78 days, and still no broadband (Sky/Openreach, UK)
linkedin.comOh ...Sky.
For those not intimately familiar with the UK ISP industry, allow me to fill you in.
Sky's home-broadband service was a spin-off from Easynet which was a spin-off from UKOnline (Easynet's business broadband went Interoute -> GTT).
UKOnline were a fantastic ISP back in the day, really, really good.
Then Easynet bought them. They kept the techies, which meant things still got fixed correctly and in a timely manner.
The shit didn't really start hitting the fan until the Easynet spinoffs started. Once the residential customers moved to Sky and the business customers moved to Interoute ... that's when the service levels dropped off a cliff.
As for who to use now ?
Well, others have mentioned Andrews & Arnold.
I would concurr. They might me more expensive than the rest, but they employ techies who know their stuff. And if their techies find out you are a techie, they will treat you as one and have a proper conversation, you don't need to beg and scream to speak to a level 3 tech .. at AAISP, most techs are highly knowledgeable.
Not only that, but the Andrews & Arnold management and monitoring system is one of the best I've seen. They've got these fancy graphs they generate 24x7. And you can see the full activity log in relation to your account (even down to notes left by Openreach engineers when they came to fix your line).
Not only that, but Andrews & Arnold will do things other ISPs won't do. You want some static IPv4 ? No problem. You want a /48 IPv6 ? No problem. Want to manage your own PTR records ? No problem.
For home users and small businesses who can't yet afford a leased line, Andrews & Arnold is the dogs bollocks.
One of the mistakes people make in situations like this is to make all their communication (and complaints) via telephone.
Start writing real letters, on paper, in an envelope, with a stamp. Get proof of posting (but not proof of delivery) and start building up a paper trail. This way you get to show them what they promised, and that they didn't deliver that when they said they would.
Learn how to write a complaint letter. (Keep it short. Explain what went wrong, and what you'd like them to do to fix it. Give them realistic time limits to do so.) Go through their complaints process. You can copy in all of the organisations.
Then, when you've exhausted their complaints process you escalate to their regulator.
I remember submitting a complaint to Vodafone once and when I submitted the relevant form on their website it gave a error - so I ended up complaining about their complaints process. :-)
Broken support systems seem to be the rule rather than the exception these days.
> communication (and complaints) via telephone
If I do this I normally use a digital voice recorder but tell the drone at the other end that "I'm recording the conversation for training and quality purposes": that normally focusses their attention.
Why not proof of delivery?
In England proof of sending is enough for the courts, and proof of delivery gives the receiver chance to reject the post and then say they didn't get it.
Courts presume mail is delivered. Especially when it's multiple letters over many days.
All ISPs I have dealt with in the UK seem to be in a race to the bottom to provide the worst possible customer service. We recently had a problem with BT Broadband and got the run around for a few weeks and only got any attention when I submitted an official complaint.
Does anyone have any recommendations for UK ISPs that have decent customer service?
You want to talk to ISPs that target themselves at business use, rather than consumer ISPs who are indeed all in a race to the bottom, with a side-serving of barely different custom routers.
Zen Internet (zen.co.uk) have pricing comparable to consumer ISPs, but provide significantly better service, and have support staff who can actually fix your problems.
Andrews & Arnold (aaisp.net.uk) are very much priced for business users, but on the flip side of that have possibly the best support available - on occasions I've used them in the past calling up their support line always resulted in immediately being answered by someone who knew how ADSL works inside out, and could happily diagnose routing errors without escalating to anyone. They also once called me to say they'd detected activity which indicated malware was present on my network, and that I might like to resolve that.
Depending on where you live, there's also quite a few ISPs popping up who are running their own fibre throughout cities and selling symmetric gigabit connections for about the same price as BT would charge you for 60Mbps.
Zen were terrible when we used them at home. Having used Zen in the past I was expecting better. They eventually provided a service, but it took longer than it should have and there were a lot of unnecessary mistakes and support calls along the way.
