Students in UK and Ireland Vote Glide as the Best Wi-Fi Provider
Business, student and residential ISP Glide Group, which is currently busy expanding their full fibre broadband network, claims to have been named the number one student WiFi provider in the UK and Ireland, according to an unspecified new student lifestyle survey.
The survey, which is said to have taken feedback from 300 properties and over 20,000 students, awarded Glide the top spot with an 82% satisfaction rating, outperforming all other providers. But it should be considered that we don’t know what the results were for their rivals or where the survey came from, and Glide is also the largest provider of managed internet services in the student accommodation and build-to-rent sectors.
Tim Pilcher, CEO of Glide, said: “This is a huge win for Glide, and we couldn’t be more proud! The survey results show that our commitment to providing exceptional internet services is paying off. We’re the number one choice for students because we deliver what they need – fast, secure, hassle-free connectivity.”
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I’m with Glide and they seem to be incapable of being able to provide gigabit here with speeds ranging between 50Mbps (yes.) all the way up to 700Mbps (on a good day) over a wired connection.
After jumping through hoops by sending their agents about 20-odd speed test results, both over wired and Wi-Fi, they finally agreed to send a contractor to take a look, who instead dropped off a box of equipment (new ONT/router, optics, etc) without telling me until I phoned up the week after to be told that I’m to install the new router myself while they book another visit.
A month later, no sign of anyone, called again, booked another visit, guy came and said it looked like a site-wide issue (given that our friends in the opposite apartment block, same premises, are getting the same issue) and told me it’d take a couple of weeks for it to be looked at after the Glide agent on the phone said the same thing.
Another thing; no third party routers are permitted, with managed switches and routers getting automatically blocked and they disable bridge mode on both Nokia models that are currently in circulation because of concerns of it potentially “messing up the entire site”. I suppose this is to be expected in student accommodation where every AP is managed, but this is a residential deployment with just a single router.
There’s no other ISP servicing this place and while their support are very quick to answer the phone, getting any action taken has been impossible so far.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk :^)
kinda easy to be the best when your the only option?
I had Glide as my ISP when I was in Student Accommodation and was generally really impressed with them. I believe my site was on a 1gbps circuit but was limited to around 300mbps per person to prevent one person completely saturating the connection. They also brought out a Home Network product giving me my own VLAN for all of my devices hiding them from others on the network preventing issues with people casting music to the wrong speaker or printing to my printer. Unfortunately, at the time the Home Network feature had issues working over the wired network in my building but worked fine on Wi-Fi. They disabled devices on Ethernet being assigned to your specific VLAN and just left them on the site wide VLAN. The Wi-Fi was good enough without Ethernet really being needed so that’s what I ended up using.