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Switching broadband provider, any thoughts?

mark9

mark9

Site Supporter
10 Years
Joined
Sep 7, 2013
Messages
3,169
Location
Lincoln, Uk
Hi All

Been with BT since the dawn of time but it would seem that they punish customer loyalty as I am now paying £52.49 per month (superfast fibre 1 inc phone line rental) at the same time they are offering it to new customers for £29.99.

Virgin are currently offering 100 MB/s for £25 per month, switching to £47 after 12 months.

Tried contacting BT to get a better price, best they could do was £8.50 off per month for 18 months contract (43.99 p/m).

Not had any problems with BT, but it seems very pricey compared to what you get with Virgin, seems a no-brainer to switch, any thoughts?

(One issue we have with switching is multiple BT email addresses that I've had for decades, BT will delete these after a month of cancelling their services I believe? Although they do generously allow you to keep them for just £7.50 per month :eek: )
 
Is peak time performance important?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
If peak means when the kids aren't at school then yes, often have 3 ps4's using the wifi at the same time, as well as me on Netflix and the missus on her phone games.
 
as an aside, companies always punish you for being loyal, that's why comparison sites exist. I tried this week to move my variable energy tariff to a fixed one (same supplier) with First utility and was told that tariff is for new customers only. Basically the lady on the phone advised me to switch suppliers. Bonkers world we live in!
 
Check out ofcom stats - virgins peak time performance sucks

You might want to consider plusnet - note im biased and work for BT who owns plusnet!


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I switch broadband every year - slight hassle but the only way to consistently keep price rock bottom . Luckily I have very low requirements here so any old fibre will do. Had a deal last year thru a Moneysavingexpert offer meant we were paying about £7 a month :D:thumbs:
 
Im with Zen. Not the cheapest but they are super reliable. 100% unlimited too. Cant say I have ever noticed the speed dropping at peak times either.
 
I just don't get it with these companies, surely keeping a long term customer is more beneficial than getting new ones who are more likely to switch again at the end of the contract?
 
I've been with Virgin for over 15 years (used to be Telewest). Probably only had one minor issue with the broadband in all those years. I pay for the slowest connection which is 100 Meg and speed tests at about 110 meg and is very consistent. We use a load of connected devices at home all the time and never had the need to upgrade to a 300 Meg line. In my view you just cant beat fiber.
 
I did switch once before, back in the nineties, to Diamond Cable who were then bought out by NTL. The whole experience still leaves a bad taste, NTL had possibly the worst customer service ever, needless to say I switched back to BT, was better the devil you know at the time.
 
Just googled NTL to see what happened to them seems they merged with Virgin, still it was well over 20 years ago I had their cable.
 
I've been on both Virgin and Plusnet and haven't had any problems. A carefully worded email to the CEO of BT should sort you out as it will goto the executive escalations team.
 
The problem is everyone has a bad experience with someones and everyone KNOWS someone that's had a bad experience with someone. One of the guys here at work had 9 months of hell with BT and obviously would never use them again but some here have had good experience with BT. Customer service died many many years ago for pretty much all companies. My golden rule is never to sign up to any company that doesn't have a telephone number you can call. Web Chat just sucks!!!

...........Neil will now give his BT spiel..............;)
 
Tucks said:
I've been with Virgin for over 15 years (used to be Telewest). Probably only had one minor issue with the broadband in all those years. I pay for the slowest connection which is 100 Meg and speed tests at about 110 meg and is very consistent. We use a load of connected devices at home all the time and never had the need to upgrade to a 300 Meg line. In my view you just cant beat fiber.
Click to expand...

Same, I've been with Virgin since they were NTL. I don't really feel I get any customer loyalty, but at the same time I cannot fault their service.

I'm also on the 100Mb connection and do not feel the need to upgrade the speed. Maybe it depends on where you live, but I don't see a drop in speed on during "peak" hours. I usually get between 12 and 13 megabytes (not bits) per second download any time of the day.

If you want to save more money (potentially) with cable internet, ditch the phone line and setup a VOIP account. I use Sipgate which is PAYG so there's no line rental.

https://www.sipgate.co.uk

Looking at the last month, I spent 7p on calls :-)
 
Plusnet has been good in the past and i will probably switch back to them.
EE a joke. Gave me the wrong number when I left and took ages to leave due to having their equipment on the exchange and would not take it off. Spammed texted me when I left. had to complain.
Talk Talk just lie about fixed fee's. Just keep on adding more on. Morons ha ha ... thats funny.

Good luck.
 
mark9 said:
I just don't get it with these companies, surely keeping a long term customer is more beneficial than getting new ones who are more likely to switch again at the end of the contract?
Click to expand...

