ISP Reviews by Beaker

I left origin broadband 18 months ago, having moved to them for a cheap cheap deal. Oh my, what a mistake.

You get what you pay for. Download speeds were exceedingly slow right from the start (regularly 1mbit or less), especially at peak times (although this is based on 18 months ago).

After various testing it was clear the fault lay with them, oversubscribed infrastructure and bandwidth throttling were suspected.

Support was pretty rubbish and they had well published complaint issues 18 months ago. after I left (fully paid up, had to wait out the whole year!) they were still sending me monthly bill emails for the account a whole year later! Really!!?

I’m surprised they are still in business, but I won’t be going back, not even for free.

I have been with vodafone broadband for 18 months and have just switched. The connection speeds were generally good (around 30/39), but at peak times they were getting slower and slower since I subscribed (recently as low as 1.5mbits). Although a couple of faults are documented (and claimed fixed - human error (late aug), sliced fibre (early sept)), the peak speeds are still not good (before and after) and I was inclined to switch anyway. It does suggest oversubscribed infrastructure - too much contention.

Also, their router was nailed to dumb. There was hardly anything you could configure on it and no admin mode (for customers anyway).

Support was pretty good from what I recall... I had a line fault a year ago.

Hope they upgrade their infrastructure soon!

The router is cheap, but it is reasonably configurable, unlike some vendors’ dumb routers. I only use vendor routers as an external router having an internal router for my network/clients (makes switching vendors much easier). After being advised it was live by email, I configured my router (changed p/w, internal IP range etc). Initially, I could get no connection to web pages, although I was able to ping and tracert. After 10-15 mins the web traffic started getting through, so must rely on intervention at shell end.

Speed is good so far, right up to the max, although this may be due to them being a new entrant. Time will tell how they hold up when they have more subscribers using their infrastructure.

N.b. On their router - Changing the firewall profile from medium to high blocks a lot of well known application protocols outbound, including those used by ookla speedtest, so has been kept on medium for now.