ISP Reviews by BilK

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.