uno Reviews

When my previous ISP was taken over by Sky I decided to shop around. Xilo had the highest rating on ISP review, and the reviews were positive. I care mostly about reliability (I work from home as a programmer) and good support (everything goes wrong eventually, how you deal with that is what matters.)

Before moving to xilo I've had no detectable downtime in over 5years. Since I've had two major outages, one that lasted a full working day and on into the night. This second one caused me acute stress as I was on a deadline. I used a backup network (3g tethering my 'phone) so I survived, but it was pretty rough.

During these outages Xilo's response to tickets was basically "it's not our fault", during the long outage they actually tried to upsell me to fibre. Amazing.

And this isn't the real problem. The router they sent me is misconfigured in some hard to detect way. I'm not a network guy, but I'm pretty logical.

With Xilo's router I can't push to, or pull from remote Git repositories using the git over ssh protocol. Weird right? I did a factory reset on their router, no joy. I bought a cheap router from Amazon: works fine. Clearly the only difference then between git+ssh working is the Xilo router. Yet they're unwilling to help beyond "return it at your expense and we'll look at it and refund you _IF_ we think there is a problem"

This sucks. I offered them remote access, I have Wireshark traces that show very odd repeated acks over ssh, and they're just not interested in helping: they just want to put me to such trouble as I don't bother them anymore. They refused to even look at the wireshark captures. Why?

Ok, so, I'm getting of Xilo at the end of the month. What a disastrous, expensive, waste of time this has been for me.

I never usually write reviews, ever. I'm lazy and all I care about is just getting on with a quiet life, but these Xilo clowns have really motivated me. In one word? Shitshow.

The migration to Xilo went very smoothly, my presales questions were answered quickly and consicely. When it came to the migration day everything went exactly as planned, really there were no issues! I had one question regarding DLM so I raised a support ticket, the response was so quick it was almost like using instant messaging, highly impressive.
I'm pleased to say that in terms of performance the only bottleneck is the phone line, there is no noticeable congestion and speeds are consistent regardless of the time of day.
My only regret is not migrating to Xilo earlier!

I was with an isp called ADSL24 for 5 years and they were brilliant but they were taken over by another company so I didn't think I'd ever find another ADSL24 again. Time for me to move on but didn't know who to chose. Found Xilo mentioned on numerous forums and everybody only had good words to say about them. I made inquiries from Xilo about what they had to offer and as it was a monthly contract I had nothing to lose if everything went wrong so I signed up. It was the best bit of signing I ever did. They are the best isp ever, even beating my brilliant ADSL24. Matt seems to really care about his customers and is always there if you have a problem. I had a few problems at first but Matt worked with me till they were resolved. So do yourself a favour, once you've read this review get signing up to Xilo. You'll never regret it, I haven't.

(Edited 2 years later to add that I've moved to Virgin Media because I wanted an upgrade to fibre and they are the only available service in my area. Wish me luck... Would have stuck with XILO otherwise)

I became a Xilo customer after successive screw-ups by two other ISPs.

First, Orange incorrectly handled transferring my account to a new phone line. When they realised their mistake, they said it would take 7-10 working days to put it right, so I cancelled and signed up with Virgin cable who had told me they could have everything up and running within that timeframe.

Fast forward a couple of weeks: Virgin ring up to say I can't receive their service because it would cost them too much to do the wiring, as I live on a main road. I later found out the flat below has Virgin, so obviously their records were incorrect - which lost them a customer.

By this point I was frustrated with the poor level of service I had received from Orange and Virgin - the Indian call centres that both employ are particularly enraging - so I looked into Xilo, who seemed to have built themselves a good reputation for customer service. I was able to call them up and discuss their broadband packages with a genuine English person who actually understood me.

I placed the order and the line was activated on the agreed date (albeit at 9 PM, by which point I was beginning to wonder! ISPs are not in control of this though). Speed is very good and I've since used their online ticketing system once - their replies came back within minutes.

The only disadvantage of Xilo compared to other ISPs is that they don't cover the cost of the ADSL router. You need to purchase this and set it up yourself by following their instructions. But at least they don't supply you with a cheap Netgear router like Orange!

