ISP Reviews by unb

Been with Xilo for 8 months on the Pro Office product and just left.

They're not bad at all - Matt and Tom are pretty good tech support; the speed isn't too bad, but the underlying infrastructure needs work.

I joined them from Plusnet who were throttling my line down to useless levels, and in that regard Xilo have been far superior - unmetered and unthrottled is mandatory as far as I'm concerned and they were true to their word. However, the C&W LLU hardware on which their products are based is shoddy. From the moment I joined them my sync speeds dropped 25% and I'd get disconnected every time the phone rang. Matt and Tom worked hard with me to diagnose the problem and it went back and forth to C&W for about a month - ultimately with no fix, despite it being reproducible. I guess with BT, C&W and Xilo in the mix, nobody was prepared to step up and take responsibility. Add in a few (occasional) network issues within Xilo's own network and it's been acceptable but nothing outstanding.

Today I've migrated to Be who also do an unmetered, unthrottled product for roughly the same money, but based on BT infrastructure. The sync speeds are up 25% and I now can longer reproduce the disconnection problem. For me, that confirms C&W's hardware in the Exchange is the fault. Hopefully this will be a long term improvement...

In summary, I'd recommend Xilo, but be wary of the C&W LLU infrastructure which various online forum discussions highlight as being under-par. 5/10 for 'services' purely because I didn't use anything other than pure connectivity. 8/10 for support because they're helpful, but ultimately didn't resolve my issue. 7/10 for 'speed' because it's the same at all times of day, but 25% slower than it could be. 7/10 for 'value' because £24/mth isn't the cheapest product of this kind out there.

I've been a customer of Plusnet's since 1998, back when they were a technically astute ISP with some concept of customer service.

I originally started to write a short essay in here listing the multitude of issues I experienced with their 'service', but re-living it just makes me more angry so I'll take the twitter approach:

backend capacity oversold; throttling so heavy: 7Mb > 128Kb; useless from 4-12; DNS even worse! cancellation a nightmare; RIP +Net-of-old.