Posted 3 days ago
Is open-reach Broadband better than cable and which one
Hello Dear HUKD members,
Seek your advise. I joined Virgin after leaving Sky but day after joining had an outage for full 5 days with no Broadband service. That has really put me off along with terrible overseas customer service, so going to leave Virgin as still in 14 days cooling off period. Read on community forum that this is the second outage for 5 days in my area in two months
Any Suggestions about open reach. Vodofone sounds to be cheapest but again read some bad reviews about their CS. Does it matter which provider as almost all providers are via Open-reach ? I am thinking of taking 500 or 910 Mb speed.
Sky had best customer services but frustratingly they say they can only provide me up to 150 MB speed
Seek your advise. I joined Virgin after leaving Sky but day after joining had an outage for full 5 days with no Broadband service. That has really put me off along with terrible overseas customer service, so going to leave Virgin as still in 14 days cooling off period. Read on community forum that this is the second outage for 5 days in my area in two months
Any Suggestions about open reach. Vodofone sounds to be cheapest but again read some bad reviews about their CS. Does it matter which provider as almost all providers are via Open-reach ? I am thinking of taking 500 or 910 Mb speed.
Sky had best customer services but frustratingly they say they can only provide me up to 150 MB speed
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30 Comments
sorted byIt does to some extent matter who you go with on Openreach. Performance and reliability will be similar but it's just the line from your home to the exchange that's always the same. From there, different ISPs use different backhaul systems which may have different speeds, routing and capacity. Additionally, different ISP's routers will make your experience vary a lot as well. Some are decent. Others are awful.
Virgin Media's customer service is the absolute worst in the industry. The best service will come from specialist brands like AAISP and IDNet but both of these will command a price premium. Out of the mainstream brands it's the BT Group of companies BT, EE and Plusnet (Pick the cheapest from a comparison site like BroadbandChoices) have good broadband, a half-decent router, and full UK Based customer service who are helpful.
If looking for Openreach fibre at the lowest price you can get, Onestream is where you want to look. They are almost always the lowest price for it. and the broadband they provide uses Vodafone's backhaul but with their own UK customer service. If you go with them you'd need to opt out of any free trials they offer you though, and would be best off supplying your own router.
Plusnet is 35, BT around 37, Onestream is actually cheapest 35/month for 900 speed. Is their router not the best ? Is it easy to find an alternative router. Voda is cheapest with cash back. But with cash back it is around 28-29/month although conscious reading their CS is also bad (edited)
I’m not sure I’d call Sky customer service good though. Last time I dealt with them I spent ~30 minutes on hold to get put through to an overseas call centre who struggle to understand my accent and I can’t say were very helpful in general… With that said, they were still miles ahead of Virgin Media’s customer service.
There is a site you can check. I'm sure someone who knows will offer it
Plusnet, Vodafone, BT, Shell and Onestream are available in my area for 500 or above speed (edited)
If you don't want a telephone number they have good prices & should be able to get the best speeds available
Ive heard customer service has greatly improved since they first started offering broadband and at the end of the day, full fibre has very little to go wrong.
I have my own router, I use my own DNS, so as long as OpenReach keep the kit running then there is very little to go wrong.
In 3yrs on full fibre I've had 1 outage which was 1hr.