Origin Broadband Reviews

Exceptionally poor service. Ineffective at dealing with slow speeds (at 6-7mbps vs. advertised 38mbps every single day). At this point I have endured a month of brick wall responses. If you are thinking of dealing with this provider, move along as they are very very poor.

I have been with Origin broadband for 2 years 3 months. For the first 2 years I was on a 78Mb fibre package (I was actually receiving 63Mb, but that was the line limit and I was very happy with that). I've got to say it was almost faultlessly fantastic, not a single complaint, so much so that this August (2017), I signed up for a 2 year 38Mb package, I was offered a supersaver discount... I.E pay 2 years upfront for a 30% discount, which equated to £430. Shortly afterwards I received an email to say Origin were "upgrading their hardware",

Since this "upgrade" I've been subjected to speeds of between 0.6 - 5Mbps almost every evening with ping above 130ms so totally useless for streaming, downloading and online gaming. Customer service should be renamed "Lip service" as they're very polite and amenable, but totally ineffectual.

On top of that they've "mistakenly" debited my bank account by a further total of £430 in 3 billing errors, which then takes 10-14 days to refund, I wonder if I'd not spotted these errors would they have rectified them themselves?

I had nothing but praise for Origin originally, but now suspect the company will be going under soon as it really has gone to the dogs.

This week after 11 appaling weeks of "service" I'll be getting a visa chargeback on the balance of my £430 "supersaver" and moving on which is a pity as I really LIKE to support smaller ISPs, but I can only have the p!ss taken for so long.

Origin broadband is one of the worst iproviders I have been with.
Service took ages to setup. Phone line was never setup correctly couldn’t even use 1471 I was diverted to BT although I was with Origin. Customer services is appalling. Ain’t *ot a clue wat they are talking about. Their tech advisor did not even know what an isp was. Never again

I ended a twelve month contract with Origin, because they increased their prices, without letting me know about this. And I spoke to them over the phone to convey this bad news to them; and they deceived me into staying with them by providing a misleading figure of £18.49 per month for their service. But when it came to my first bill it came to an astronomical £33. So I am am going to leave with all due speed these highly unethical, money grabbing so called ISP. And my advice to anyone trying to sign up to Origin, is avoid like the plague.

I decided to sign up for 2 years despite all the bad reviews, and have been pleasantly surprised so far. Part of my reason for going ahead despite the reviews was that I thought I should be an easy account to switch, since I was already on fibre and no engineer access was required, and I'm geeky enough to play around with router settings if required. I'm *very* dependent on fast reliable ISP though, so despite feeling ripped off by BT (£56/month), I was concerned about it being a false economy.

My switchover was on Tuesday. BT access was lost during the night (I got an email at 05:37 to say it was gone), and I don't know when Origin was first available, but it took me about 3 minutes to get connected when I plugged the router in at about 10:30.

So far so good since then. Speed the same as with BT (up to around 62/19 Mb/s down/up), and I'm paying about 52% of what it cost with BT, and the only problem has been seven very short outages, lasting 3-4 minutes at most (3 on Tuesday, 1 on Wednesday, 1 on Thursday, 2 on Friday, none so far today at 11pm). [update: no outages in the 8 days since then]

I called about the outages on the first day, and was on hold for 14 minutes, but the guy that answered seemed knowledgeable and helpful.

I'm very happy so far. The router (an ASUS DSL-N16 Wireless-N300) was very easy to set up, and has a strong signal and more options than I'd ever want to use. You need to change the administrator login details, and I also turned off "Enable WAN down browser redirect notice", as that was just annoying when I had an outage.

There's no ISP webspace or email address, but I don't use those anyway. One thing to watch out for is that when you end the contract, you'll probably have to give the router back or pay them £40. I actually prefer that to the BT scheme where they give you a free router, but it's locked so that you can't use it with other providers. I was able to unlock my BT Homehub 3, which wasn't easy, but as far as I can tell, it isn't possible to unlock the Homehub 5.

I took out broadband with origin as i heard through the grapevine they do not impose the dreaded Fair Usage Policy or Traffic Shaping at peak times like most of the big companies do.. throttling your connection right back..and i believe this to be the case.

I also opted for a useful static ip for almost no extra. However the compromise for me has been a consistant download speed of 900kb.. not even 1mb! A fifth of the speed the line is capable of. So only good for browsing and even that requires a router reset every week or so as all hangs. Terrible.

I've tried to stick this service out for almost 11 months now as not in much.. but now theyve just double the monthly bill for no reason. Enough is enough.. i wont be returning or recommending this to anyone.

Where do I begin?

Firstly I am truly astounded to be able to post this using my Wifi provided by Origin as I've had more reliable Alfa Romeo cars.

I transferred across in February and was promised great speeds, amazing 24h customer services and all seemed too good to be true!

I went for the Fibre package and I have reverted to using the 4G on my mobile phone as the internet is either not working or the speed is very, very slow (very frustrating)

I have probably lost a good 9 hours in holding for their tech support - don't expect to call and get through to someone any quicker than 30 minutes (my best score so far)

I wouldn't normally review an ISP and have never before, but I just don't want anyone else to be fooled into signing up with them - save yourself the headache and pay a bit more.

I have managed to get a few months refunded by one of their managers and they finally admitted it was their router at fault, this was replaced and it seemed ok to begin with but now its gone back to being extremely slow. I have called again. 1 hour after being on the phone it was raised to level 2 tech support... I was immediately put on hold for a further 30 minutes and just gave up.

Just moved to origin from plus net phone and braodband- good price for 12 months paid upfront- and extra for anytime calls - Router came two days ago, openreach did there stuff today 9th aug - set up router and wi fi within 30 min - speed and verything else seems ok for basic broadband - Up to now my experience with origin has been ok

The internet connection cuts out frequently, resulting in no internet access at all for any length of time between 5 mins and about an hour, but most often about 10-15 minutes. I notice this several times a week but I don't use the internet every day so I am not recording all of the outages. The speed can be fine sometimes, but a lot of the time there are severe slowdowns, and often there a periods of time lasting several hours or more with such a slow speed that the connection is barely usable. Customer service are polite, but it can easily take longer than half an hour to reach them, and they offer no solutions at all to the problems described to them, and will not do anything other than give excuses as to why the connection is so bad. The excuses range from explanations that slowdowns and outages are normal for all IPS, to advising me that household appliances like my toaster and my next door neighbour's TV are to blame for the isses with the connection, when in fact these issues were either absent or very rare with other ISPs. I wouldn't want their product if I was paid for it. Will switch ISP as soon as I can.

This provider is a complete waste of time and money.

Since the start our broadband has been so slow as to be completely unusable, we have been forced to connect via our mobile phones to use the internet.

Obviously we have called customer services about this. Many times. But only occasionally have we got through to anyone, otherwise it's been hours waiting on the phone listening to music.

When we did get through the first level of customer service is totally useless and provides no help whatsoever. If you are patient and lucky enough you eventually get through to the tech team (which I suspect is about 2 people strong). They have a few ideas but ultimately after hours wasted our broadband doesn't work.

Then there's the customer portal which is never upto date, complete with account statements that don't show payments that have been made.

Will be leaving asap. New provider may be more expensive but you're paying for nothing with Origin.