Business Phoneline and Broadband

[paulears]

That's the plan - to ditch the dodgy line. Even more annoyingly, I just plugged my BT 3G dongle into the laptop because I'm out and there was no wi-fi, and guess what - it's expired!

[Owain]

Sadly Sipgate no longer offer number porting inwards on their Basic (free) product. When they did it was £20 very well spent.

[Judge]

There are a few things to bear in mind here. ADSL and FTTC services are all provided by Openreach and are sold on to other companies such as Plusnet, Clara, Eclipse and BT - yes Openreach and BT are the same....but different/

There is a fixed bottom line price that Openreach charge as wholesalers so as as been pointed out, the bottom line is often similar between companies.

I have had dial-up, ADSL, ISDN and now fibre and for the last few years have been using Eclipse. They are certainly in the top tier price-wise but do give excellent customer service, and are based in Exeter.

Other than that Zen Internet have a stellar reputation and are cheaper. Both will supply the whole package inc line rental so thats worth looking at.

Plusnet are interesting. They are very cheap - one of the cheapest but seem to be well liked. They are actually part of the BT group but the call centres are UK based and talk sense. They offer home and business services. I called them and said, I am a business, whats to stop me using the much cheaper home service? He replied that in the T&C it states that you are not allowed to use the line for "profit making activities"

We both agreed that this was a bit of a grey area as almost everyone at some point uses their home line for business related calls and web activity. He also said that if you are a business customer then you will get priority service and technical support. As I run an internet based business I had to take notice of that one. But generally if you want a good cheap provider at home then they are a great choice.

We had speed issues with our line a while back and I was on the phone to Eclipse to get it sorted out many times. All they can do is book a service call with Openreach though, so at end of day whoever you go with you are at the mercy of the engineers. I think though that if you have a service from a good company like Zen, Clara or Eclipse then they will actually work harder on your behalf to sort things out. In the end they changed everything for us, new modem, new router, even installed a brand new line from the pole into my office. That would not have happened with BT. Even though BT actually carried out the work here - go figure!

 

Now, because the line speed is determined by several things: your proximity to the exchange, whether your underground cables are copper or aluminium, how the DSLAM is set up, how the ports are configured etc. Consequently there is a max speed you will get regardless of who you go with.

And dont go with BT. I really resent this whole BT Sports thing. I have no interest in watching sports on TV and will not pay towards it by buying one of their stupid packages. Tell you what BT, why not give us decent UK based support instead eh? Thats what I need from a comms company - not frickin' football!

 

And lastly, however good a deal it seems, dont use Talk Talk. yes they may have got a bit better over the last year or so but are generally still rubbish and promise a lot more than they deliver.

Cheers

J

[timsabre]

There are a few things to bear in mind here. ADSL and FTTC services are all provided by Openreach ...

 

except in our corner of East Yorkshire... where we are stuck with the local telecoms company Kingston Communications. As far as I know it's the only part of the country where there are no BT lines. We still get lots of bus stop adverts and leaflets trying to get us to change to other providers, which are pointless as they all require you to have a BT line.

[Judge]

Oh yeas, forgot about that. Actually Eclipse are owned by Kcom group.