ISP Reviews by philipa

We've been with Xilo for a month now and are very satisfied with the service. The move to LLU has improved our line speed in spite of our distance from the exchange. But what is most unusual is the helpfulness of the support and customer service. When I requested to release my domain name from Madasafish, it happened so quickly that my Xilo broadband had not even started yet, leaving me without email to my domain name. I contacted Xilo, who were happy to let me start hosting my domain name with them 2 weeks prior to my broadband switch over. I have also benefitted from Xilo's cPanel interface, which is far better than with my previous supplier. I now enjoy unlimited broadband each month for only a couple of extra quid. Hence I consider this to be a vast improvement in value for money.

We were with Madasafish for about 10 years. Initially on dial-up PAYG, then unlimited dial-up, and finally upgraded to broadband. Having my domain name hosted by them for free (originally the service was called FreeNetName) I was reluctant to move ISP. However I was hitting the 5GB included bandwidth too often, and the price had always been a little more than other equivalent services. Hence I did not consider the service to be great value for money.

The support existed, but was hard to get straight answers from. Replies often ignored the question asked. Nor did I like the assumed "the customer must be wrong" attitude, particularly when their technical explanations did not make sense by comparison with trusted expert websites. (And BTW I consider myself a bit of a geek.) In one particular support case, they messed around for ages with different settings and then waiting. I then had to press them to pursue BT, and finally they found ants at the exchange shorting my line and causes my connection speed to drop to 160kbs. I then had to argue to get interleaving removed from the line after they left that on as one of the experiments.

Finally, on leaving I found them unhelpful. Not surprising really, they no longer needed to try and keep me. The support ticket had about 5 different account termination dates. And after I had confirmation of account termination, I was then asked to request account termination. I also got some worrying emails abut change of invoice date. At no point could then categorically confirm I was not going to get any additional charges, instead they used a code "we've moved your next invoice date to XX/XX/XX", the date after account termination. So I quickly cancelled the direct debit payment. When I suggested I was due for a refund for part of the month after account termination, they simply evaded the question and refused to answer at all on the ticket. So I promised them an on-line review here!