Broadband Internet Access (in the UK)

plusnet are pish

to this day the best service I've had was from virgin fibre. doesn't come to our house unfortunately : /

problems w plusnet: frequent drops on laptop (which is a 2020 model so has a decent wireless card); iOS devices unusably slow on it (tested on work wifi network where they're blazing fast so again it's not their chips); it's... not all that fast. streaming on my smart TV is pish too but I'm putting that down to the fact my TV is at the back of the house, and down a level from the router

also when I signed up you could talk to an advisor live on their website. they've since removed that functionality (was pre-rona) which is super annoying. fuck a phone

It’s on the expensive side, but I find Zen’s service to be excellent.

Just switched from Virgin to BT. Virgin were fine I guess, the odd outage but less than once a month, but the price had skyrocketed - I probably could have called and renegotiated but BT had an offer on and good feedback in the neighbourhood whatsapp so fuckit I switched. Virgin really didn't want to see me go. If the new router takes less than ten minutes to start up after it has to be reset for any reason then it's a win.

I keep going through this cycle with Virgin where my bb package is about to go up in price and they offer me a faster more expensive package on a *special rate* 18 month contract. Even though I have absolutely no requirement for even faster broadband. I'm just utterly guileless and am like go for it, that sounds fab!

why didn't they offer that to me, the fucks, I've been paying over the odds for years.

oh wait, more expensive... hmm nope!

my last package was 60 odd quid and it was supposed to be 80 odd quid but it was on an 18 month special deal. So now I have one that is 75 a month on an 18 month contract that will go up to 90 when the contract expires. Fair to to say I'm a pretty easy mark. Could start a money losing website.

i have found having your own router as opposed to the one supplied makes things a lot more stable, and configurable.

i have been with BT forever, so, they never ever offered me a Hub, and have always had my own.
then a few years back problems started to occur.
rang BT explained they had never ever sent me a Hub,
and the cheeky b^stards said it would cost me for them to send one (£60!).
f*ck that.
(also, i believe that to reconfigure anything, you have to call the supplier and get them to do it ? )
went to pc world, bought a new belkin (for more than £60 - but still), as mine was clearly obsolete.

however, all of this is minor in comparision to the fact our road is a little snicket road off a main road.
so, there is no way we will ever get fibre up here.
good old copper for us with max speeds = 12Mb.
(fine for me + one other most of the time)
after a couple of years of realising that i was paying more than folks in my town who were getting 35Mb+
i rang and kinda gave BT grief about the situation.
15 mins later, they gave me a 2 year deal for £30 per month.
when it came to recently renew the price they actually dropped to £28.

which for 12Mb and extras i.e my daily call to my mum,
i am ok with.

as i said, fuck their toys : if you can, get your own.
a lot more options especially if you run an internal network.
DHCP (i.e. the default) for Sonos can become a proper pain.
with your own router, you can define the IP address of your Sonos devices,
which i found to make things a lot more stable.