ISP Reviews by NickC4555

The new house I moved to a month ago is a factory conversion with 100 or so properties (apartments and townhouses). The whole place is prewired for Virgin, including 2 dedicated risers. There is no BT FTTC in this area, so there is no realistic alternative to Virgin.

Having heard numerous bad reports, I was nervous about signing up, but so far they have been great. The installation engineer came on time and got it all commissioned. In the month since it has never dropped below 220Mbits/sec, 20Mbits/sec upload and around 10ms ping.

I signed up with Plusnet when I moved into my house in February. I knew the connection was going to be slow, speed estimates put it at around 2.5Mbit/s. What I hadn't anticipated were the constant drop outs and intermittent high ping times.

I have placed numerous support calls with Plusnet and usually get the standard responses like it's probably my wireless (even though I'm wired) or they've tested everything and found it to be fine. The only thing they have done in four months is get BT to switch off interleaving to help with the ping times (it hasn't, they still go up to 1500 millisecs at times).

I signed up for 12 months, so I'm stuck for a while, but I definitely won't be staying with them after that.

I moved to Aquiss at the same time as changing from a very slow ADSL connection to FTTC, so I was obviously expecting a huge performance improvement. The download and upload speeds I have are actually more than what was predicted. I've had the service for over a month and it has been rock solid and consistent. Latency is excellent too, ping times are between 10-20ms.

Having previously been with one of the big providers it's great to always get through to someone on the phone within a minute or so, not just a call handler but someone who knows what they are talking about and who takes real ownership of the problem. Things can always go wrong but with Aquiss you aren't just a ticket to be closed as soon as possible.

Even though problems are very often with BT, not the ISP, my previous provider was reluctant to escalate anything to them. Aquiss has proved to be effective in chasing them up and getting things sorted. There was a BT related cock-up with my installation which could have gone on a lot longer had it not been for Aquiss's intervention.

The online account interface is good, especially the billing system where you get VAT invoices as standard. Lots of people, including me, claim their internet as an expense, with my last provider I had to make a special request for VAT invoices.

The only negative comment I have is their excessive traffic management on Usenet downloads. I typically get no more than 3Mbits/sec on a 70Mbit/sec connection, and it is sometimes blocked altogether when their network is at capacity.

For the service provided Aquiss has the best features and value of any of the premium providers. Highly recommended.