Does anyone have any recommendations for UK ISPs that have decent customer service?
Zen Internet (zen.co.uk) have pricing comparable to consumer ISPs, but provide significantly better service, and have support staff who can actually fix your problems.
Andrews & Arnold (aaisp.net.uk) are very much priced for business users, but on the flip side of that have possibly the best support available - on occasions I've used them in the past calling up their support line always resulted in immediately being answered by someone who knew how ADSL works inside out, and could happily diagnose routing errors without escalating to anyone. They also once called me to say they'd detected activity which indicated malware was present on my network, and that I might like to resolve that.
Depending on where you live, there's also quite a few ISPs popping up who are running their own fibre throughout cities and selling symmetric gigabit connections for about the same price as BT would charge you for 60Mbps.
We were literally trying to get them to work through a set up procedure they had somehow forgotten to do - on Christmas Eve, which was at least a week later than it should have been.
A&A have a good rep among geeks but they seemed expensive and I've never used them.
The best service I had in the UK was with Virgin (on local coax). Apparently their customer service is pretty poor. But aside from the occasional random outage the service mostly just worked, and at the advertised speeds.
It seems like a lot of the problems in the UK are down to the state of the POTS copper - if you're in an area that got NYNEX'd back in the day then cable is the way to go
All indications are that Cerberus are extremely technical - the sales guys were able to talk BGP happily (not literally).
What does AAISP do better to be so expensive compared to the competition?
1. It's more expensive, but not that expensive considering I use the internet for 12+ hours per day, and I earn an IT professional's salary. At a £15/month premium over other ISPs, it's a far cheaper luxury than a fancy car, a foreign holiday, or a pet.
2. ISPs I've used in the past have had truly shitty support - no matter how often you have problems, they'll just tell you to restart your router and close your ticket. AAISP claims to have support that can actually investigate and solve problems. I wouldn't know, as I've never had to contact their support.
3. I respect their pro-privacy/anti-censorship stance.
4. Many ISPs that are "unlimited" do have limits, they just won't tell you what they are or if you're close to them. They'll be in small print like a "fair use policy". Having spent a month throttled by Zen (admittedly years ago) I'll take an explicit limit over a mystery one. And AAISP's limit is more than enough for my purposes.
Perhaps I should look into Zen. They are the other one I hear good things about. AAISP does have a 300GB monthly limit (extensible for a fee) but I've never exhausted it, even with two people WFH and nightly TV streaming.
AAISP have strong principles of privacy and not interfering in connections. (No NXDOMAIN web page injection, for example.) Also, exceptionally advanced line monitoring tooling and configuration - they let you see telecoms-engineer metrics and parameters about your line, for what that's worth.
The price I quoted includes line rental btw.
Been really stable for me for a long time, and I have been using them for years for mobile + broadband. They are a really straight forward what you see is what you get organisation.
+ When you ring them up they just answer the phone which can be a bit of a surprise.
- The router they sent me was junk but I just use it as a modem and have some ubiquiti stuff sat behind it.
- Not sure what their opening hours and stuff are like for support, I think it's not far off 9-5
https://www.thephone.coop/help-resources/contact-us/
Tech Support is 24/7, anything else is 08:30-5pm Mon-Fri.
Used them for ages and only had one issue, and when I reported it, the person talking to me was an networking expert.
You must get a huge number of people phoning up with unfathomable problems related to their computer set ups that waste your time and aren't actually something that is your fault.
Her response was “oh that thing, I took it out of the box”. She’d been paying for an internet connection for the previous two years, while never connecting to anything but her neighbour’s WiFi.
Had zero problems in the last 5 years.
Since upgrading I've been having a couple 30-seconds long disconnections every day. Zen delegates any responsibility to OpenReach, and the latter has sent an engineer [1] which hasn't found anything wrong _on my end_ (of course), so I have to pay them 165+VAT for the call. And the disconnections are still there.
It's perhaps not Zen's fault, but I went to the most stable Internet I've ever had to one that disconnects randomly, while being 200m away from the cabinet and no-one can tell me where the problem is. Fun.
1: the engineer actually did a thorough job to make sure my line was OK, so the problem is elsewhere.