Current Go-To Broadband provider? Still Zen?

[kindai]

Just came to the end of my BT contract, with price rises included current paying:

BT Privacy Caller Display 12 months
Calling Plan Unlimited Evening and Weekend Plan
Broadband Superfast Fibre 2 Unlimited
Line Rental is now included in your package
Total:

£58.49 PM

Which, given I get 17Mb on this crappy phone line is excessive.


Zen equivalent seems to come in at

Unlimited Fibre 1
Line Rental Plus
Caller Identity
Unlimited Anytime Minute plan

Total monthly payment £44.40


PlusNet and Sky come in at £35 a month, but, I don't mind paying that little premium for getting someone on the other end of the phone who isn't a total moron when things go wrong (and the crap lines on our estate mean they will go wrong). The Zen static IP would be useful for working on customers servers.

Any other contenders?

 

[ChrisD.]

PlusNet. I’ve noticed no difference after moving from Sky to Zen and finally PN, except more in my bank each month. Static IP address too for a one off £5 payment.

Let me know if you would like a referral code.

 

[Sui]

I moved in last month and got Plusnet, kept dropping connection each day. Raised a thread on their forums, received a response within a few hours stating they'll get openreach to sort it and was fixed 2 days later.

Not sure if other companies are that quick to deal with issues, but I was pretty pleased with how quickly it all got sorted, even if it was something simple.

 

[Steveocee]

Plusnet. Cheap and still decent. Have had to contact them twice and was resolved quickly to my liking (and I work in the ISP industry).

 

[lee32uk]

Pulse8 are worth considering if available to you. I have been with them for a couple of years and the service has been excellent. Had maybe two or three outages in that time. No throttling at all and no call centres to navigate...just straight through to someone when you ring.

Also they do a '30 day' rolling contract, so you are not tied in to 12/18 months like you are with a lot of providers.

Not sure how the price stacks up against Zen but worth a look. I was actually looking at smaller ISP's like Zen and IDNet before settling for Pulse8.

https://pulse8broadband.co.uk/fibreoptic-broadband

 

[kindai]

Rang BT up to cancel, they told me the best they could do was reduce it down to £55 a month and change from evening and weekend calls to anytime.

Told them it still kinda sucked and pushed back, so id be moving to plusnet.

Ended up knocking it down to 44 quid a month for:

Line Rental
Phone - Unlimited Anytime Calls add-on
Broadband - Superfast Fibre 2 Unlimited
BT Privacy Caller Display FREE FOR LIFE
Next day minihub guarantee if internet goes down
Free next day engineers visits for any issue regardless of fault
UK only priority support
Price locked 18 months

 

[Kelt]

I pay £26 PM for 200MB and landline at Virgin.

No other ISP comes even close.

 

[kitfit1]

I pay £26 PM for 200MB and landline at Virgin.

No other ISP comes even close.

Mmmmmmm and that's the problem with Virgin isn't it, no other ISP comes close because they are all providing a service to the vast swathes of the country that Virgin can't be bothered to cover.

 

[ChrisD.]

I pay £26 PM for 200MB and landline at Virgin.

No other ISP comes even close.

Mmmmmmm and that's the problem with Virgin isn't it, no other ISP comes close because they are all providing a service to the vast swathes of the country that Virgin can't be bothered to cover.

Not to mention the complete lottery on area subscription. VM are a terrible ISP if you have any sort of issue, not only their actual product but the customer service too.

 

[Vogon]

Just wanted to chime in as in a similar position.
Moving house means I have to give up Virgin (who I have been with for over 8 years with only small niggles and generally very good service despite the trustpilot ratings). as they are not available in the new area.
The trouble is pretty much every provider is slated.
Sky have some nice packages and a phone call netted me an offer to drop connection fees, but 18 month contracts means if the BB is unreliable and /or below advertised speeds I am tied in.
With a house of 3 kids and 2 adults, heavy use of Netflix and online gaming means I need the 60+ mbps services.
PlusNet seem to get slated on trustpilot, but are one of the best rated on MSE, so its really hard to judge.
Now TV have a 30 day contract, but £60 fees upfront.
I want to keep costs down, but don't mind paying a bit more to get a solid reliable connection with decent speed.
I keep going around in circles working out who to go with !

 

[Lartyconshayo]

Get zen cheaper here:

https://campaigns.thebigdeal.com/zen-broadband-deal/

 

[MrRockliffe]

but 18 month contracts means if the BB is unreliable and /or below advertised speeds I am tied in.

This isn't the case any more. If it's below their advertised guaranteed speed, you're allowed to leave without issues: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...peeds-mean-you-can-exit-contract-anytime.html

However, switching to a new ISP won't necessarily solve the issue.