We were literally trying to get them to work through a set up procedure they had somehow forgotten to do - on Christmas Eve, which was at least a week later than it should have been.
A&A have a good rep among geeks but they seemed expensive and I've never used them.
The best service I had in the UK was with Virgin (on local coax). Apparently their customer service is pretty poor. But aside from the occasional random outage the service mostly just worked, and at the advertised speeds.
Zen used to be good, back in the early 2000s they had amazing support. But they like most of the other ISPs have been racing to the bottom and they are a shadow of their former self. Unlike Sky and Plus.net and such its not an acquisition issue it just seems to be the quality of what they do has dropped substantially over the years. They remain one of the better ones but that is only because the service is that bad at Sky/Plus.net/EE/BT that it is a low bar to pass.
Agreed about Zen, we experience random dropouts at night sometimes for hours, I don't know if they are doing unannounced infrastructure changes or what it is.
I've observed it from the other side (failing to connect to a Zen customer for more than an hour), and additionally the zen.co.uk website refused to serve me either directly or via Tor when I tried to check its status and/or a looking glass service (though not recalling finding those anyway, when I've finally connected via a private server).
Although I haven't had the 'pleasure' of dealing with any of this in a good while, my experiences mirror your last paragraph.
It seems like a lot of the problems in the UK are down to the state of the POTS copper - if you're in an area that got NYNEX'd back in the day then cable is the way to go
We're in a rural area of Scotland so the only options appear to ADSL or 4G - I almost switched to the latter before BT Broadband got their act together.
Vodaphone Business are not to bad - I switched to them when Vodaphone finally shutdown Demon.
Sadly you're right. AAISP is very much worth a look, but they're not cheap. We went with Sky because they're good for the low price point - our longer term play is a joint order with the majority of our street for FTTPoD (Fibre to the Premises on Demand) through Cerberus Networks (which will cost quite a bit more, but take time). (this will eventually get us up to 900Mb/s, and the build will be entirely funded by the Governments DCMS Gigabit rural broadband voucher scheme, and built by Openreach.)
All indications are that Cerberus are extremely technical - the sales guys were able to talk BGP happily (not literally).
AAISP has an excellent product. Their sales team wasn't the easiest to deal with (pretty brusque in my experience), but in the ~15 months I've been with them, the connection has been rock-solid and never throttled. You do pay for it though (£45/month bottom line for ~75Mbps).
Sounds expensive, and looks like they have monthly download limits. I've been using Zen (though I explained my issues in a sibling comment) and I've never been throttled either, nor capped, with excellent latency round the clock. Miles ahead than any Virgin offering, that's for sure.
What does AAISP do better to be so expensive compared to the competition?
> What does AAISP do better to be so expensive compared to the competition?
1. It's more expensive, but not that expensive considering I use the internet for 12+ hours per day, and I earn an IT professional's salary. At a £15/month premium over other ISPs, it's a far cheaper luxury than a fancy car, a foreign holiday, or a pet.
2. ISPs I've used in the past have had truly shitty support - no matter how often you have problems, they'll just tell you to restart your router and close your ticket. AAISP claims to have support that can actually investigate and solve problems. I wouldn't know, as I've never had to contact their support.
3. I respect their pro-privacy/anti-censorship stance.
4. Many ISPs that are "unlimited" do have limits, they just won't tell you what they are or if you're close to them. They'll be in small print like a "fair use policy". Having spent a month throttled by Zen (admittedly years ago) I'll take an explicit limit over a mystery one. And AAISP's limit is more than enough for my purposes.
My only recent comparison is with Virgin Media, whom I'm sure we both agree has awful support.
Perhaps I should look into Zen. They are the other one I hear good things about. AAISP does have a 300GB monthly limit (extensible for a fee) but I've never exhausted it, even with two people WFH and nightly TV streaming.
