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Any different between fttc providers

Razza

ULTIMATE Member
Hi, this is a questions for a friend hes currently with Virgin but moving house to non VM area, the estimated speed for his new house is 27 Mbps, I've always been a VM customers so but know anything about other isp.

My question is there any difference between different isp the cheapest seem to be Shell and Vodafone then its Talktalk and the most costly seem to be BT is there any major difference between them reliable wise.
 
They are all going to be using the same piece of copper wire from the exchange to the property, so in that respect they are all constrained by the limitations of the Openreach copper circuit. Some providers have their own exchange equipment whereas others just use the generic service provided by Openreach - there's not a significant difference between them AFAIK.

One FTTC provider that does stand out for me, but they are comparatively expensive is Andrews and Arnold. They have proper UK based technical support, the person answering the phone is not reading off a script, and they are genuinely clueful. They also provide a network quality monitoring dashboard which they will use as ammunition against Openreach in the event of faults or variable performance of the service. You can sign up on a monthly contract so your friend could use them for a few months, and get a feel for the reassuringly expensive service and then make a decision to stick or move on to a more generic consumer ISP.
 
Adding to @plunet response other differences between the different ISPs could be:

  1. Giving a public IPv4 instead of using CGNAT. This could also be fixed or dynamic
  2. Allowing you to use a third party router if you want (allowing doesn't mean supporting though)
  3. Better latency in their network, assuming they have equipment at the BT Exchange
  4. Price rises annually during the duration of the contract
  5. Additional services bundled with your internet connection like email mailboxes, Cloud storage, etc
Reliability is hard to measure for all ISPs as some ISPs use Openreach's network some don't. And this varies depending on the area so again hard to aggregate figures. Was the ISP's fault? Was it Openreach's? Truspilot's reviews given you a general indication. You can also look at Ofcom's yearly stats but that only include the large ISPs.
 
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One FTTC provider that does stand out for me, but they are comparatively expensive is Andrews and Arnold.
I've heard they are good, the guy is a cheapskate so will pick the cheapest deal he can find on them comparison sites.

So probably be Shell, I know most isp included routar are nothing to write home about but the shell one look like total crap Technicolor.
 
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