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In the UK, use this: https://www.aa.net.uk/ https://www.aa.net.uk/ I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They just have a great reputation for good technica

In the UK, use this: https://www.aa.net.uk/ https://www.aa.net.uk/ I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They just have a great reputation for good technical knowledge, privacy, and support.

ngcazz 6y ago
Can vouch, they've the most competent customer support I've ever dealt with and especially they respect technical customers.
mhandley 6y ago
I've been a happy A&A customer for 15 years now. They're not the cheapest, but you get what you pay for. Excellent tech support, no nonsense attitude. Edit: as an example, a bunch of years back I detected a routing loop. Emailed them the traceroute. Got a response back in a few minutes saying they were looking into it, and it was fixed shortly afterwards. So nice to be able to communicate with someone who can actually fix problems. The only other times I've had to contact them have been related to diagnosing problems in the underlying BT copper (not really their problem), and they were super helpful there too.
Silhouette 6y ago
AA have a good reputation. Zen do too. I'm not sure why anyone who'd done market research would go with one of the bigger name ISPs these days. Well, OK, I am sure: AA and Zen both tend to be a bit more expensive. But this is one of those areas where you get what you pay for, I guess. Ironically, the one major exception to this is Virgin, because they do offer an alternative product with technical advantages, whereas almost every other landline ISP is ultimately just backed by the same physical BT infrastructure. But given the speeds you can get in most parts of the country from that BT infrastructure now, the difference isn't going to be as important for most people as it used to be a few years ago.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  We had a Zen account for a while. They were terrible - absolutely hilariously incompetent at getting us connected, expensive, and minimal bandwidth at busy periods. I'd used Zen about ten years earlier and they'd been much better, so I was very disappointed. My experience with Virgin was fine. The product was fast, there were a couple of short outages but no serious technical issues, and I had no problem cancelling when I moved a few years ago.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    I'm sorry to hear that. We've been with Zen for many years and through multiple addresses, and the only technical issues I can recall originated with Openreach rather than Zen and got escalated promptly by the Zen support people. Never had a bandwidth problem, and right now we're routinely getting close to the top speeds available with FTTC, even at "busy" times and with the coronavirus disruption. We did have a bit of hassle getting connected the last time we moved, but again I'm not sure whether that was really Zen's fault, because we ended up getting a BT engineer sent out to install some new hardware as well. It's true that Zen are relatively expensive, though, and their lack of 24/7 support is still well below par. A&A would be the obvious alternative to consider if we were moving again or decided to change ISP for some reason.
- daveoc64 6y ago
  I'm with Virgin Media (and have been for 20 years) because they offer the best speeds in most parts of the country. AA or Zen simply can't compete when they are offering FTTC or ADSL. I don't care at all about customer service. If you're contacting your ISP enough to care about the customer service, they must be doing something wrong. Virgin Media currently offers speeds of up to 500mbps across their entire network. That will be 600mbps at the start of next month, and it's 1000mbps in some places (such as Reading).
harel 6y ago
Thanks, I wasn't aware aa existed. What kind of speed are you getting out of it on average?
- lightgreen 6y ago
  AFAIU from reading their website they sell the same Openreach ADSL as the rest of providers (except Virgin or Hyperoptic which have own fibre). So the speed is the same as any ADSL provider: 70 down, 15 up or so.
  - dijksterhuis 6y ago
    > We offer both the slower ADSL services and the faster VDSL (fibre to the cabinet) services, FTTP and G.FAST services where available. The package is available with a copper pair or you can use with a phone line you buy from another Openreach-based provider such as BT. https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/home1/ https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/home1/
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      I wish I understood, are you agreeing with me, or your quote is a contradiction?
      - dijksterhuis 6y ago
        I believe they offer all of them on the open reach network. Simple ADSL, Fibre to cabinet, Fibre to premise and now G.Fast, which is on the order of 100Mbps-1Gbps speeds. Edit: to clarify, I'm saying they don't singularly operate on the copper ADSL component of the open reach network.
- mhandley 6y ago