AAISP have strong principles of privacy and not interfering in connections. (No NXDOMAIN web page injection, for example.) Also, exceptionally advanced line monitoring tooling and configuration - they let you see telecoms-engineer metrics and parameters about your line, for what that's worth.
The price I quoted includes line rental btw.
Hugely reccomend The Phone CoOp[1]. I pay ~£33 a month for 80/20. It's properly unlimited, and I pay an extra £0.60 a month for a static IP.
Been really stable for me for a long time, and I have been using them for years for mobile + broadband. They are a really straight forward what you see is what you get organisation.
+ When you ring them up they just answer the phone which can be a bit of a surprise.
- The router they sent me was junk but I just use it as a modem and have some ubiquiti stuff sat behind it.
- Not sure what their opening hours and stuff are like for support, I think it's not far off 9-5
I sold them a bit short there:
https://www.thephone.coop/help-resources/contact-us/
Tech Support is 24/7, anything else is 08:30-5pm Mon-Fri.
IDnet is really good. They're like a small ISP that sells mostly to business that dabbles in the consumer space.
Used them for ages and only had one issue, and when I reported it, the person talking to me was an networking expert.
It must genuinely be extremely hard to provide good customer service.
You must get a huge number of people phoning up with unfathomable problems related to their computer set ups that waste your time and aren't actually something that is your fault.
My favourite story from the support guys when I was working for an ISP was an old lady they’d been talking to for ages trying to work out the problem. Eventually they asked her to restart the router, she seemed utterly baffled as to what they were talking about, but eventually they managed to describe it in a way she understood.
Her response was “oh that thing, I took it out of the box”. She’d been paying for an internet connection for the previous two years, while never connecting to anything but her neighbour’s WiFi.
I can thoroughly and whole-heartedly recommend plusnet. Not only do we get the full advertised speed at all times, but the couple of times I have had issues, they explained clearly what was happening and were not afraid to indulge in more technical chat when they found I knew what I was doing.
Cannot speak to how they are now, but I was with IDNET for quite a while back in 2008 or so and they were very good https://www.idnet.net
I use Zen and when there was a cable cut between the cabinet and my house recently, between them and OpenReach we were back online the next day.
Had zero problems in the last 5 years.
I was extremely happy with Zen, so happy I upgraded from 76 to 330 Mb in June. Which requires a G.Fast modem and having to deal with OpenReach.
Since upgrading I've been having a couple 30-seconds long disconnections every day. Zen delegates any responsibility to OpenReach, and the latter has sent an engineer [1] which hasn't found anything wrong _on my end_ (of course), so I have to pay them 165+VAT for the call. And the disconnections are still there.
It's perhaps not Zen's fault, but I went to the most stable Internet I've ever had to one that disconnects randomly, while being 200m away from the cabinet and no-one can tell me where the problem is. Fun.
1: the engineer actually did a thorough job to make sure my line was OK, so the problem is elsewhere.
Total shot in the dark: I had a similar problem, it turned out the power supply for the router was faulty.
Same thing happened to me. I actually replaced the power supply with a 35 year old HP bench supply for a week to compare.
hyperopic if you're lucky enough to have coverage. dirt cheap gig e.
I moved mid of August within London and Openreach+Plusnet have not been able to connect my fiber connection - more than 2 months! Every week is a different issue.
As an update to yesterday: After emailing our local Member of Parliament (Rt Hon Dame Cheryl Gillian), and reaching out to Openreach CEO Clive Selley, we've finally been connected!
A member of the Chief Engineer Technical Escalation Team was put on the case, who arranged for a Senior Engineer to visit us today. The engineer arrived early this morning, and immediately set about finishing the copper run from several poles away to us. Before long he was back at our door to handle the internal wiring, which he quickly noted had an unnecessary route bridge (I don't know what this means, but it relates to internal copper wiring), which was degrading the signal. After the fix, he got us up and running at just under 30Mb/s (7Mb/s upload) - not stellar, but this will do until our longer term plans come to fruition (a joint FTTPoD order with many of our neighbours, using the Government's DCMS Gigabit Voucher Scheme to bring us 900Mb/s full-fibre).
