Vispa Reviews

Quick response and proper instructions were provided to connect the wifi services.
reliable services from support team via live chat.

Amendment to Original Review (04/03/22):

My initial review was very negative and I want to take a moment to come back and amend it. Vispa has done a fantastic job solving some very complex issues for our estate and other estates around the UK. The issue was with the infrastructure service provider and Vispa worked tirelessly with regulators, the builder and other stakeholders to resolve the issue.

I cannot say enough about how well Vispa did in this regard.

Helpful support
Reliable connection
Speed maintained

Vispa's Citywireless wireless broadband service could be so much more, but sadly it just simply does not provide a reliable service. I've been a customer for just over two years now, Vispa introduced its Citywireless service in our area with its 'Upto 60Mb' asymmetric wireless broadband services - an area where previously only very slow ADSL services were available being serviced by an exchange a number of miles away - naturally, we jumped at the chance improve our broadband service.

In the beginning the services were good, achieving respectable speeds and most importantly, low latency. Unfortunately, it didn't last. Support group pages began flooding with customers barely struggling to achieve anywhere near the promised speeds. The core network just simply does not provide adaquete bandwidth during peak times - latency is simply unacceptable, streaming on demand services such as Netflix and Sky Go continuously buffer and competitive online multiplayer is just simply not practical due to high lag.

The problems have been consistent and ongoing throughout my time with Vispa - contacting support can take a frustrating amount of time as responses tend to only be answered between 8:30 and 17:30 week days - we've gone entire weekends and longer with either a practically unusable service to no internet access whatsoever before the problems are resolved. Although support do seem to care, the issues themselves almost always arise from their network being too contended and not delivering the bandwidth required.

The service does seem to improve during off peak times, namely after midnight, but it's simply not acceptable (or useful) in my case working daily means the only times I'd want to access the internet is during peak times.
The only the advantage of Vispa's Citywireless service is saving on Line rental charges with other providers but the consistently poor latency and reliabilty of the service far outweigh this.

We've finally got a FTTC service available in our area and I'm happy to say we'll be leaving the service as soon as humanly possible. If an alternate provider is available in your area, avoid Vispa and save yourself the hassle.

I have now been a member of Vispa for 14 months. I can honestly say they are the worst managed company I have come across.

Every month I have experienced at least 4 outages of 1 hour or more (some being half a day).

The first 6 months were hell. Speeds of 1Mbps if you were lucky.

There customer service never apologise who offer compensation. I know of at least 20 members locally who are connection. We all experience the same issues.

After 14 months, enough was enough. I spoke to there customer care department and said I wanted to cancel. They told me I couldn't get out of my 18 month contract and wanted to charge me nearly £200 to terminate early.

I am in the process of complaining to Ofcom and speaking to the local newspapers.

Ok, so Vispa started off last year in the Warrington area offering "Super Fast" internet. But since November 2012 it has been nothing but poor. 1-5Mbps average over the past 12 months. They limit you to 5Mbps after downloading for 20 seconds so you never actually get to use the true speed you could get. But then they don't actually have enough equipment to support you have a decent connection so theres no point using it over the 1Mb ADSL available.

Support never get back to you, tickets either stay open forever or just get shut.

Customer Service is poor, it feels like they rob you of you're money then use it to pay for new toys for themselves instead of improving the servie.

I have been with Vispa for approximately one year. The first 10 or so months were generally good service (providing you only wanted the 10Mb service). The last two months have been very poor with little/no communication regarding timescales or plans for resolving the issues.

The VOIP service is only as good as the underlying wireless broadband connection - which at present is not a suitable replacement for a landline.

I will happily update this review if the service can be stabilised and can reliably/consistently provide the advertised throughput.

The service is of poor quality, I am currently receiving a download speed of ~0.2mb/s and ping ~900. When the service is operating at anywhere near its advertised speeds, there is the added 'excitement' of the constant drop outs.

The online 'help' is anything but, and even though a number of users report the same problem we are told it is local to our router.

There seems to be no urgency in fixing the problems, or even acknowledge its existence, I assume they are relying on the lack of competition in the areas they operate.

If you have any alternative in a provider, I would strongly recommend you use it.

IF they fix these problems, I will be happy to re-evaluate this review, but for now I stand by it.

Who though an ISP could be so bad. Speeds up to 60Mbps are offered, they don't get above 60Kbps.

Rather naïvely, we didn't check what the broadband coverage was before we moved home, and were quite disappointed to find that none of the big providers could offer anything above 2Mbps. Looking at local websites suggested that most people in Burtonwood were getting around half that. Not to be deterred, we contacted Vispa to enquire about the CityWireless option and despite an initially shaky start with communication, got a date for installation a week or so down the line. The engineer, Alan, was a great ambassador for this company, and I really was impressed by how professional he was. For his sake, I wanted to write a glowing review: he was early, polite, quick (even in the blustering wind and rain that left his ladder teetering at points) and also went beyond the call of duty in setting up our pre-existing router over the space of an hour. We seemed to be getting excellent speeds on demonstration runs of 20Mbp and <30ms pings.

Sadly, however, over the next few days, the speed of the broadband has gradually drifted down and as I write, I'm getting pings of 133ms and a download speed of 1.17Mbps. iPlayer is having to stop and buffer fairly frequently even though there's only one device connected at the moment.

Vispa did recently send an email saying that they were working on increasing the bandwidth in the area, but for the time being we're back to the sort of speeds we were seeing with BT Openzone while we were waiting. In fact, I'm currently getting faster downloads on my 3G dongle (6.08Mbps) than I am on the WIFI... If there are any changes to the current situation I'll update this review, but for the time being, I'm holding my breath.

UPDATE 8.12.12
I've just bumped up the ratings for support, speed and value. After a very brief call to the customer service team - which, by the way, was my first communication with the company on the issue - they found that my antenna firmware needed updating and within a few hours my broadband was up to scratch and beyond. Ping 17ms, Downloads 23Mbp, Upload 7.3Mbp. And we're paying about the same as it would cost for a BT line with broadband.