ISP Reviews by Ben

I signed up to Swish Fibre as soon as they became available to me, and overall I've been pretty happy with them. I'd definitely recommend them over Openreach-based networks, but I'm not sure if they'd be my AltNet of choice (e.g. the fact that they're vertically integrated is a bit of a shame -- it would be nice to have a choice of ISPs over the physical network).

Support tickets used to receive rapid responses, have deteriorated significantly over time – I now struggle to get replies to emails.

The speed of the service is excellent. My package is described as 900 Mb/s but in reality I get around 1,150 Mb/s. Swish's network uses XGS-PON so they could launch multi-gig packages at some point (I'm a little surprised that they haven't already).

Swish's pricing is a bit on the high side. I was lucky to get 6 months free (on an 18 month contract), but this promotion has now ended. In particular I'd like to see a package to address the budget end of the market (e.g. Community Fibre offers 40Mb/s for £12.50 per month, and this is available to everybody). They also no longer offer 1 month contracts, which is a shame -- in my mind giving customers the option to leave shows confidence in the quality of the product.

Overall the services are pretty good, but it's a shame that their network lacks IPv6 (in 2024 it feels like table stakes).

My time with IDNet was boringly straightforward. On the rare occasions where I had issues (e.g. packet loss for a few evenings) they were able to investigate them via phone or email. No problem with using my own hardware (indeed, IDNet don't supply a "standard" router). I only left them to join a local alt net's full fibre network, as the speeds available via Openreach's VDSL network are somewhat limited (I've awarded full marks for speed because I don't believe IDNet's network has ever been the limiting factor in my speed).