from users in other parts of the country. And indeed, there's hardly any problem. And if there's a problem it mostly caused by a digger pulling a cable or similar somewhere down the road.
Take notes how and where the cable runs in your garden. They 'shoot' the cable through the ground, no digging in the garden, apart from two small holes. Obviously, they shoot in a straight line and they'll try to avoid roots, so the routing is not always the most obvious one! Pics help a lot. When we had new fence installed, things went pear-shaped and the fence company hit /broke the fibre cable. Repairing is very easy, I must admit. But you need a special (and therefore expensive) company for that. Luckily, the fence company had to pay for it, and they're insured.
Once in the house: we opted for the 1Gbps option + modem, telephone and interactive Make sure your modem is hidden in a cupboard or something. It lits up like an American home with Christmas decorations: leds flashing all day long. The weakest part of the system is the section 'behind the modem'. We use those devices that send the signal through the electrical plugs *don't know the exact name.
A speedtest shows that, as a result, wifi is about 80 Mbps all around the house with those power plugs. That's enough for everything we do. But, we have a direct cable running from the modem to the annex almost 100m away and a router in the broom cupboard of the annex: the wifi signal there is about 800Mbps(!). And, we had it professionally installed.
Those 'through the electrical sockets' part of the system has the biggest risk of not properly performing. If you can avoid them, then do so! A direct cable from the modem works best. And with more than one device on the receiving end: make sure you get a modem with several ports.
Last edited by thieuster; 9th December 2022 at 16:12.
This will be like the washing machine thread.
People have very good and very bad experiences with the same provider.
None are perfect. But, how can you take recommendations when you have a different exchange that has its own reliability and speed impact of number of users
I suggest not overthinking it, Op.
Got to be Miele.
Been with Sky on it for just over a year. I was a very early customer of it (locally), as the installation guy had never seen fibre in a house in the area before.
Openreach came and did the installation and were very good too. It's been stable since day 1 and is excellent from a user perspective.
I went for the cheapest package as I'm not a heavy user and the extra £3 to double speed just didn't seem worth it - I live on my own so ~75Mb was more than enough.
Zen Internet.
Zen are the only Which recommended broadband provider:
https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/broa...uppliers-rated
If you send me a PM, I can send you a referral link (which is worth £25 to each of us).
I have Sky. £40 per month and 1,300mbps download. Bargain. Used to pay that for 20mbps back in the day.
My sister and BIL have been with ZEN for their business for years, and swear by them for support. BUT - how much support do you need for domestic use these days?
No wonder my speed is crap! You're sucking all the goodness out of the internet with that rate !!!
Yeah baby! I can download macOS Ventura is less than two minutes (which is handy as I download rather a lot from the Apple servers).No wonder my speed is crap! You're sucking all the goodness out of the internet with that rate !!!
Zen were great when I was travelling and I needed reliable customer service for the family in case it all went pete tong, we had to call a couple of times and always got straight through to a very helpful and knowledgeable person. Zen used the BT infrastructure and I was able to get a much better deal for a faster connection with BT so we reluctantly switched after a couple of years, but have had no issues whatsoever since.
Vodafone offered what looked like a good price but were an absolute shambles when it came to installation as they had to put in their own fibre link to the street box and sent out an engineer with a 50m cable fish for a 100m duct. When I was eventually able to contact an actual person in customer services instead of the chat bot, they claimed that the duct had collapsed which was BS.
Don't just do something, sit there. - TNH
+1
Been with them for a while now.
They seem to have acquired a reputation as not necessarily being the cheapest ISP, but well worth it if you should encounter problems. I've personally found their customer support excellent with them successfully managing/sorting both a complicated line switch and and also a couple of niggling external cable problems for me. In all instances they displayed ownership, persistence and good customer communication.
As Mr C suggests though, it mostly comes down to deciding how valuable that is to you.
Best improvement to our connection in recent memory was replacing a cr@ppy socket extension system 2y ago with a 3-unit TP-Link Deco system. It now just works.
This isn't a full Mesh, but we're now getting seamless 260 down and 24 up throughout the house and 1/3 the way down the garden. (We've been on Virgin cable for years which, I almost hesitate to say, we've found extremely reliable and further improved by removing hub duties from the Hub3 and handing them to the TP-Link).
Search for "TP-Link Deco S4 AC1200 Whole-Home Mesh Wi-Fi System, Qualcomm CPU, 867Mbps at 5GHz+300Mbps at 2.4GHz, MU-MIMO, Beamforming, Work with Amazon Echo/Alexa, Pack of 3" on Amazon for the TP-Link gear.
BTW you can add an ethernet hub to add wired devices to the TP-Link setup.
My contract with VirginMedia is due to come to an end. I pay £60.00 pm for 100 mbsp of power, two TV boxes and a landline. They wanted to renew at £75.
I mentioned city fibre had installed 900 mbps and I had a handful of leaflets offering cheap packages on the strength of this.
Final result, 18 month contract at fixed price of £51.00 pm for 250mbps, more TV channels and no charges for the landline.
Broadband is getting cheaper.
Virgin are cheeky feckers - now they only provide phone lines over the broadband and not "landline" its costing them nothing to provide it. It should be free on all contracts.
Got to phone Virgin this month, getting too pricy - I hate this bit.
I recommend lining up a nice pint of something you like, to be consumed after the call ends. You'll get a rosy glow...
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before all the new cable companies start gouging just as hard, too, so we might as well get used to making the call every year or two (speaking of which, I'll be on to Virgin in the New Year). Proven reliability is worth a lot, of course, and if Virgin ever start f-ing me around I'll be shopping elsewhere.
Thanks very much for all the contributions. Haven’t had a chance to study but I will read with interest.
Thanks. I’ll beat that in mind. Certainly always see Zen get praised for customer service.
Been with Community for a while. 1 year at 150Mbps which was great. I got such a good offer at renewal I think I ended up paying the same price for 1,000Mbps down. The router you get on this tier is also much better than the standard (wifi speeds on Wifi 6 are eye-watering).
Nothing bad to say about them at all. One of the few ISPs that doesn't hand you trash hardware, unless your needs are more specific. Fine for a home or small home office.
Literally not true.
Just because the industry is dropping legacy their is still a cost to digital lines.
Anyone on virgin at renewal just cancel within your in notice period they’ll give you a better offer than retentions would have
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