ISP Reviews by -pete-

I've being subscribed to BT for about 6 months now and I've got to say that as someone who uses the net alot, there are definatly better services out there.

If you download during peak hours (which they seem to define as from about 8am till midnight) you are VERY likely to suffer the wrath of their EXTREMELY aggressive traffic management, the limits can go anywhere from a slight manageable lag to full on destroying your line, this can ruin gaming experiances and make streaming video impossible to watch without prebuffering 3/4s of the clip. Its worth noting that during the off-peak hours the speeds are usually fine, I don't tend to get cut off, peer to peer works about as well as you would expect and ftp downloads can get close to a 1mbps, which is about as much as my line can take.

With my previous ISP (PlusNet) if the worst happens and you their tech support you got a nice english person who knew what they were talking about and could talk you through what was going on. Not so with BT, quite why companies still insist on outsourceing tech support to India I'll never know. I couldn't imagine having to deal with them trying to fix any major faults because they basically have no clue to what they're doing other than the screens in front of them. Surfice to say the best solution to any technical problem is to just leave the line and hope and pray that it will come back on its own.

The homehub they send you is a cheap nasty rebranded thompson piece of crap, it works and the wireless N standard is nice if you have the hardware to support it but to be honest you would be much better off with your own gear (which thankfully they don't mind you doing) oh and don't go relying on the phone part of it, it will KILL your speeds.

I feel that you will only ever get the negative side from reviews on sites like this (its somewhere to vent frustration after all) If you don't use the internet THAT much, or if you do don't mind sticking most of your bandwidth hogging activities to off peak hours you could do worse than BT, but not much.