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ISP with good relationship with OpenReach

mandelbug

Casual Member
Hi there,

I am currently on Vodafone and have been for a couple of years now. Over those years, I have had a lot of issues with the phone line (BT have sent out about 5 engineers within a 1 year period). It looks like the last one who attended finally managed to resolve the issue by replacing the cable from pole to premises. My line has been so problematic that I have a permanent 15% discount applied (making it £18/pm inc line rental) so very cheap.

My gripe with VF was that they would not complain to Openreach, and they do not seem to have any relationship with them. I was complaining to them as a VF customer but they would not complain to OR as an OR customer.

With the new cable though my line appears to have stabalised. My line is a rubbish line, I am about 1 mile from the green cabinet (due north) which is then 1 mile from the exchange (due SW). As a result, the BT Wholesale checker gives the following stats:

Clean DL High 18.5, Low 11.4 UL High 1.3, Low 1.1, Handback 8.8 (VF have min as 7.3)
Dirty DL High 18.2, Low 10 UL 1.3-1.1 Handback 6.5

Best performance of my line that I have seen is 15Mbps which is fine it's all it can do after all. I would be happy with that (or at least as happy as I can be without FTTP). Max observed rate is 13.09 which was on 13/06.

Since my line has become stable, I have removed the VF hub and replaced it with a DrayTek Vigor 130. I have altered the SNR margin and in the stats it indicates I should be able to get a 15ish Mbps connection. I am currently connected at 1139900 and it seems to be a hard limit. DLM hasn't changed anything despite the DrayTek being in place for 2 months and SNR change 4 weeks ago. I have tried powering off the route for 45 minutes to force a DLM profile reset but this hasn't made any difference. I have tried to get VF to reset the DLM profile, even highlighting the article https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...each-fttc-broadband-dlm-profiles-arrives.html to them indicating it can be done. But because my line is above the minimum guaranteed speed they won't/can't do it.

OR won't help via Twitter as quite rightly, I am not their customer (VF is). I have looked at plusnet as the next cheapest option for Broadband, they seem to have a good customer service aspect to them. Does anyone have any recommendations on either how to get VF to reset my DLM profile, or whether it would be worth moving to plusnet? Any suggestions for other ISPs? I do have a static IP as well that I make use of in Firewall rules for remote hosting. I would like to maintain a static IP (appreciate it will be different with a new supplier)

Thanks in advance
 
You don't want the one with the good relationship but the one that gets OR to act. This would be Andrews & Arnold.


Expensive but the best for getting OR to work for their money.

Give us a month and we'll sort your problem broadband line or your money back. If you are migrating your service to us, even though you know you have a problem with your broadband line, we'll take on the fault. We'll tackle the problem and get it fixed within one month. If we don't, then you can migrate away, and owe us nothing for your migration to us and your service charges for that month. - A&A
 
I was just looking at them, they look like they give OR the kick in they deserve at times. The data cap and cost just put me off a little. Just been reading reviews on Uno which look good on here, but their checker is offline.
 
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AAISP are excellent if they suit you and you don't mind paying the price and the data caps etc.
 
Nearly any smaller ISP will get OR to do more than the big guys.
I use Aquiss, when I had an outage last month, they had OR out to me in under an hour.
Not only did the OR guy find and fix the issue, he did some remedial work to stop further damage to my line by a tree, and removed and tidied up some old phone lines that had been disconnected many years ago and left to rot.
3 hours after calling Aquiss with the fault, I was back online.

Unlike A&A, Aquiss have no usage limits.
 
How are TalkTalk nowadays? From the outside it looks like they are better than they were. Was thinking of the business broadband
 
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How are TalkTalk nowadays? From the outside it looks like they are better than they were. Was thinking of the business broadband
Don't expect much in terms of support. They still use overseas staff unlike a lot of larger providers. Not that they're doing anything wrong but you get more of a read from the script kind of experience - even if you've done everything in the list they're going to make you do it again on the phone with them otherwise their programming doesn't let them continue the troubleshooting script.
 
Depends - if you're on a budget and use a decent amount of bandwidth then best bet in my opinion would be Zen. Otherwise Andrews & Arnold are probably the best but quite expensive for the premium service and bandwidth usage cap.
 
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Andrews & Arnold are hard to beat if you want a rock solid service, top-notch technical support and a team that get results out of OpenReach. Yes, it’s a premium price but it’s a premium service to match.

