OT- Broadband & TV experience

[FishingWasp]

I am shortly moving house, and am reviewing broadband, TV etc providers. The speeds claimed and various packages of the different providers make direct comparison difficult.
Has anyone good or bad experience of BT, Virgin, Sky etc.?
I know that I want Sky (for cricket for Mrs FW), BT for Premiership rugby, and general documentaries/nature. I am indifferent for movies.
Any suggestions or good/bad experiences with providers?

[wasps]

They're all as good / bad a each other

For every terrible review you'll get of BT, Sky or Virgin, you'll get equally good reviews.

I've never used Virgin, but my in laws hated it.
I've switched a few times between sky and BT for internet.... And I've always had sky sports and BT sport.
Quite frankly, they're both a shambles when there's a problem or when they're first setting it up after you move in... Or when you switch.
But once in place, I found the service fine.

I work from home and notice every time my connection drops.
Usually it's my internal wi-fi or extenders that are the problem - the connection to the house has been rock solid, other than the first 3 or 4 weeks where it needed looking at a few times.... But that was the same with both BT and Sky when I had it.

I'm happy with BT now, and may look to ditch sky for TV if I can get all of their sports channels through BT tv

Ultimately, I'd say go with whoever will offer you the best price for the services you want.

[NellyWellyWaspy]

Where I am there is truly a choice. I have Virgin's own cable (fibre optic - recently upgraded to their fastest speed), or that of BT OpenReach (copper, but soon, I am informed, to also be replaced with fibre optic).

For most people, whoever you choose, the cable will be from OpenReach. If it is copper, it will be slow. If it is fibre, it may be fast.

Behind all the rhetoric, advertising, good and bad reviews, it is all the same. For me, I get the advertised speed. Only Virgin's customers on Virgin's new fibre get that. All the rest get sold lies.

Until the lying, thieving pack of inhuman beings we elect, who call themselves our political representatives, but in truth are a bunch of thieving, conniving, self-interested crooks, actually change the law and oversight of these huge monolithic corporations, and force the provision of to the door fibre, we can expect to be poorly served and robbed blind.

[Rossm]

I work from home and notice every time my connection drops.
Usually it's my internal wi-fi or extenders that are the problem - the connection to the house has been rock solid, other than the first 3 or 4 weeks where it needed looking at a few times.... But that was the same with both BT and Sky when I had it.

I have been with Sky for years and have had little to complain about their broadband. Please note, I do not have Sky Q. I don't use Sky's router which is crap. I use a third party router/modem (TP Link Archer VR2800) which is rock solid and holds it's connection much better that Sky's kit.

[BG]

I am shortly moving house, and am reviewing broadband, TV etc providers. The speeds claimed and various packages of the different providers make direct comparison difficult.
Has anyone good or bad experience of BT, Virgin, Sky etc.?
I know that I want Sky (for cricket for Mrs FW), BT for Premiership rugby, and general documentaries/nature. I am indifferent for movies.
Any suggestions or good/bad experiences with providers?

Is there fibre to the door or is it copper based ?

[Gaz]

I think you can still get BT sport discounted if you have a BT broadband product, or Virgin TV. That may swing it.

After being with sky for years I switched to virgin, hated it, nothing wrong per se but you get used to the interface. Went back to sky q and love it, albeit it is a bit pricey.

They are all terrible when something goes wrong. But I have better experience overall with sky.

I have BT infinity (fttc) and get good speeds (70 Mbps) and good reliability so no complaints.

[Heathen]

I have Sky for TV, Telephone, Broadband and Mobiles. (Do not have Sky Sports as there is little on there that interests me) The only extra is BT Sport which I get through the Skybox (but have watched online from time to time.) The telephone cable is 250 m in copper to the green box, which is fibre connected. Currently getting 68 Mb. It is excellent for downloads and catchup TV - almost instant.

My major issue with BT is that their call packages are restrictive, compared to Sky. We do not have Virgin in our area so cannot hammer them for better deals. As a Sky customer of 20years plus, the threat of leaving always provokes a new discount.

[backdoc]

A BT contract for fibre reduced my speed from 4 MB/Sec to 0.2 MB/Sec.
I wasted 9 working days waiting for 'technicians' from BT to sort the problem out, and each episode was a Groundhog Day moment.
Eventually even they agreed that the contract was broken and after 9 months of misery I went to sky.

I also tried satellite [useless] and more recently a dedicated line [a complete waste of money].

My house in rural France is much better supplied than my house in Harrow.

[FishingWasp]

I am shortly moving house, and am reviewing broadband, TV etc providers. The speeds claimed and various packages of the different providers make direct comparison difficult.
Has anyone good or bad experience of BT, Virgin, Sky etc.?
I know that I want Sky (for cricket for Mrs FW), BT for Premiership rugby, and general documentaries/nature. I am indifferent for movies.
Any suggestions or good/bad experiences with providers?

Is there fibre to the door or is it copper based ?