You would think. ....But they make more money bumping up existing customers rates ... knowing that a huge number will never even notice/question it or be bothered to switch. Same with insurance.
 
mark9 said:
I just don't get it with these companies, surely keeping a long term customer is more beneficial than getting new ones who are more likely to switch again at the end of the contract?
Click to expand...
Perhaps they are banking on the notion that most people ringing up are not actually going to bother switching when it comes down to it. There must be a reasonable percentage of customers who either don't know they can lower their prices, or don't care enough to actually go through the effort of changing (imagined or actual effort).
 
Durzel said:
Perhaps they are banking on the notion that most people ringing up are not actually going to bother switching when it comes down to it. There must be a reasonable percentage of customers who either don't know they can lower their prices, or don't care enough to actually go through the effort of changing (imagined or actual effort).
Click to expand...
Yeah and I was one of them people up until a few days ago, didn't even look at other companies until I got off the phone to BT trying to haggle a better deal.

nugat said:
Looking at the last month, I spent 7p on calls :)
Click to expand...

Same here, I rarely use my landline, only to ring companies that look like I will be charged more for on mobile. I never answer it either, mostly it is junk calls, my parents and the in-laws are the only ones who still ring it, they have my mobile number if they really want me :D
 
From a cynical perspective these companies will have metrics which tell them that X% of people have complained about what they're paying, and a smaller percentage of that have actually moved away. Why would they willingly choose to lose money when they don't have to? Attracting new customers is far more valuable to them when those new people will be locked in to 12+ months anyway.
 
The new customer scam.
I've haggled to get the same deal but thats pretty much all your going to get from them.
Mobile contracts are easier to haggle.
 
Unfortunately I still have a land line. Misses want to keep it. The only people that call are her mum and PPI claims. Could do with getting rid of both of these to be honest but don't mind speaking to the PPI people sometimes :)

Definitely avoid Talk Talk. I've recently closed a business account with them. Shocking service. Had a problem a while ago where the talk talk router basically ground to a halt (reboots and re-configs wouldn't sort it). Their customers service told me I had to pay a £100 call out for an engineer and if it was found to be their problem they would reimburse me! Closed the account soon after.
 
Tucks said:
Definitely avoid Talk Talk. I've recently closed a business account with them. Shocking service. Had a problem a while ago where the talk talk router basically ground to a halt (reboots and re-configs wouldn't sort it). Their customers service told me I had to pay a £100 call out for an engineer and if it was found to be their problem they would reimburse me! Closed the account soon after.
Click to expand...

We had bad experience with Talk Talk also. We were out of the minimum contract term and were switching. Because they had recently revamped the online account thingy it reset our 'start' date o_Oo_O so when we left they then proceeded to charge us an early leaving fee - hundreds of pounds. It took months of emails , passing the buck , broken promises of a refund date, explaining again and again , increasingly angry phone calls to eventually get the refund. Customer service was absolutely shocking :mad:
 
+1 for Plusnet. They are owned by BT but seem to be kept at arms length.

You can get good support from Plusnet when things go wrong - which has happened only twice in ten years.

Performance is consistently good and has actually crept up over the last couple of years from 26 mbps to 31mbps max and I live quite far from the cab, and you get cheaper (but not free) BT Sport on your sky box if you want it (but you don't get access to the app.)

They give you a free router which is a load of rubbish, but you can use your existing one and chuck the plusnet one out.

(And if you sign up use mfresh as a referrer code and good things will happen!)
 
If you want to move to save money then do so, very few people do so high prices for current customers mean easy £££ for most services - that's the same with broadband, mobile, TV, banking, energy etc etc.

What's the current line speed you're getting on the connection?

You can switch to any other FTTC provider and get the same basic speed as you get with BT as the connection back to the exchange will be the same. Speeds from there depend on the ISP's backhaul, but most don't have bandwidth issues these days as its all factored in over huge numbers of connections.

I spent a short (because I declined to extend the contract) period consulting for NTL some years back and their IT systems and infrastructure were astonishingly poor though seems to have improved with Virgin.

Virigin cable works slightly differently, and you can have localised contention/congestion issues, but my son's in Cardiff on a street full of students capable of consuming an astonishing amount of data is solid at 250M, no issues even when playing online FPS stuff.
 
An update on this, switched to Virgin 100 yesterday and so far not so good.

Struggling to load webpages on all devices, no matter how close to the Vhub, sometimes they load very fast but often just hang or timeout?

Before I contact Virgin, any ideas?
 
Just tried moving the hub away from phone cradle and power sockets, seems to be working perfectly now...fingers crossed.
 
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