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Sky Broadband
by drfootlong
I live fairly close to the phone exchange so my experience will vary from other people, this is the standard Broadband unlimited, not the sky fibre product.
Speed wise, i get about 16mb so almost the full advertised speed, It's not slowed down at peak times either, or speed limited once a certain threshold has been reached ... like i had with Virgin Media, they don't throttle certain things like torrent traffic which most other ISP's slow down aggressively at evenings/weekends.
Customer service seems OK, i've had a few instances where the connection has gone down for an hour or 2, when my neighbors on O2 and BT have been fine, it was a local network problem however and the call centre, which is UK based, actually got an engineer to call me back to verify the problem before escalating it with someone at the local exchange.
If you already have ADSL from O2, BT, Plusnet, etc, and already have a poor connection, it's probably your location or line quality and it's unlikely you'll get any better from switching to sky, so bear that in mind.
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virginmedia.com
by thedomino
Of all the reviews I want to write, when I found out that I could review virgin media, I jumped at the chance.
From a service perspective, they are by far THE worst company I have ever dealt with.
I began my journey with virgin media 2 years ago. Things started smoothly and the broadband had no problems and kept a ... reasonable speed. It was only once problems started occurring that you start to realise how poor the company is. The Internet connection started to drop out regularly and after 3 calls to technical support who follow a benign script of things, starting with have you turned it off and on again, I was ready to pack it in! I don't blame the tech support as they have a script they must follow, but once you've explained to them that you've recently spoken to someone and tested these methods, they make you follow the steps again anyway! One of the advisors told me to manually input DNS servers into my router. The following tech support member told me I didn't need to do that...so they clearly can't even follow the same script? Eventually they sent me a new router around a month after my first call which finally resolved the problem.
The real problems started when I moved house...
My girlfriend is currently completing a PhD and Internet is crucial for research when she's away from the library. As we were moving house we knew we had to plan the Internet ahead of time to make sure we weren't without Internet for long in the new house. I arranged with virgin to cleverly start a package for the new house before we moved, so I would be paying for both my current package and the new package at the same time for a month or 2. I was happy to do this and it meant that I would be able to keep my Internet running in the old house up until the last minute and the Internet be pretty much ready and waiting to go in the new house when we moved in. All seemed well and we thought everything was sorted.
The following day our services were disconnected in the old house...despite asking to keep the service running until we cancelled it. As the phone line had been stopped I couldn't use the landline to call virgin for free anymore, which meant I had to use my mobile...charging me a shed load. As it was their mistake once I'd finally got through to an advisor after a 30 minute queue I asked them to call me back on my mobile to save me spending money I shouldn't have to. The adviser promised to call me back immediately. My patience ran out 5 hours later and I called again. I demanded to speak to a supervisor, explaining my situation and how virgin had not kept their promise. I asked again If I could have a call back to save my phone bill due to them cutting off my phone line. The supervisor promised me 3 times that he would call back immediately after we ended the call.
Guess what...I hit the roof as once again, no call back 3 hours later (I'm amazed I gave them even that long). Number one rule for service, keep your promises!
I called once more, and immediately pushed the button for 'thinking of leaving us', it probably took about 5 seconds before I was connected to the happiest person I've ever spoken to in my life, who's own life seemingly depended on keeping me with virgin. It didn't end happily for them unfortunately as I was beyond reconciliation by this point and cancelled my whole deal with them despite being offered a whole £50...
Bottom line, virgin are fine...so long as you don't have to speak to them...and prey to god that you don't ever have reason to speak to them
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Sky Broadband
by tzlubbock
So having been a sky broadband user for more than 3 years now, I have seen how the internet product has become based around speed. Remember those promises of high speed connections in the UK...well they exist but you have to pay a premium!
Sky broadband offer a multitude of options and I recommend people do their homework ... first, you need to be thinking about what you might use the connection for! Because some of the packages are very limited!
That said I am reviewing my connection, unlimited but of the normal speed, no frills other than I can download what I like. Of course I am reviewing in general and will keep it brief for this reason, it's not fair to summarize other services based on the one I have, and area limitations will undoubtedly apply so be sure to check the estimated speed if you're going to purchase
1. Downtime, the net's worst enemy, I have never had any down time...to my surprise the connection is very reliable, it's never dropped out and other than finding that at 12:00 at night things go a little odd for a second or two whereby the router has to reboot (could be the router), it's always solid.
2. Speed is OK, not mega fast keeping in mind I have the unlimited package speeds should be up in the 8gig limits but realistically they hover around 3. Again you should be doing your homework, always, whatever you do ask the sky to profile your connection. Upload speed is poor! Simply put it is less than adequate, sending files to Flickr and site the likes of...is a chore!
3. Router - BASIC not much more to say, main comparison is the home hub from BT, quite an advanced little box, but the sky box is just a router nothing more nothing less.
4. Customer services - -I have found sky quite helpful, when things have gone wrong (often my fault) the helpline is happy to help with little queue time, maybe some queue at peak time but never enough to note being on hold for too long.
5. Cost, and here is the clincher, its cheaper when bought with a TV package! Come and be a sky TV customer and you get an OK connection for next to nothing in comparison. When you start talking about upping the speed that's when the bucks hit! Right back to my original point...speed costs these days and someone has to pay to lay fiber optic cables right...? If purchased alone I personally don't think it's anything special, it's a connection and that's the bottom line, complimentary to a range of products.
Recommended? Yes in all fairness its a solid connection with the good help service, a router thrown in and OK speed for a good price. Would I want more? I always want more...I am a broadband customer. If you are hunting for a very very fast connection I strongly recommend that you consider looking for a more expensive product, sky base broadband packages are 'base'. That said the 3gig connections are letting me play games, download music and the only real bottleneck is 720 DPI+ streaming, buffering is common when trying to do such activity.
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