ISP Reviews by russelldb

When my previous ISP was taken over by Sky I decided to shop around. Xilo had the highest rating on ISP review, and the reviews were positive. I care mostly about reliability (I work from home as a programmer) and good support (everything goes wrong eventually, how you deal with that is what matters.)

Before moving to xilo I've had no detectable downtime in over 5years. Since I've had two major outages, one that lasted a full working day and on into the night. This second one caused me acute stress as I was on a deadline. I used a backup network (3g tethering my 'phone) so I survived, but it was pretty rough.

During these outages Xilo's response to tickets was basically "it's not our fault", during the long outage they actually tried to upsell me to fibre. Amazing.

And this isn't the real problem. The router they sent me is misconfigured in some hard to detect way. I'm not a network guy, but I'm pretty logical.

With Xilo's router I can't push to, or pull from remote Git repositories using the git over ssh protocol. Weird right? I did a factory reset on their router, no joy. I bought a cheap router from Amazon: works fine. Clearly the only difference then between git+ssh working is the Xilo router. Yet they're unwilling to help beyond "return it at your expense and we'll look at it and refund you _IF_ we think there is a problem"

This sucks. I offered them remote access, I have Wireshark traces that show very odd repeated acks over ssh, and they're just not interested in helping: they just want to put me to such trouble as I don't bother them anymore. They refused to even look at the wireshark captures. Why?

Ok, so, I'm getting of Xilo at the end of the month. What a disastrous, expensive, waste of time this has been for me.

I never usually write reviews, ever. I'm lazy and all I care about is just getting on with a quiet life, but these Xilo clowns have really motivated me. In one word? Shitshow.