I decided to sign up for 2 years despite all the bad reviews, and have been pleasantly surprised so far. Part of my reason for going ahead despite the reviews was that I thought I should be an easy account to switch, since I was already on fibre and no engineer access was required, and I'm geeky enough to play around with router settings if required. I'm *very* dependent on fast reliable ISP though, so despite feeling ripped off by BT (£56/month), I was concerned about it being a false economy.

My switchover was on Tuesday. BT access was lost during the night (I got an email at 05:37 to say it was gone), and I don't know when Origin was first available, but it took me about 3 minutes to get connected when I plugged the router in at about 10:30.

So far so good since then. Speed the same as with BT (up to around 62/19 Mb/s down/up), and I'm paying about 52% of what it cost with BT, and the only problem has been seven very short outages, lasting 3-4 minutes at most (3 on Tuesday, 1 on Wednesday, 1 on Thursday, 2 on Friday, none so far today at 11pm). [update: no outages in the 8 days since then]

I called about the outages on the first day, and was on hold for 14 minutes, but the guy that answered seemed knowledgeable and helpful.

I'm very happy so far. The router (an ASUS DSL-N16 Wireless-N300) was very easy to set up, and has a strong signal and more options than I'd ever want to use. You need to change the administrator login details, and I also turned off "Enable WAN down browser redirect notice", as that was just annoying when I had an outage.

There's no ISP webspace or email address, but I don't use those anyway. One thing to watch out for is that when you end the contract, you'll probably have to give the router back or pay them £40. I actually prefer that to the BT scheme where they give you a free router, but it's locked so that you can't use it with other providers. I was able to unlock my BT Homehub 3, which wasn't easy, but as far as I can tell, it isn't possible to unlock the Homehub 5.