ISP Reviews by Gruntintunz

It is with reluctance that i have to leave The Phone Co-op after just over a year. In fact i now wish that i had joined them after leaving Aol, rather than going with BT for three years.

Unfortunately my father died last month, most household bill payments were in his name and now frozen so a new start is needed in the Scorpio time of birth, death and regeneration; ergo some economies are having to be made.
The standard Phone Co-op package costs about £25 a month. I use the telephone as little as possible but the average bill has been the very best part of £30 a month which is no longer affordable. Personally i don't think any ISP needs to charge more than £20 a month for a basic, good strong service. The Phone Co-op gave a generous 40 GB or whatever it's termed allowance per month. I never used more than 4 because of only using this machine for email, 'surfing' and watching a few U tubes.
How people have the inclination to play games, let alone the time to do so is quite beyond me.

Aol years ago just seemed to melt down into a hopeless uncontrollable disaster, took over my machine and tried to preach to me about what i looked at. The Indian call centre had perhaps one gent called Niamet Ullah who actually knew what buttons to push after a month of trying.
British Telecom became extortionists at £38.50 a month for a turgid service with shitdowns and never an appology. The 'helpline' put me straight through to New Delhi (!) where the very nice sounding lady said "oh goodness gracious me, it is your router sir". My local shop who set the tower and screen up said she was talking through the equivalent of a scrotum ! Why this router thing isn't built into the big mostly empty tower box is beyond me. It would save on cables for a start.

So, after all that The Phone Co-op was like a blast of cold fresh air. Their staff speak a very high standard of English in both Oxfordshire and Manchester, helping me set up the Email via Windows 7. They have always been courtious, polite and efficient and really do seem to value new customers. In short i would never rule out going back to them which would be past the event horizon for the megalithic vast companies as prevoiusly slated.

If you want a good reliable ISP for around £30 per month the The Phone co-op in my opinion is amongst the best. There was one shut-down that i can remember and that lasted only an hour and a half, then normal quite fast service was resumed.
Clearly 'Offcom' must look at this issue of telephone line rental. We have all been stiffed with this extortion since Edwardian times and must have paid for the pine poles, terminals and wire at least fifteen hundred times over. If competition won't work for the people then the people must force a total renationilization of what ought to be public services. As a corollary i would add that any big ISPs who operate offshore, are not prepared to pay their staff above the national minimum wage should not be allowed to trade.

I understand the call centre is somewhere in India ? How can this be for such a megalithic monopoly ? Fortunately the set up has been stable enough to avoid contact so would have to give the half way balance of 5 out of 10 there.
Have to put my cards on the table and state i know very little about the world of computers and interwebbyness.
My previous first experience was with what has been called on here "AoHell" - a several pint job in a pub to explain in itself !
In my opinion BT excells in duplicated, slow, wooden complexity. There is this strange accolyte called "Yahoo" as if BT feels awkward, embarrassed or incapable of solely relying on it's very own mainpage.
It seems impossible to have more than one window open at any one time, unlike AoL even allowing for the seven year vintage of my Hewlett-Packard machine. There is the feeling a neighbour has lifted a manhole cover to dump a freshly bagged bulging dog turd down the four inch soil pipe but lo, there has to be a back bollocking pressure of more turd to instil any kind of speed into their wire system.
Then there is the clumsy enigma of the thing called "Outlook Express" which has to be gone through as like a split brain entity which devolves off the main page, in my opinion tediously. Hate to say it but AoHell was streets ahead on email for simplicity.

Most annoyingly, BT imposed what i think was called a 'fair use policy' on many subscribers after they signed up so the monthly payment became £20 rather than less on signing up.
To me this is far too much for the small use i place upon their service and pay rental for telephone line - which ought to have been paid for many times over even in the last decade !

No more big providers for me with hideously long contracts - had enough of that and am going to find a smaller ISP. If they take old fashioned cheques, that is even better.