In the UK, use this: https://www.aa.net.uk/
I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They just have a great reputation for good technical knowledge, privacy, and support.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They just have a great reputation for good technical knowledge, privacy, and support.
Edit: as an example, a bunch of years back I detected a routing loop. Emailed them the traceroute. Got a response back in a few minutes saying they were looking into it, and it was fixed shortly afterwards. So nice to be able to communicate with someone who can actually fix problems. The only other times I've had to contact them have been related to diagnosing problems in the underlying BT copper (not really their problem), and they were super helpful there too.
They're expensive, they have a data cap (but it's generous), and don't currently offer the higher g.fast or FTTP speeds, but:
- the support is consistently excellent and no-nonsense, and there's no upselling or questionable sales tactics
- phone calls are usually answered within seconds by someone who can actually help and doesn't just have a script, and they'll even give support over IRC if you want
- easy access to extra fixed v4 and v6
- they support the Open Rights Group, and have a clear stance against internet censorship
I've been a customer for over a decade now, and I still have no intention of leaving. Good CS on the odd occasion I need it more than makes up for the cost for me.
Only thing I'd love to see is access to faster FTTP speeds (330/50)!
One of the biggest resentments I have against Virgin is that you need the business package to support some types of VPN. Like the VPN in use by my lab. Static IPs? Business account. Anything useful? Business account.
That and the woeful password security practices they force on users. Letters, numbers and between 8-10 length? For the account login?!
AA on the other hand will generate a secure and memorable passphrase for you, which you can override but has to be tiptop secure to do that. There's even a button for "whoops, someone else could see my screen, please generate a new passphrase again".
I mean, who does that?! Genius.
Then there's the logs which relate to my account. I can see exactly what openreach have said about work on my account. When an openreach engineer was assigned and exactly what they're doing etc.
Honestly, if I buy a house, a deciding factor will probably be whether I can have AA as my ISP.
Ironically, the one major exception to this is Virgin, because they do offer an alternative product with technical advantages, whereas almost every other landline ISP is ultimately just backed by the same physical BT infrastructure. But given the speeds you can get in most parts of the country from that BT infrastructure now, the difference isn't going to be as important for most people as it used to be a few years ago.
AA or Zen simply can't compete when they are offering FTTC or ADSL.
I don't care at all about customer service. If you're contacting your ISP enough to care about the customer service, they must be doing something wrong.
Virgin Media currently offers speeds of up to 500mbps across their entire network. That will be 600mbps at the start of next month, and it's 1000mbps in some places (such as Reading).
I'd used Zen about ten years earlier and they'd been much better, so I was very disappointed.
My experience with Virgin was fine. The product was fast, there were a couple of short outages but no serious technical issues, and I had no problem cancelling when I moved a few years ago.
It's true that Zen are relatively expensive, though, and their lack of 24/7 support is still well below par. A&A would be the obvious alternative to consider if we were moving again or decided to change ISP for some reason.
Also not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.
Coincidentally, I switched to them once I managed to break free from Virgin. The major selling point for me: Lifetime price guarantee. After being with Virgin for 3 years and tolerating 2 price bumps, that was a breath of a fresh air.
Yes, the speeds are nowhere near what Virgin is offering, but for me, all the speed in the world cannot make up for obnoxious customer service, the terrible security and the shady practices they use to keep you handcuffed to them.
Edit: here's the graphs from the A&A control page for my line for the last week. These are really helpful figuring out what's going on if anything is strange. You can see that the mean RTT doesn't really move off the bottom axis, and the peak RTT pretty much never exceeds 50ms. http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/latency.png
Can confirm. They are awesome! You can see network logins/logouts for the last 12 hours.
I love the email I get whenever my connection has dropped, and the next email 30 seconds later after reconnection.
Absolute genius.
EDIT: Check out their network status page: https://aastatus.net/
That's throughout the day as well. Never noticed any issue with peak time usage.
Regularly get about 30ms ping when playing CS:GO.
If I could get FTTP, I would, but I think that was dependent on openreach.
So the speed is the same as any ADSL provider: 70 down, 15 up or so.
Edit: to clarify, I'm saying they don't singularly operate on the copper ADSL component of the open reach network.
Further more, their stance on internet censorship is laudable ("The Government says we have to offer customers a choice of censored internet. So here's your choice, if you want censorship pick another ISP.")
> The company's owner, Adrian Kennard (RevK), stated in a blog post that as of October 2010 the company is "xkcd/806" compliant, referring to xkcd comic number 806. This means that technical support callers who say the code word "shibboleet" will be transferred to a technical support representative who knows at least two programming languages, and presumably can offer more useful advice than a standard tech support script.