  I'm on FTTC 80/20. Their control pages (which are excellent BTW) tell me the VDSL sync speed is currently 72.7Mb/s. They allow you to set an FQ/shaper upstream of the DSL infrastructure. I have the shaper set to 95% of the sync speed. This means I'm trading off 5% of the capacity, but in return I never see any queuing delays in the BT infrastructure. For example, I just ran a ping from my home to my lab across London. With an idle link, I get 10ms RTT. Then I ran a DSL speed test and saturated the downlink. It reports 65 Mbps which is pretty much what I get 24/7. But the real story is that the ping briefly only increased to 30ms just when the speed test started, then dropped back to 11ms for the duration of the speed test. That's really good isolation. Bandwidth is really not a big deal anymore - what matters is latency, but most ISPs just don't get this. Often you need to buy stupid link speeds just to avoid queuing delays. But I find that FTTC is fine for everyone in my family to run simultaneous Netflix sessions and me to videoconference at the same time with no noticable additional latency on my call. Edit: here's the graphs from the A&A control page for my line for the last week. These are really helpful figuring out what's going on if anything is strange. You can see that the mean RTT doesn't really move off the bottom axis, and the peak RTT pretty much never exceeds 50ms. http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/latency.png http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/latency.png
sakisv 6y ago
One more alternative for people in the UK: https://www.zen.co.uk/ https://www.zen.co.uk/ Also not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer. Coincidentally, I switched to them once I managed to break free from Virgin. The major selling point for me: Lifetime price guarantee. After being with Virgin for 3 years and tolerating 2 price bumps, that was a breath of a fresh air. Yes, the speeds are nowhere near what Virgin is offering, but for me, all the speed in the world cannot make up for obnoxious customer service, the terrible security and the shady practices they use to keep you handcuffed to them.
teh_klev 6y ago
I'm with A&A as well and since the mid 2000's. Despite being on Universal Credit due to my freelance biz going down the toilet due to Coronavirus, I'll do my absolute best to stay with them even if it means living off of cheap frozen peas and 50p supernoodles. They're not cheap but they bloody well answer the phone within 30 seconds and their tech support know their stuff. Even in my present crappy financial situation the thought of settling for anything else cheaper from Sky, BT, TalkTalk et al makes me shudder.
dijksterhuis 6y ago
This lot are my new ISP and I love it. Two phone calls to support on set up day, answered immediately. No support calls since. No peak time drains (that I've noticed). Bit more pricy, but you get technical wizardry and freedom. One of the biggest resentments I have against Virgin is that you need the business package to support some types of VPN. Like the VPN in use by my lab. Static IPs? Business account. Anything useful? Business account. That and the woeful password security practices they force on users. Letters, numbers and between 8-10 length? For the account login?! AA on the other hand will generate a secure and memorable passphrase for you, which you can override but has to be tiptop secure to do that. There's even a button for "whoops, someone else could see my screen, please generate a new passphrase again". I mean, who does that?! Genius. Then there's the logs which relate to my account. I can see exactly what openreach have said about work on my account. When an openreach engineer was assigned and exactly what they're doing etc. Honestly, if I buy a house, a deciding factor will probably be whether I can have AA as my ISP.
BuildTheRobots 6y ago
AAISP have been sponsoring our Hackspace's internet for a number of years now and we find them fantastic, friendly and knowledgeable - and they even implement xkcd#801 compliance. Further more, their stance on internet censorship is laudable ("The Government says we have to offer customers a choice of censored internet. So here's your choice, if you want censorship pick another ISP.")
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  For people who don't know what the xkcd compliance is: > The company's owner, Adrian Kennard (RevK), stated in a blog post that as of October 2010 the company is "xkcd/806" compliant, referring to xkcd comic number 806. This means that technical support callers who say the code word "shibboleet" will be transferred to a technical support representative who knows at least two programming languages, and presumably can offer more useful advice than a standard tech support script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_%26_Arnold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_%26_Arnold
minimaul 6y ago
(disclaimer, I'm a current customer and have been for a decade+) They're expensive, they have a data cap (but it's generous), and don't currently offer the higher g.fast or FTTP speeds, but: - the support is consistently excellent and no-nonsense, and there's no upselling or questionable sales tactics - phone calls are usually answered within seconds by someone who can actually help and doesn't just have a script, and they'll even give support over IRC if you want - easy access to extra fixed v4 and v6 - they support the Open Rights Group, and have a clear stance against internet censorship I've been a customer for over a decade now, and I still have no intention of leaving. Good CS on the odd occasion I need it more than makes up for the cost for me. Only thing I'd love to see is access to faster FTTP speeds (330/50)!

