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ISP Recommendations

Can anyone on the Heathfield East Sussex exchange recommend their Broadband ISP for speed and service? I am currently with Bulldog on 512.
 
elessm, I am just down the road from you in Eastbourne . It took me 4 previous ISP`s before coming to NDO who have been the most helpful reliable ISP .If they are in the wrong or a problem is down to their equipement they are the first to admit it . I am on 512 Broadband at £24.99 a month They do have a wide range of connection options.check out their forum at ndousers.com. Technical support is superb they stick with it till its solved ,and should you need to contact by phone it`s at national rate
miffie
 
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I'd support Miffie - I'm with NDo and am happy with them. Another to look at is PlusNet.

Andy
 
Big or small ISP?

It seems to me that the relatively small ISPs tend to get much better reviews that the bigger ones, such as AOL and Wanadoo.

In fact, if you look at the 'Top 10' lists (link on the banner at the top of the page), none of the big 4 (Wanadoo, AOL, Tiscali, BT) features in the Top 10.

I've been a member of this site for about 15 months, and in that time the smaller ISPs have pretty much always performed far better in terms of both connections and customer service (according to posts here), to the extent that I wouldn't use any of the big 4 (big 5 if you include Virgin) and therefore couldn't recommend them to anyone else.

Given the far higher number of customers these larger ISP's have, you would expect them to recieve a higher number of complaints than the smaller ones - you can't keep everyone happy, after all. However, if their service really was as good as the competition, you'd also expect to see more posts from happy customers defending them as well - and I don't really see that happening. In fact Tiscali recently notched up 100 complaints in 1 week - I believe it was a record (or at least close to one).

At the time of writing, the top 10 for ADSL is:
Vispa
NDO (I use them)
Firefly
V21 (must have seriously improved after the hammering they took a few months back)
Eclipse
SurfAny Time
Zen
MetroNet
Tesco
Freedom2Surf

As you can see, both NDO and Eclipse, who have both been recommended in this thread, figure in the top 5. I don't know where in the rankings any of the big 4 come in, but at least one of them should be in the top 10.

It's also interesting to note that none of the biggies are in the top 10 for dial up access either (and I didn't know the BBC even had an ISP, but they're on the list!!).

-------

Question for mods/admin - is it possible to get a full list of overall ISP rankings, rather than just the Top 10. I bet it would make interesting reading.

Is it possible for a complaints stats page, so we could see which ISP's have recieved the most complaint in the last week/month/year?

Both suggestions will be posted on the 'Web Site' threads.
 
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I put it down to budgetting.

A lot of them, if not all, outsource the call centers used to take the tech support calls and whatnot.

Of course, the company with the lowest budget always gets a lookin, and they are always out to get the lowest running costs as a result.

So, you end up with a lot of low paid, badly trained staff. Some have knowlagde already, but the majority seems to me too not have enough training.

They are trained to deal with inexpirenced users, whom many calls are because they havent plugged in a cable, etc etc.

To be fair, they get a lot of these calls, but this is why they all have a list of things to go through. (often known as a script :))

A lot of these calls get put through these lists, most the time even when the person is a bit savvy and knows its not that sort of problem.

All the biggies seem to have problems tracking a problem too, many times did we ring BT up and say hows the problem going, often to find the logging problem code invalid.

Throw your occasional grumpy student/bored middle age person badly paid workers into the mix (not all of them), and you have a system thats bound to cause problems.
 
Ah - it seems I misread the article but the basic point still holds true.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/showthread.php?t=16341

They have passed 100 complaints in total, maing them one of the most complained about ISP's.

My apologies for my mistake, and thanks for pointing it out paul45.

Also, I have just taken a look at the ISP section, and worked out when the big 5 are in terms of ISPr reviews (ADSL only):

ISP . . . . . . . Rank . . . No. of reviews
BT No frills . . .16th . . . . . . .4
AOL . . . . . . . 20th . . . . . . .15
BT Openwrld . 21st . . . . . . .7
Virgin . . . . . . 23rd . . . . . . 14
Wanadoo . . . .25th . . . . . . .21
Tiscali . . . . . .28th . . . . . . .31

This is based on the same rules as the Top 10 screen - minimum 3 reviews.

This is out of a total of 31 ISPs which have the 3 reviews needed (not one of the big 5 even gets into the top half.

ALso V21 and Tesco, both in the top 10, have 4 and 3 reviews respectively.
 
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Personally I would like to see the ISPReview system only featuring ISP's with 10 or more reviews; as the more number of reviews the more balanced and reflective the overall verdict on the service it becomes. Currently it is possible for an ISP to go streight to the top with just 3 "all 10stars" reviews if this limit was 10 then its much harder for an ISP to genuinely receive 10 reviews all at 10stars (as much as we would like to be, I don't think any ISP is perfect yet!)

If you just looked at ISP's with over 10 reviews - only 16 ISPs would qualify for listing and these ISPs are all the medium-sized ISP's (most VISPs fall out) -

1 Vispa - 9.6 (15 reviews)
2 NDO - 9.51 (52 reviews)
3 FireFly - 9.48 (22 reviews)
4 Eclipse - 9.38 (26)
5 Zen - 9.3 (11)
6 MetroNet - 9.16 (24)
7 CentralPoint - 9.04 (14)
8 Freedom2Surf - 8.87 (28)
9 PlusNet - 8.45 (45)
10 Pipex - 7.94 (43)
11 Nildram - 7.92 (12)
12 AOL - 5.85 (15)
13 Bulldog - 5.29 (21)
14 Virgin - 4.89 (14)
15 Wanadoo - 4.41 (21)
16 Tiscali - 3.36 (31)

I think you will find that most of the "big 5" ISP's tend to be joined by new users to Broadband (and often the Internet in general) and these users I would say tend not to frequent the ISPReview type sites until problems occur and they start to look for a new, better ISP.

Sam
 
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akbray wrote:
...thanks for pointing it out paul45.
You’re welcome akbray.
I have to admit to frequently committing the mistake of assuming the number is the complaint total received within a week.
 
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