Not sure, but the current owner gets 38 mbyte download using BT , so I guess it's fibre to quite near the house. The current owner said he was going to switch to Sky. However the house is in rural mid Wales, so that might restrict the number of providers.
It will also mean a longer (time wise) journey to the Ricoh!

[JF]

I recently had to change my ISP as Vodafone were closing the Demon brand. I switched to Vodafone for both broadband (fibre to box, not house) and home phone.

Both are fine. One of the reasons I liked Demon was that they blocked nothing, and Vodafone are the same. I have a business account, and there are various guarantees attached to it. The speed increase I received over Demon was considerable. My only comment is that once or twice a day the connection freezes for about thirty seconds. Nothing worse.

My landline doesn't get used much, the calls in are generally "Michael from Microsoft" or people who think I've had a car accident. I can hear the lies quite clearly from both.

[westwaleswasp]

You need to haggle with them all.
You can use independent speed testing websites once installed.
My Sky package has been great for BB, but my parents are not so lucky. It seems to be a bit pot luck. They are notoriously hard to leave. BT are sneaky and just put the price up out of contract so if you don't check your ebill you can be shafted, Sky do the same but when you log into their website the current and old bills are easily to hand. In my experience BT are better in terms of haggling, you can get most new customer deaks with them by renewing, they just tie you into them for longer. Sky can get arsey over things like box replacement until you hit the right person, at which point you normally get what you want, and their customer service has been good for me.
My Sky BB is linked to the sports, permanently reduced as long as I have sports. It is pretty fast here.

My Virgin experience was rather unsatisfactory- they told me over the phone that I should not have gone into the shop for a deal when I wanted to upgrade and keep my email address. Oddly the email address stayed active for years after, despite their shop trying to tell me I could only keep it if I paid top wack for a package I did not want.

[RogerE]

Our lane has been upgraded from normal ADSL (1.5Mb ) to FTTC .

We are now running at a pretty constant 35 - 39Mb.

We have TalkTalk, our neighbours have Sky and BT and both have a pretty consistent 30 - 35Mb. However we have had  no dropouts, whereas the neighbours have then at least twice a week.

Although the lines are provided by Openreach every one of the major suppliers, using the Openreach network, have their own equipment located in the exchanges, and I wonder if that is the reason why ours seems to be a bit better?

[Heathen]

A BT contract for fibre reduced my speed from 4 MB/Sec to 0.2 MB/Sec.
I wasted 9 working days waiting for 'technicians' from BT to sort the problem out, and each episode was a Groundhog Day moment.
Eventually even they agreed that the contract was broken and after 9 months of misery I went to sky.

I also tried satellite [useless] and more recently a dedicated line [a complete waste of money].

My house in rural France is much better supplied than my house in Harrow.

It is interesting that we also got better Mb in rural France before we went to superfast in the UK.

We consistently get 7 Mb+ on copper out there with a commitment from Orange that the whole area will be upgraded to FREE superfast fibre by 2021.

[BG]

Although the lines are provided by Openreach every one of the major suppliers, using the Openreach network, have their own equipment located in the exchanges, and I wonder if that is the reason why ours seems to be a bit better?

I have a feeling that the equipment in the exchanges are still effectively BT's but they rent out sections to other providers and also the support for the equipment for them.

Having supported companies for IT and broadband I know problem solving connection speeds for copper based broadband (either fibre to cabinet or pure copper only adsl)  is a extremely difficult.

It can be a corroded connection in the nearest cabinet.. the same at the DP at the house or even the internal wiring. Then you have really old installations that use over head cables from the street open to the elements.

In my view every new housing development should be forced to install fibre to door (and not just to the nearest cabinet). I have fibre to door (Virgin) and get 240 down and 20 up. BT Openreach don't want to start digging up pavements and roads from the cabinets to houses as it would cost billions and billions.

I'm not a fan of BT being re-nationalised but govt (this or next) need a way of forcing BT to invest more.  In theory Openreach and BT residential/business are 2 sep companies but Openreach have an almost monopoly grip on 80% of the market infrastructure. Openreach do have to sell their product to other companies (Sky, TalkTalk as well as BT itself) but if you report a fault via Sky.. then it still has to go back through to BT.. so you might as well just use BT if Virgin cable isn't available.

All 3 media companies (Virgin, BT and Sky) have to allow the others to be able to resell their TV packages. I have Virgin TV/Internet with the BT sports package bolted on for rugby and Moto GP. I could add Sky Sports or Sky films but that's doesn't interest me.. I'll stick to my Laurel and Hardy VHS tapes

[andermt]

As has been said, really depends on where you are what you can get.

If you are after good BB speeds and can get Virgin cable then IMHO it's a no brainer. (Also if you have TV the signal doesn't cut out n bad weather like Sky does)

I've had Virgin BB for as long as I can remember (right back when it was NTL!), and I can probably say that the system has dropped out only a handful of times. I think the worst was losing it for 1 whole day, not bad in about 15 years. I always have whatever the fastest speed is as my son works in gaming and needs decent speeds to do his job.