In the UK, use this: https://www.aa.net.uk/ https://www.aa.net.uk/ I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They just have a great reputation for good technical knowledge, privacy, and support.

ngcazz 6y ago

Can vouch, they've the most competent customer support I've ever dealt with and especially they respect technical customers.

mhandley 6y ago

I've been a happy A&A customer for 15 years now. They're not the cheapest, but you get what you pay for. Excellent tech support, no nonsense attitude. Edit: as an example, a bunch of years back I detected a routing loop. Emailed them the traceroute. Got a response back in a few minutes saying they were looking into it, and it was fixed shortly afterwards. So nice to be able to communicate with someone who can actually fix problems. The only other times I've had to contact them have been related to diagnosing problems in the underlying BT copper (not really their problem), and they were super helpful there too.

Silhouette 6y ago

AA have a good reputation. Zen do too. I'm not sure why anyone who'd done market research would go with one of the bigger name ISPs these days. Well, OK, I am sure: AA and Zen both tend to be a bit more expensive. But this is one of those areas where you get what you pay for, I guess. Ironically, the one major exception to this is Virgin, because they do offer an alternative product with technical advantages, whereas almost every other landline ISP is ultimately just backed by the same physical BT infrastructure. But given the speeds you can get in most parts of the country from that BT infrastructure now, the difference isn't going to be as important for most people as it used to be a few years ago.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
We had a Zen account for a while. They were terrible - absolutely hilariously incompetent at getting us connected, expensive, and minimal bandwidth at busy periods. I'd used Zen about ten years earlier and they'd been much better, so I was very disappointed. My experience with Virgin was fine. The product was fast, there were a couple of short outages but no serious technical issues, and I had no problem cancelling when I moved a few years ago.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that. We've been with Zen for many years and through multiple addresses, and the only technical issues I can recall originated with Openreach rather than Zen and got escalated promptly by the Zen support people. Never had a bandwidth problem, and right now we're routinely getting close to the top speeds available with FTTC, even at "busy" times and with the coronavirus disruption. We did have a bit of hassle getting connected the last time we moved, but again I'm not sure whether that was really Zen's fault, because we ended up getting a BT engineer sent out to install some new hardware as well. It's true that Zen are relatively expensive, though, and their lack of 24/7 support is still well below par. A&A would be the obvious alternative to consider if we were moving again or decided to change ISP for some reason.
daveoc64 6y ago
I'm with Virgin Media (and have been for 20 years) because they offer the best speeds in most parts of the country. AA or Zen simply can't compete when they are offering FTTC or ADSL. I don't care at all about customer service. If you're contacting your ISP enough to care about the customer service, they must be doing something wrong. Virgin Media currently offers speeds of up to 500mbps across their entire network. That will be 600mbps at the start of next month, and it's 1000mbps in some places (such as Reading).

harel 6y ago

Thanks, I wasn't aware aa existed. What kind of speed are you getting out of it on average?

lightgreen 6y ago
AFAIU from reading their website they sell the same Openreach ADSL as the rest of providers (except Virgin or Hyperoptic which have own fibre). So the speed is the same as any ADSL provider: 70 down, 15 up or so.
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  > We offer both the slower ADSL services and the faster VDSL (fibre to the cabinet) services, FTTP and G.FAST services where available. The package is available with a copper pair or you can use with a phone line you buy from another Openreach-based provider such as BT. https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/home1/ https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/home1/
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    I wish I understood, are you agreeing with me, or your quote is a contradiction?
    - dijksterhuis 6y ago
      I believe they offer all of them on the open reach network. Simple ADSL, Fibre to cabinet, Fibre to premise and now G.Fast, which is on the order of 100Mbps-1Gbps speeds. Edit: to clarify, I'm saying they don't singularly operate on the copper ADSL component of the open reach network.
mhandley 6y ago
I'm on FTTC 80/20. Their control pages (which are excellent BTW) tell me the VDSL sync speed is currently 72.7Mb/s. They allow you to set an FQ/shaper upstream of the DSL infrastructure. I have the shaper set to 95% of the sync speed. This means I'm trading off 5% of the capacity, but in return I never see any queuing delays in the BT infrastructure. For example, I just ran a ping from my home to my lab across London. With an idle link, I get 10ms RTT. Then I ran a DSL speed test and saturated the downlink. It reports 65 Mbps which is pretty much what I get 24/7. But the real story is that the ping briefly only increased to 30ms just when the speed test started, then dropped back to 11ms for the duration of the speed test. That's really good isolation. Bandwidth is really not a big deal anymore - what matters is latency, but most ISPs just don't get this. Often you need to buy stupid link speeds just to avoid queuing delays. But I find that FTTC is fine for everyone in my family to run simultaneous Netflix sessions and me to videoconference at the same time with no noticable additional latency on my call. Edit: here's the graphs from the A&A control page for my line for the last week. These are really helpful figuring out what's going on if anything is strange. You can see that the mean RTT doesn't really move off the bottom axis, and the peak RTT pretty much never exceeds 50ms. http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/latency.png http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/latency.png