As for why Xilo remains a comparatively small ISP in terms of market share: in my opinion, this is because they are mainly a hosting company, and therefore their website is structured differently to that of other ISPs. This is likely to put prospective customers off. And this is ironic, because the recipe for a good ISP is identical to the recipe for a good hosting company: fast/reliable infrastructure, and good customer support.

If I were ever to need web hosting then Xilo would be the first port of call.

Overall, very happy, and not foreseeing revisiting the ISP question for a long time.

I ordered Xilo around the 21st December 2013 and the line went active on the 3rd of January.
My experience with the order process was fantastic, I had sent a ticket asking what product would suit me the most as i frequently play online games, within 1 hour i had a response from a very helpful individual by the name (Matt) who recomended the TTB LLU over C&W as TTB would give me control over interleave or fastpath within the broadband control panel.

Since my line went active i have only had around 5 miniuts of slower speed due to some Denial of service attacks happening to some of Xilo's servers around 6pm on the 2nd of March in which they had obviously fixed fast as the service was brought back to normal quickly. I had no need to contact Xilo regarding this issue as the service status was very clear explaining what was going on.

You pay a little extra for Xilo then some of the other isps but its worth every penny.

My time with Xilo since O2 sold off has not been very good stability wise, speed is all over the place, it goes from very good to very bad.

In all my time using broadband I have never ever had to contact any provider as much as I contact Xilo.

Things do get fixed quite quickly but in a few weeks it goes wrong again with big speed swings.

I have marked speed 3 because of the above.

I normally cant be bothered to write reviews...

We've had soooo many issues with our BB over the years , a move to xilo finally sorted them out .

They are not cheap , but you get what you pay for .. How much is your time worth wasting hours messing around with the internet.

These guys respond fast and generally know what they are talking about .

Its worth paying for their pre configured router , again for less hassle..

I had two and half years of trouble free, well supported ADSL with Xilo. Set up was hassle free and the line was so reliable considering the distance to the exchange.

When BT finally put that shiny new Fibre Box at the end of our street - I knew who I wanted to provide my service through it. Xilo were very flexible and provided the service I required. The line speed coming from very slow ADSL was something else. I could have got it a little bit cheaper else where, but I knew that acclaimed Xilo customer service was worth hanging onto.

Fast forward to this weekend. The Openreach modem provided by BT failed. Emails were exchanged and somehow Xilo got a BT engineer out to me on the first working day back, who replaced the modem. That's some magic trick they pulled. A failure on a weekend, a BT call out required and the service back up and running within 48 hours? Incredible. All done with fast and polite emails that don't insult the intelligence of the customer.

Xilo - in my opinion - are truly the only choice for the broadband connoisseur.

I moved into an area with no LLU , the only options were standard BT, rebranded BT (Plusnet, XILO, Talktalk etc). I opted for XILO given that there was no contract, and they had good reviews. The service itself cannot be faulted, in the year or so I've had it, it has only been down once. Speeds were okay. I switched to Sky Unlimited after it became available on my line. Although you must remember it's part of a package of around £55 a month, it's only £7 for their broadband. I was paying £24 a month for XILO - over 3x the cost which seems excessive. Anything over £20 seems too dear for broadband. I was happy to pay this premium to not have to deal with BT or Talktalk though, and was out of options. Only used support a few times (by email) and it was fairly quick. However the real downside to all of this, is XILO's 'cease fee' which is £32. Although they bill themselves as being a no-contract company, bare this in mind - I should have read the small print and this left a bad taste in my mouth (I am using my own router as well, so it's not an equipment fee). It just seems unncessary. Plus.net for example offer a similar monthly rolling contract with no exit fee. I must say I prefer smaller ISPs (plusnet are BT owned) and don't like conglomerates so am happy to support British businesses, for that reason I will always be happy to pay more per month, but please scrap the exit fee. In regards to speeds, I am getting about 0.3MB - 0.5MB/s faster speeds on Sky, using the same router, which is great but not a dealbreaker... but the real downside to XILO is their cease fee. Edit, it's not actually £32 it's £38 after VAT! Awful.

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Been with Xilo now for a few months. So far so good.

The connection has been very good and stable, and the call I logged about configuring a new router was dealt with swiftly and efficiently.

Price wise good value.

Happy customer!