The biggest difference I've ever achieved is buying a router that allows you to configure your DNS, and using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 & 1.0.0.1 service. It doesn't improve throughput, but massively increased delays and hanging I was getting when loading web pages.

 

[Ayahuasca]

The biggest difference I've ever achieved is buying a router that allows you to configure your DNS, and using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 & 1.0.0.1 service. It doesn't improve throughput, but massively increased delays and hanging I was getting when loading web pages.

Yep, I'm only with Vodafone and fortunately their supplied router allows you to change DNS and I've noticed a nice difference using Cloudflare's service.

I don't use Wi-Fi a great deal, everything that needs a reliable connection is wired in.

 

[Vogon]

This isn't the case any more. If it's below their advertised guaranteed speed, you're allowed to leave without issues: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...peeds-mean-you-can-exit-contract-anytime.html

True, but reliability might not be covered ?

Thats another aspect I guess the router abilities. I don't know what the cloudfare achieves for normal joe bloggs internet users (not heard about it until now), but a decent wifi signal is of benefit, although I do have and currently use a mains wifi extender as the week point on the VM router was range.
I was of the understanding one of the best supplied routers was the BT hub, but BT are quite a bit pricier than most.
I don't know how comparable or configurable the sky Q / Now Hub2 (same thing as far as I can research) are ?

Vodaphone I wouldn't go near EVER, We had a 30 day internet only sim from them to use on holiday 3 years back, and they ignored the cancelation and billed us for further use (although it was useless so we never actually used it). after 2 years they finally agreed we had paid up and owed them zilch, only for us to find a few days ago they are still listing us as outstanding £29 debt on credit checks.
They are a nightmare to contact, have no inter department communincations, and customer service is shocking. no way I would ever deal with them for anything !

 

[Vogon]

Get zen cheaper here:

https://campaigns.thebigdeal.com/zen-broadband-deal/

Says offer closed when clicked, current "offer" is now more than BT !

 

[MrRockliffe]

True, but reliability might not be covered ?

Thats another aspect I guess the router abilities. I don't know what the cloudfare achieves for normal joe bloggs internet users (not heard about it until now), but a decent wifi signal is of benefit, although I do have and currently use a mains wifi extender as the week point on the VM router was range.
I was of the understanding one of the best supplied routers was the BT hub, but BT are quite a bit pricier than most.
I don't know how comparable or configurable the sky Q / Now Hub2 (same thing as far as I can research) are ?

In really basic terms, a DNS server is like a big dictionary of website addresses. The quicker the server is at finding the address for the website you're trying to connect to, the quicker the perceived speed of loading that web page is (since most broadband connections are already plenty quick enough to download the info - the bandwidth available).

Essentially, what I'm saying is that if you break down the time it takes from clicking a web page to viewing it, if you're using your ISPs DNS server, a large chunk of that speed is because of their slow server (Cloudflare reckon the average DNS speed for ISPs is >60ms!)

Don't forget, most latency tests you can do through Speedtest.net, for example, will offer results of 25ms or less. Using cloud flare is the difference between an added 200% of latency (>60ms) and 50% (11.6ms for 1.1.1.1)

There are also other factors, but regardless; that's a monster difference for a 2 minute job.


(please feel free to correct me anyone as this is just what I've picked up when researching)

 

[Lartyconshayo]

Says offer closed when clicked, current "offer" is now more than BT !

soz didn't check it - thought it was ongoing

 

[BigT]

FTTC is FTTC is Openreach. Choose ISP on data caps, traffic shaping policies, customer service, price etc. but the infrastructure is the same no matter which ISP.

I too found changing DNS servers on my router made the connection a bit more 'snappy' but an even bigger difference I found was having a well tuned PiHole on my network. I cut our tens of thousands of internet requests even leaving my network and consuming the internet connection every day. Not just from ad services but it also lets me stop my IoT devices talking home or reporting statistics etc.

 

[Vogon]

Forgive my ignorance, but as openreach does all the non virgin providers, wouldn't the reliability of the actual connection be the same regardless of provider ?
oops I think that's what BigT just said :0

Is the pihole you speak of just a service you pay for and setting on the modem, a piece of hardware or ?
If a setting, can BT and Sky hubs be configured or are they locked out ?

 

[BigT]

It’s a piece of software designed to provide network wide ad blocking. Originally designed to run on a Raspberry Pi (hence the name) but you can run it on any Linux machine. I run it in a docker container.

https://pi-hole.net/

You give it a static IP and tell your router to use it as it’s DNS in a setting. Most ISP routers let you change this setting but I don’t specifically know the BT and Sky hubs.