Recommend an ISP?

[zoo_music_girl]

I'm leaving Plus. I'm thinking of going to Zen, as I've heard such good things about them, but they are bloody expensive (£24.99 inc VAT per month) compared to everyone else. Given my history of connection problems I want an ISP with stellar customer service and support.

Any other recommendations before I move? It's costing me a £14.99 deferred migration fee to Plus so I want to get it right this time.

I'm actually really surprised Plus are giving me a MAC code at all, as I've just been badly Local Loop Unbundled.

Cheers.

Comments

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

Zen are worth the money. I was a happy customer for burble years before moving to a house with cable.

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

My other option would be subscribing to HomeChoice, which is kind of tempting. I can't get any other form of cable where I am though.

[reddragdiva]

I actually went for a job with Video Networks, who run HomeChoice. The people I spoke to were remarkably competent; I don't have any customer reports. Reputedly they suck less than Sky for the telly thing.

[redcountess]

apiphile and tintintin have Homechoice, ISTR it going down on numerous occassions.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I've been happy with Eclipse for a few years now. They're pretty reliable, and their tech support people have known what they're talking about and have sorted things out quickly and efficiently on the couple of occasions I've had need to contact them. They have a 1-month notice period, rather than the more usual 6- or 12-month deal, so if you get fed up with them you can change to a different ISP pretty quickly.

[reddragdiva]

Arkady and I both had very little trouble with Eclipse that wasn't BT's fault. The main problem with Eclipse is that they were bought by idiots who now run the customer disservice desk, so their service is good but customer service is shite.

[reddragdiva]

Zen are technically great but their current plans have silly bandwidth caps. Tiscali and AOL don't have bandwidth caps but Tiscali are notoriously incompetent and AOL are, um, AOL. But have a very fast and good network if you can get past them being AOL.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I have never noticed bandwidth caps -- is this for new customers only?

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

20GB on the package I'm looking at. If you're still on one of the old packages (which aren't available to new users) it's possible you don't have any.

20GB is four times what Plus had...

[reddragdiva]

O rly? Go for it then!

[reddragdiva]

Yup. Check the site - all new accounts are capped, old customers can move up to 8Mbit at their leisure but will be capped.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I have no problems with Zen apart from a one two day connection interruption about eighteen months ago and that turned out to be BTs fault. Other than that I get one or two line drops a month which I reckon are router related not Zen related.

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

So you're on Zen now? Do they have a recommendation scheme? If you can get anything out of it I'm happy for you to officially recommend me, I'm going to go with them.

[steer.livejournal.com]

They have always been my ADSL provider so I have no point of comparison.

[My post a while ago about internet issues was extreme dissatisfaction with 123-reg my domain hosting provider -- they suck and I dropped them.]

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

So do you want to give me a referral? I know Plus.net gives you 50p per month off for successful referrals, does Zen not do something similar?

[steer.livejournal.com]

Don't know if they do such a scheme. I'm about to hop in a cab any minute to head to London so I won't be offended if you go ahead without me. Otherwise, I will look on my return on Wednesday.

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

I'll see how it goes, I may not get my MAC code till Tuesday anyway.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Couldn't find any referral thing but thanks for the offer. also since I will move in a few months I will need to start a new contract. That'll probably be with Zen but I don't know if it will count any referral kind of thing. Thanks for thinking of it though.

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

I can't move just now anyway, because I was LLU'd. They don't have migrations for LLU yet.

Zen will let you move house without cancelling your service with them, I noticed that when I was looking at their products. http://zenbroadband.com/zenbroadband.aspx?page=494

[reddragdiva]

That's surprising - I've never had any trouble with reasonably complicated things with 123-reg.

[steer.livejournal.com]

The issue was one between the semi-competent 123-reg sysadmin and the semi-competent spam stopers at the university. 123-reg mail relays keep getting on spam blacklists because they sometimes relay spam. spam stoppers block blacklisted IP addresses.

123-reg people say "we relay mail, some of it is spam -- we can't help being on blacklists sometimes"

spam people say "they are on blacklists -- if you give us IP numbers of servers we can whitelist them for you."

It took me two weeks to persuade 123-reg to provide me the IP nos of their servers and I had to ask them a few times to get themselves removed from the spam blacklist.

A few months after that they changed to new servers which ended up on blacklists.

[nils.livejournal.com]

I'll happily recommend Zen. Was with them for 2.5 years, and would go back again if I had to pick a new provider (I'm not with them anymore as my current flatmates use a different provider).

I've only had limited exposure to their customer service (as you can do pretty much everything online) and support (as most of the time, it just worked), but had no problems in those areas in what little dealings I had.

IIRC, they give you a free dial-up account for when the ADSL is down. Which you hopefully won't need, but it's nice to have...

Might be worth checking uswitch.com - enter your details and go to the output table, then click the 'Customer satisfaction' link to read user reviews of the various providers. </ad>

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'd forgotten uswitch had broadband now too, but it doesn't look as useful as www.adslguide.org.uk

[drpete.livejournal.com]

The best customer service in the world is from Wizards (because he's called Chris, is a two-man band, and will bend over backwards to ensure stuff works). Not as cheap as some though.

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

This lot? http://www.wizards.co.uk/html/internet.service/adsl.services.html

Actually that's not a bad price to pay for a connection that stays up. I'm not sure I can get more than 512k anyway. I shall consider him, thanks!

[drpete.livejournal.com]

That's them.