I’d still be with them if I hadn’t moved to place where wired broadband isn’t a viable option, but that’s nothing to do with AAISP.
 
OK, so I took the plunge, moved to TalkTalk Business, they were the next chepest to Vodafone, went with a business line to get a static IP address primarily. I also switched the modem from the Vigor to a Billion 880NL as it has the Broadcom chip and I am on a Huawai cabinet. This made no difference on VF. Reluctant to switch it back now especially whilst in the initial 10 days.

Must say, the service has only been up for one day (1 day, 13h, 57m) but I have been connected at 14816kbps with an SNRM of between 6 & 7. A speed increase of 30%!
 
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After my first post in this forum on Openreach being impossible TO reach (sorry) :) I was referred to this post by the originator.

In general I agree that both AA and Zen provide a good service, as I know people who use them. I guess I'm just mean in not wanting to pay double and possibly having a cap on usage so I have to live with problems.

What is of possibly greater significance is that I suspect these problems significantly add to the overall cost of broadband as Openreach are out all the time fixing silly problems + Huawei and others kit is working overtime overcoming errors on junk old twisted pair connections.

The final solution is the better use of fibre which I believe was not installed by BT/Openreach throughout the country some twenty years ago as the government at the time gave NTL (now Virgin Media) a guarantee that they would not have any competition. This was because NTL were going bust and if didn't make money would go under.

BT's decision not to install fibre in rural locations, now overturned by Boris, is a major factor in rural businesses either paying exorbitant fees for average "superfast" broadband or putting up with even more unreliable and slow connections.

Also the widely available private network (Virgin Media) effectively subsidised by the government isn't available to 3rd parties as the BT network is.

There is a big push on wind-power and the UK being carbon neutral very soon = more factories to build turbines and more people employed to install them plus more projects to use the surplus power when the wind is blowing but there is low demand to generate hydrogen etc. as an alternative to pumped storage etc.

So why not the same for fibre broadband, more people employed to install the network, far fewer faults, more availability/speed in rural locations so people don't need to move to cities, in general a boost for jobs and business. Just what we need right now,

A fiend with a property in Spain in a relatively rural location has FTTP now.

PS I like the Billion 8800 NL R2 as either a direct connection to ADSL (adjustable SNRM) or FTTC or as a "modem" in front of a router.
 
OK, so I took the plunge, moved to TalkTalk Business, they were the next chepest to Vodafone, went with a business line to get a static IP address primarily. I also switched the modem from the Vigor to a Billion 880NL as it has the Broadcom chip and I am on a Huawai cabinet. This made no difference on VF. Reluctant to switch it back now especially whilst in the initial 10 days.

Must say, the service has only been up for one day (1 day, 13h, 57m) but I have been connected at 14816kbps with an SNRM of between 6 & 7. A speed increase of 30%!
TT's "dedicated phone line for new business customers" is the exact same line used by ALL their customers. After supplying the wrong log in details, I spent THREE DAYS trying to get through on that line - getting cut off every 90 minutes of being on hold.

And this was before they had COVID as an excuse.

Bargepole, Touch, Would'nt.
 
TT's "dedicated phone line for new business customers" is the exact same line used by ALL their customers. After supplying the wrong log in details, I spent THREE DAYS trying to get through on that line - getting cut off every 90 minutes of being on hold.

And this was before they had COVID as an excuse.

Bargepole, Touch, Would'nt.
Ermm....no. TT Business have totally separate sales & support teams, nothing to do with TT Residential. TTB teams are based in Warrington - many of whom are ex-Zen staff. Always had great support from them, great ISP.
 
Yeah, I wouldn't go to TTR. I've had really bad experiences with them before. I was nervous about going to TTB, but from what I can gather the service on TTR is better than it was. There are a lot of service providers who run over TTB for DSL (Uno and Gradwell are a couple, there were more)

I must admit, after a week, I now have a down speed of 18.4Mbps, btwholesale say the best I can get on a Clean line is 18.5. My Billion thinks the max attainable is 19, give or take. SNR is currently at 3.5.
 
Ermm....no. TT Business have totally separate sales & support teams, nothing to do with TT Residential. TTB teams are based in Warrington - many of whom are ex-Zen staff. Always had great support from them, great ISP.
Not my experience, the number of the paperwork was the exact same number they use for all general enquiries.
And then there are the implications of being sent a router with someone else's password and user name on it.
 
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