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.
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.
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.
Does anyone have any recommendations for UK ISPs that have decent customer service?
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.
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.
All indications are that Cerberus are extremely technical - the sales guys were able to talk BGP happily (not literally).
What does AAISP do better to be so expensive compared to the competition?
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
https://www.thephone.coop/help-resources/contact-us/
Tech Support is 24/7, anything else is 08:30-5pm Mon-Fri.
Used them for ages and only had one issue, and when I reported it, the person talking to me was an networking expert.
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.
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.
Had zero problems in the last 5 years.
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.
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!
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 ?
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.
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.)
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)?
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.
I have a journalist preparing a story on my situation, similarly Kafkaesque.