sakisv 6y ago

One more alternative for people in the UK: https://www.zen.co.uk/ https://www.zen.co.uk/ Also not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer. Coincidentally, I switched to them once I managed to break free from Virgin. The major selling point for me: Lifetime price guarantee. After being with Virgin for 3 years and tolerating 2 price bumps, that was a breath of a fresh air. Yes, the speeds are nowhere near what Virgin is offering, but for me, all the speed in the world cannot make up for obnoxious customer service, the terrible security and the shady practices they use to keep you handcuffed to them.

teh_klev 6y ago

I'm with A&A as well and since the mid 2000's. Despite being on Universal Credit due to my freelance biz going down the toilet due to Coronavirus, I'll do my absolute best to stay with them even if it means living off of cheap frozen peas and 50p supernoodles. They're not cheap but they bloody well answer the phone within 30 seconds and their tech support know their stuff. Even in my present crappy financial situation the thought of settling for anything else cheaper from Sky, BT, TalkTalk et al makes me shudder.

dijksterhuis 6y ago

This lot are my new ISP and I love it. Two phone calls to support on set up day, answered immediately. No support calls since. No peak time drains (that I've noticed). Bit more pricy, but you get technical wizardry and freedom. One of the biggest resentments I have against Virgin is that you need the business package to support some types of VPN. Like the VPN in use by my lab. Static IPs? Business account. Anything useful? Business account. That and the woeful password security practices they force on users. Letters, numbers and between 8-10 length? For the account login?! AA on the other hand will generate a secure and memorable passphrase for you, which you can override but has to be tiptop secure to do that. There's even a button for "whoops, someone else could see my screen, please generate a new passphrase again". I mean, who does that?! Genius. Then there's the logs which relate to my account. I can see exactly what openreach have said about work on my account. When an openreach engineer was assigned and exactly what they're doing etc. Honestly, if I buy a house, a deciding factor will probably be whether I can have AA as my ISP.

BuildTheRobots 6y ago

AAISP have been sponsoring our Hackspace's internet for a number of years now and we find them fantastic, friendly and knowledgeable - and they even implement xkcd#801 compliance. Further more, their stance on internet censorship is laudable ("The Government says we have to offer customers a choice of censored internet. So here's your choice, if you want censorship pick another ISP.")

dijksterhuis 6y ago
For people who don't know what the xkcd compliance is: > The company's owner, Adrian Kennard (RevK), stated in a blog post that as of October 2010 the company is "xkcd/806" compliant, referring to xkcd comic number 806. This means that technical support callers who say the code word "shibboleet" will be transferred to a technical support representative who knows at least two programming languages, and presumably can offer more useful advice than a standard tech support script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_%26_Arnold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_%26_Arnold

minimaul 6y ago

(disclaimer, I'm a current customer and have been for a decade+) They're expensive, they have a data cap (but it's generous), and don't currently offer the higher g.fast or FTTP speeds, but: - the support is consistently excellent and no-nonsense, and there's no upselling or questionable sales tactics - phone calls are usually answered within seconds by someone who can actually help and doesn't just have a script, and they'll even give support over IRC if you want - easy access to extra fixed v4 and v6 - they support the Open Rights Group, and have a clear stance against internet censorship I've been a customer for over a decade now, and I still have no intention of leaving. Good CS on the odd occasion I need it more than makes up for the cost for me. Only thing I'd love to see is access to faster FTTP speeds (330/50)!