ISP Reviews by gareth2000

When things go well, you don't really notice your ISP. I was on BT infinity 2 and when it worked, it worked as well as could be expected. However if it went wrong...

As with other reviewers, I had a very poor experience of having to use BT's customer support. An overly complicated support portal on their web site eventually gives contact details. Trying to get things sorted means being pushed from pillar to post, sometimes via automated services sometimes not, having to repeat your account number/phone number details more than once.

Even their *sales* are incompetent. I tried to sign up via the website (as there was an offer on) and that fell through. I had to complete it by phone thereby meaning I ended up having to pay more than I expected as the offer was only valid via the website, and that was broken! That phone order didn't work and then I had to ring up a *second* time to order broadband. I was then told I had to change my phone number, and then told I didn't and then again told either way will have to wait 24 hrs as only one order can be put through for a phone line and they just accidentally cancelled it.

At this point I lost the will to live. I cancelled everything as I hadn't paid anything, and was assured I was good to go to another ISP. In a couple of weeks I received a letter saying my phone was now with BT and when I rang up I was told I was under contract and it would cost £60 to leave.

The original installation job was botched, and BT Openzone had to come out to fix that. Just requesting this proved to be a mammoth task of finding the right person to talk to, and then put up with a series of communications via text threatening me that if the problem proved to be with my wiring (it wasn't) I'd be liable.

When I did report the fault, all that I got was an email saying "thanks for reporting the fault, we'll investigate and get back to you." They didn't, and I had to chase them by phoning them up.

Having free BT wifi hotspot access is good, but mine stopped working for no good reason and I had to spend time talking to BT support again about that.

Last month BT was the only ISP that had problems to Ubisoft servers (significant if you want to play their games). They denied any responsibility despite it only affecting BT customers. There was no information and no explanation as to what the problem was when it was fixed days later. Other ISPs remain unaffected.

During busy periods, the speed of the line does suffer.

Another reviewer complained that nobody takes ownership of problems when you access customer services, and I think this captures their fundamental problem. Of all the ISPs I've had over the years, I've never had so many problems with any other ISP, and also more importantly never had such a problem trying to get those problems resolved. I had BT for a brief period in the late 90s on dial-up, and they were a pain to deal with then. Amazingly, nothing has changed.

I am paying £200 pounds to get out of my contract early.

Moved to AAISP after yet another frustrating experience with BT.

Could not be happier. Yes they are more expensive, but you get what you pay for. Support has been excellent. My queries were all about non-standard hardware or just asking for clarification on how their service worked, not due to any particular problems I had. I received prompt, friendly, sensible and *helpful* responses to my queries. Help and support is available using various modes of communication, including phone. No automated system encountered so far, go through to an actual human each time!

Connections has been is without fault. There is absolutely no buffering or degradation of Netflix or iPlayer at peak times like I occasionally had with my previous IP.

Provided router is surprisingly good. It does look pretty cheap, but in terms of actual performance it outpaced my old draytek router in terms of wireless range and speed. Not as feature rich as some of the higher end ones, but it does the job.