ISP Reviews by PaddyD

Been a very satisfied customer for more than 10 years (back when they were known as NTL). Have only had to phone technical support a few times and the problems were resolved in a matter of minutes. Have had consistent full connection speed and stability from this service. Very nearly did I cancel with Virgin last year because of excessive throttling but they quickly remedied this after hearing the uproar from their customers and now the throttling is extremely lax, they listen to their customers. Very recently moved to Sky regrettably, already moving back to Virgin after an abysmal experience.

Overall, I am a very satisfied customer and can't wait to be back with Virgin.

*I am reviewing the fibre-optic broadband I have no idea about the ADSL broadband.

Having been enticed by the £7.50pm unlimited 20mb package I quickly snapped it up. I moved from Virgin Media and I regret doing this. The Sky box arrived in the post and I set it up beside the phone socket which is in the hallway where the nearest power socket is in the kitchen. I had to get an extension lead from the kitchen all the way down the hallway to the phone socket. I phoned up Sky technical support to see about getting this moved or somehow remedy the situation. They informed me the most they could do was send me a longer ethernet or ADSL cable and generally had a 'well, tough!' attitude. Sorry, but I don't want an ADSL cable, a power cable AND an ethernet cable running from the kitchen down into the hallway running along the bottom of the stairs. Not only does it look awful there's also a health and safety issue involved here with multiple wires at the bottom of the stairs. What they should have done was send out an engineer to set this up accordingly or at the very least supply pins and other things with the box.

Well, after setting it up and planning to sort out the position of the Sky box at a later date (which is unacceptable) I connected to Sky with my laptop and checked and ran a speedtest. It came out at 0.3mb which at that point I didn't mind, having coming from fibre-optic Virgin I read up about ADSL line training and that speeds may fluctuate the first 10 days until it is stabalised. I waited patiently for 3 weeks (yes, with 0.3MB speeds, no online gaming for me and also with constant disconnects) and I ran a speedtest again and it came out at 0.6mb. I phoned up technical service again and they informed that my connection had fully synchronised with the DSLAM and that my max attainable speed was indeed 0.6MB. I know it says 'up to 20MB' in the ads and I would've been happy with half that coming from 10MB Virgin Broadband but 0.6MB as a max attainable speed is completely unacceptable in this day and age and also with me being an avid online gamer.

All in all, a complete waste of time and apparently money as I have been informed that I am being billed for this debacle. After 3 grueling weeks being with Sky I'm now moving back to Virgin ASAP. Virgin may be more expensive but at least I was getting the speed and stability that I was promised. Do yourself a favour and avoid Sky.