uSwitch reveals UK streets with best and worst broadband speeds

[crossy]

Which is more or less exactly what has been said earlier in the thread: when it's working, their service is great; when it's not, you're absolutely stuffed.

You're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying for a femtosecond that VM are the pinnacle of ISP's and have no scope to improve. I can give you a list of more than a dozen improvements I'd like to see. No, what I was getting at was while they're not perfect, they're also not the nadir of broadband providers that seems to be stated.

They do well because they provide a decent service to a large number of users without any problems. When things go awry, their customer service ranges from non-existent to absolutely diabolical; for a long time it was impossible to even get a contact phone number off their website without clicking through page after page of frustratingly patronising documentation on how to reset a router. Posting on their support forums didn't help either.

And that kind of backs up what I'm saying - I've heard the same complaints from ex-customers of Sky, BT, TalkTalk, etc. And don't get started on the mobile phone companies, they seem to be in a unique group of bad service.

When you do get a number to call, expect it to be 20 minutes minimum before you actually get to speak to anyone -- that's assuming you've already spent the pre-requisite half-hour needed to work out how to navigate their automated phone system without dead-ending yourself.

I hate these automated phone systems ... period. That said, while VM's is complex, I get to a "meat bag" a lot quicker than 20 minutes. However, I will admit that I usual have something simple to report - invariably "my phone's stopped working".

My dad forgot his VM account password and security question recently -- a nightmare situation, granted. I spent over an hour on a Sunday working through the automated phone system; I was first told they'd need to shut down internet & TV access to the house (they said to hang up if that wasn't acceptable), was then asked for the password which I didn't have and was finally told that their human call centre was closed, before being disconnected.

Agree that the "Sunday shift" - which seems to be outsourced - are bl**dy diabolical. Unless the router's gone up in flames (or similar) then I invariably leave that kind of call until the "day shift" are in.

Yes. Fastest service in the city is 3MB, from the government granted monopoly supplier. Of course, I use 3rd world as a joke to complain about internet service here in the city, but the reality is that large parts of NM and AZ are Indian Reservations, where the most people don't have running water or electricity. Third World definitely applies.

Many thanks for the large dollop of "get real guys" - as you say it's a bit rich us complaining of being "deprived" because you can't get to Facebook etc at faster than 10Mb/s when there's people in "developed" countries lacking the real basics.

[Gerrard]

Yes. Fastest service in the city is 3MB, from the government granted monopoly supplier.

But that can change now following the FSC's vote, correct? I was staggered to read up about the situation in the US. You had two cities getting fed up with the major suppliers, so they made their own municipal providers which provided much better connections at a better price. So the major suppliers stopped it from happening elsewhere in the country via the law to maintain their monopoly. Capitalism at its best...

My fibre was installed yesterday and it will get connected tomorrow (BT).