Features - QOTW: Are you happy with your broadband provider?

[synaesthesia]

Happy with Sky. Speed/ping isn't great (15Mbps) but very much worth the hassle from Virgin who were absolutely diabolical. Their speed was good but reliability not so much and customer service was like banging your head on a spikey wall. The average support email sent to them had 5 follow up's from me along the lines of "Please re-read the original email and respond appropriately" with threats of taking it further increasing in each mail. ISPA involvement soon sorted them out so I could leave their crap service - thank god that happened the month after Sky LLU'd our exchange.

[Apex]

"overnight downloads are long gone" - Nope; not with VM and the traffic management they have.

If i purchase a game on Steam etc i have to leave downloading it till after 10 at night otherwise when the throttle kicks in it basicly kills the net for us and while i know they say they slow it down what actually happens is very differnet to that.

VM Customer Support from oversees is crap, was crap 4yrs ago and still is crap - i try to avoid phoning them if i can it is just not worth the stress (guess thats the whole point with them being crap stop customers calling in)

Cable service; i was on the 10Mb service here till last week and part from about 2 days downtime in 4yrs it was ok hate the traffic management they have. Some times got DNS issues etc but meh. Do i think it's wort the price they charge; no.

Now on the double speed service so 20Mb - no issues so far but no doubt they will crop up sooner or later. still don't think it's worth the money.

[Jingee]

My ISP isn't great, but then again, most of my problems pertain to my wireless router...

[=assassin=]

I have talktalk, and speed is around 3.7mb - it's ok in general, but it would be nice to have more. of more issue to me is that every few months or so they go through a phase where the phone/BB can go dead just after midnight for a week or two at a time. It's quite annoying if I'm gaming online, or still have things I need to check before I go to bed.

[Champman99]

I've been happy with Sky. Very very few outages, consistent speed which is close to what they estimated for my line and no FUP!

[KeyboardDemon]

I'm with BT infinity and my last major download was Just Cause 2 after buying it in the Steam Sale, the 7.7gb package took nearly 15 minutes to download which I was pleased with, the only issues I have tend to be with people's upload speeds as many sites can't send the data fast enough to saturate the available bandwidth. I can't fault the service itself though and I am very happy with it.

[Dareos]

My provider is downright awesome, not only do they give me 100 meg connection, TivO and phone for a measly amount every month, their tech support is absolutely astoundingly good. Every time I have phoned I have instructed the agent on the other end of the phone what to do with my particular problem (in one case they phoned 2nd line, who looked at my account and went, "listen to him").

Overall, brilliant service, and it seems that if i go visit their offices 5 times a week, they even put money in my bank account, how good is that?

[alpha channel]

Yeah I'd say I'm happy with Eclipse, I've been with them since switching to broadband back in '98 and in all that time I've had oh about four outages, only one of which was their fault (the other two included a driver smacking head on with the telephone pole at the top of my street and taking it out and the flooding we had recently hitting the exchange of the new place). The support that I've got from them has been darn good with no complaints.

The only fly in the ointment that I've ever really had was the installation of FTTC at the new place and that was down to BT as it took two attempts (and the thick end of twenty days) to get the necessary bits installed.

[PsiAmp]

100/100 Mbit/s and that's what I get on torrents and Steam.
~100 IPTV channels with some in HD.
24/7 support
~$12 /m

No limits at all. No bandwidth or ping difference over a day. Some months i exceeded 1 TB just to check if anything happens. Works as a swiss clock.



So YES! I'm very happy with my provider.

[B0FHY]

Appauled with my ISP (Karoo/KC) when it comes to value for money, however I get good throughput on speed usually (averaging 20mbps on ADSL2+). Another annoyance with them is similar to brasco - fibre being layed everywhere yet still won't give me it, or tell me when it's likely (can't even nail it down to this year or not)

[atomictom]

I've got virgin media and i consistently get the speed advertised (60mbit) and when there is a problem(which doesn't happen often) they fix it quickly. Their business practice however, leaves much to be desired, as i found when they offered my household a 'free upgrade' to triple our speed recently(20mbit to 60mbit). There was no warning about this would force us to stay with them as our provider for another 12 month. this was hidden rather deeply in the Terms and Conditions which not a huge number of people read!
In the end we stayed with virgin because our only other option is getting a crappy 3.5mbit from BT

[TiMeZeRo]

2 days of no internet from virgin media in my area atm (pe19) and looks like its not back until tomorrow afternoon so ... no i am not happy with my broadband provider atm

[ladcrooks]

I myself have been with ntl, virgin. I'd say the best out there. All that crap BT come out with - ads! A lot of it is still twisted pair! Hence slower speeds. And before people moan about services being down, well that happens to them all! There you go, my 2 pence!

[nibbler]

I'm with AOL and it's pretty faultless. I used to be annoyed all the time but having been with them for about 3 years, we threatened to quit and now we get 12mbits (as fast as our line can go), unlimited downloads, no traffic shaping, line rental and unlimited anytime calls within europe for about £25 a month. Bargain.

[krazy_olie]

talk talk: nope

[crossy]

Provider: Virgin Media
Pros: reliability (I work from home, so I NEED this); speeds quoted appear to be achievable in practise, (e.g. when on 30Mb/s service I was getting downloads of just over 3.5MB/s)*; not the most expensive; no monthly data allowances; far faster than the competition locally (e.g. 5-6x what BT customers are getting in benchmarks).
Cons: most technical support outsourced and poor; *recent speed double to 60Mb/s doesn't appear to have delivered notably faster download speeds, (maybe I've just not found a remote site that CAN deliver 60Mb/s) - e.g. speedtest.net rates my "60Mb/s" line at around 40-42 download; upload speeds not impressive (2.8Mb/s); supplied "SuperHub" is a useless piece of **** (mine's been demoted to merely a modem and I've got a half-decent router in there as well).
Overall: yes pretty satisfied, but there's definitely room for improvement.