ISP loyalty madness - quality of service, or customer care?

[gherking]

I'm with o2 broadband, but my exchange (Penzance) hasn't been unbundled, which means I'm 'piggybacking' BT's broadband lines I think. This means I'm essentially getting a different service to those who have their local exchange unbundled.

It's £17.50 a month, and the service crawls to half a Mbit/s on weekends, but dangnammit, I just love o2's fantastic customer service.

I've been so burnt by the ordeal of sorting problems with other ISP's (including leaving them). The worst instance was being bounced from department to department when Toucan became Tiscali a year ago, having to pretend to be my housemate (the account holder) who had since left the area.

If I ever bugger off from my current ISP, I want to be able to say 'I'm off' instead of making up some bullshit story in order to stop the backchat to convince me to stay.

What would you do in this situation? Go for better broadband, or stick with someone who has nice Irish operators on the line?

[Mr.Everready]

How often do you use the customer services ? Only when you change operator ?

Why stay with a slow connection because some bloke helped you on the phone once !

Also have you ever left o2 before, how do you know what their service is like when it comes to that.

Get a faster provider, end of.
____________________
the undemocratically unelected mod of the Scottish section

[gherking]

Well, I went with o2 first off because of their 'forgiving' attitude towards traffic shaping and bittorrent usage. They then introduced traffic shaping eight or so months ago (!)

Traffic is not terrible, I'm a mile from the exchange. Approx. 5mbit/s in business hours, and about 2mbit/s when everyone and their brother is online. Today (Saturday), it's a nasty 30-60kB/s.

Who are you with, Everready? Anyone got any recommendations?

[Inkognito]

The one ISP i never had probs with was Virgin/Blueyonder.
Always get nice speeds and been really helpful on the phone the few times there has been a problem of some sort.

Currently with sky. Not impressed. The router is shit.
Never had the claimed 20mb speeds. 15mb max and very rare. Normally only get 10mb.
The only upside is that it's free

Was with talktalk a few years back. What a bunch of conmen.
They advertised free internet if you signed up for the phone aswell. So we did because they had free international calls to all of europe.
6 months down the line we got letters saying we owed money for 6 months interweb.
Hang on. It's free? We phoned up and got told that because they only had so many slots for free internet we didn't get put on free internet.
We had months of arguing with them and eventually told them we would be taking them to court for breaching their own contract with us. Got the debt removed and went back to virgin.
Stay well clear of talktalk. You will regret signing up with them

[gherking]

Mmmm Virgin broadband. I wish I had cable in my area.

That Talktalk ordeal sounds like a nightmare. Shady practice.

[iooi]

[panrider_uk]

Been with Tiscali/Talk Talk for years and not had a problem with them. I've also recommended them to friends and customers with no problems.

I've come across more people with problems on BT than any other ISP.

Mark
____________________
Current bikes: Honda ST1100 Pan European. Moto Guzzi V85 TT Travel

[iooi]

[chrisw]

[willis1337]

Be unlimited.

Very helpful customer service / tec help - cannot do enough for you. They will help you get it as quick as possible and sort out any wireless issues etc you have. Only prob you need to have a BT phone line which will push up the overall price, however I think it's well worth it (they's did me a deal on the monthy rate too as the best speed I can get is 8mb - no upload / download limits or speed limiting).

[panrider_uk]

[iooi]

[DanceLikeAMon...]

I'm another TalkTalk (ex-Tiscali) user who is really happy with the service.

I've heard a lot of people complain about both companies but I never had a single problem with Tiscali and my downloads speeds have actually increased since TalkTalk took over.

Pay £21 for line rental, proper unlimited downloads and free local, national and international calls and all is good,

[tahrey]

Another vote for Virgin neé Blueyonder neé Telewest neé Birmingham Cable... possibly because the Virgin service in this area has inherited all the hardware, customers and probably staff from a smaller, quite well focussed outfit, it runs like a dream. Prices probably aren't all that, but it's certainly affordable and fair for what we get.

(Basic cable package, i.e. Freeview + all the VoD services you'd get online but in full broadcast quality + some minor addons, decent internet, and non-BT phone line with good call rates and free evening/weekend calls to other customers)

Services have rarely skipped a beat in more than 10 years of use, total downtime comes to maybe one full day over all of them combined. Customer service is spot on, though they naturally have to treat you like a monkey until you demonstrate that you're not (a mate actually works for them as a fitter, it's quite clear from his stories that CS probably deals with a good number of actual chimps on a daily basis). No plans to leave at the moment, much as Sky and BT reps keep coming round here, knocking on doors and offering honey-trap deals, not quite getting the message that they're going to get precisely nowhere because we all know people with those services and know what a nightmare they are particularly if you want to leave. The only person round here with a satellite dish is the slightly odd HAM radio enthusiast a couple streets away.

There is throttling if you use a monster amount of bandwidth (which I tend to run into if I'm downloading stuff with get_iplayer), but it's not chronic... can still DL hi-def programs at just under 1:1 speed.
10 meg falls to 5 meg, eventually falls to 2.5 meg until it eventually resets back up to 10mbit at midnight. Have to really hammer the connection to see that though - like, many hours of full-rate downloading - and given that we're on the base package but still get a solid, damn near guaranteed 10mbit in light use, it seems fair. It's a hell of a lot better than using a modem, or the patchy sort-of-1mbit that BT offers in the sticks.

Just trying to keep from upgrading to their hi-def "V+ HD" PVR box and service. It's pure televisual awesome.

[willis1337]