ISP Reviews by freudianskip

I signed up because I was an existing mobile customer (had to move providers as Demon - owned by Vodafone - is being run into the ground).

The purchase process was a nightmare - it took three attempts to reach the sales line and then my order just stopped. When I rang to enquire I was told that there was an issue, answered one question was told it would progress. It didn't. So I chased again and was asked another simple question that had frozen the order. In both of cases VF could have sorted the problem with one simple email or call but didn't.

On transfer days (five weeks after the order rather than the ten working days promised) I plugged in the router and waited. ADSL provision moved over then when time came to switch over to VDSL the system froze. So I tried VF's appalling technical helpline and ended up talking to the team in Glasgow who are not bad once you've hacked through the automated call handling. Turned out that there is a known issue with routers not initialising properly. Once we got to that point, a factory reset of the router and it worked perfectly.
Line speeds as I'm close to the exchange are 79.99 Mbps downstream and 19.0 upstream, so pretty respectable. However a number of ongoing niggles have occurred:
1) faulty exchange equipment - I was suffering repeated short outages; I eventually spoke to someone competent who diagnosed a possible BT equipment fault. 48 hours outage - difficult when my wife runs a business from home - and an Openreach visit to the local BT box and it's been fine since. Not VF's fault but it should have shown on their systems and been rectified before

2) contention - although this is less of an issue, I suffer reduced download speeds during high load times (falling from around 80 Mbps to 30 - still respectable but annoying)
3) router - the one supplied by VF is crap and you can't use your own; it won't recognise USB hard drives, and the Twonky server is non-functional. Support can't get it working either. It also knackered an existing media server on my home network (the work around is to make sure that your VF router is plugged into nothing but a switch connected to everything else). It works now but seems ludicrous. Being able to use my own VDSL modem/router (as BT allow) would sort a lot of problems. As I said, the supplied one is crap. There may be future firmware updates but for now if you want anything more than plug and play for someone with no technical skills, I'd look elsewhere

4) customer services - the automated phone service is enough to suck your soul out through your ears and leave you in tears as you try to find the right combination of buttons to talk to an actual person. EVERYTHING about the system is designed to get you talking to someone about mobiles, not broadband. Even the dedicated broadband support line (0808 003 4515) can render it impossible

The offer from VF is something that works very well when it works, and COULD be very good with some minor tweaks: a decent line for support queries and the option to use one's own hardware would make the problems disappear. As it is, look elsewhere, and even if BT or Talk Talk's customer support is poor, it can't be as bad as this. If it weren't for an eighteen month contract term I would already have jacked it in and gone elsewhere.