My family and I are extremely grateful to Clive Selley and his team for taking a personal interest in our case, and local MP Cheryl Gillian's staff for playing their part. (sadly there was no response from Sky CEO Jeremy Darroch.)
The engineer who ultimately got us connected today told me he was in the process of studying for a masters in Nuclear Engineering, and I wish him the very best in that endeavour!
Forza to the poor soul navigating this (not an insurmountable problem, especially on 2020's scale, but annoying for sure.)
Anecdotally, it seems to me like this kind of horror stories only happens with ISP/Telco (to the point were I dread switching ISP for years)
Is that just an impression ? Was there an industry as prone to mishandle basic customer service like this in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc... Before ISP came to basically ruin our lives once every few years (and provide access to the greatest source of info in between ?)
I conjectures that the industry is so new that there has never been a "decent ISP" to set a gold standard, and that everyone is just operating into a "well, we shitty but so is everyone else" mindset. Is that accurate ?
It started when vendor lock-in began, which was the late 90's/early 2000's when dial-up died and broadband took over.
Before that the phone company was the one with the poor customer service, but nothing at this level that I recall.
Dial-up days were the golden years for the ISP business. When every marginal NFL city had 30+ ISPs to choose from, and switching was simply changing a dial-in number you actually had decent competition. You had any choice you could think of - want a high quality ISP catering to highly technical users? Done. Want an uber-cheap ISP catering to the masses? Got you.
This all went away and service went greatly downhill once you had 1 or 2 options to choose from in the DSL/cable/fiber era.
So this is one of those situations were either "a single monopoly with great customer service and / or a sense of public mission" and "lots and lots of competition in a very fluid market" can be sweet spots, but anything in between is bound to fail ?
Yep, similar issues with my provider moving in August, took 6 weeks to get a proper connection. Took a well-mannered engineer to basically press on while his boss was telling him to give up. From what I was able to get from my ISP (who also use Openreach for install) - it's a massively common issue and most of the lines have delays on them.
The mistake was not using BT for a new connection - Openreach is 100% owned by BT- Sky is one of their main competitors. My experience is that BT installations get prioritized and dealt with more efficiently and go the extra mile, everyone else gets dealt with in the statutory minimum way "by the book"
I’m having flashbacks to getting Speakeasy DSL service installed in a Southwestern Bell (now AT&T) area in the States. Everything took weeks, worse if your circuit needed any kind of repairs or if the first pair the line tech tried had any issue at all.
A common “fix” was to order Internet service directly from Bell for a month then switch to your preferred ISP. Of course, only the diehards actually did this and Southwestern Bell would aggressively market at you for months after.
(Granted, it was not great but now we have virtually no such option in most of the States, so the UK has us beat.)
Meanwhile, getting my 2Gbit fiber cable installed and connected (in Japan) took only a few days.
I’m continually surprised by these kinds of stories.
Also by nobody seeming to have any idea about the situation. How hard is it to add a note to the customer file (and read it)?
The Labour Party’s national broadband policy isn’t looking so stupid now.
Just out of interest, what makes you think that nationalising OpenReach would make them deliver a better "customer" experience?
In my personal experience dealing with e.g. HMRC, local councils etc does not offer me much confidence on that front.
The only benefit I can see personally is that there might be less room for error if there's less need for changes as people move in and out of properties.
Easier to focus on good customer service of the running of the network when:
1. You have more money to run the network.
2. No billing, sales etc. The bulk of most customer service departments.
3. Everyone is already connected.
It was stupid back then still stupid now.
Here in the US I pay more for gig fiber but service and reliability has been great. I'm not sure which one I'd rather have.
Openreach are an appalling organisation to deal with.
I have a journalist preparing a story on my situation, similarly Kafkaesque.