Decent ISP In the UK! Give me your suggestions please....

I am at the moment with Sky TV and will be moving home soon so need a decent ISP for broadband and phone rental only.
Years ago I was with BT but they were useless then but may have changed now.
What do other members in the UK use and are the speeds good and a I need. It unlimited.
I get between 7-10mbs at this time and its unlimited and on a years contract.
I dont want to commit to something that's no good and also,need wifi as well.
Will take all recommendations seriously and weigh them all up and decide the best.
Hopefully I can get a lot here and pros and cons will go a long way.
I can't get fibre optic yet either.
Thanks....

reply to post by scotsdavy1


Your choice of ISP really depends on where go live. There really are only two ways of landline based broadband - BT or Virgin. Thats because people like sky use BT's network and the quality of connection depends on how your house to street connection is made AND the distance from the exchange.

Virgin can guarantee fast speed as long as the street box to your house is fibre optic. Their network might be at warp speed but if you have to rely on noisy copper (old) cables then your speed will drop.

I use BE Internet as ISP that sits on BT copper network but I'll look at my options when BT fit fibre between my house and the street box next year.

I hope this helps.

Have a look at www.samknows.com... to see whats available in your postcode region

Virgin is the best we've been with. Just the other week they doubled the internet speed for nothing too.

Sometimes they throttle my internet speed though. When I'm on a downloading spree I notice after 4-6 gb are downloaded(I'm talking in quick succession, say an hour or two) they'll cut my speeds by 90% and it'll stay like that for around 6 hours. That can be a pain in the arse if you want to download some multi-gig videos, but I rarely download so much so quickly so I can live with it

The internet has never been down and is always at the speed it says (apart from when they throttle me).

would recommend them to anybody. I don't think any of the other big providers can match them. Maybe some of the smaller companies can depending on where you are

Im with Virginmedia to and they are great. Speeds are fast and service is excellent. I had problems with the superhub what they send out. I went through 2 in the first Couple of months and they sent replacements out the day after. Would definitely recommend them. The only downside is of course is if you can get it in your area

VM beats everything i've tried hands down. Sunday afternoon peak time i'm getting 75mbs most other times i'm getting 120mbs on a copper feed to the house from the cab. Only disadvantage is their Supermodem is utter crap for wireless penetration and range so switching it to modem mode and using your own router is advised.

I should imagine bt infinity is a close follower but i have had friends report it was flakey at times. The non reliance on traditional land line installs with having a cable bb connection has always edged it for me

Im not a vm customer but there fibre optic bb is supposedly best
With non fibre optic connection they are of equal speed as
Sky/bt infinity

I can imagine that all companys will go optic eventually
Then maybe the bt infinite will rule with its sattelite provider friend

Bla bla bla...
Its like energy providers... wait ur turn n urs will be cheapest/fastest deal
Or...
Try download less porn

Im rocking 52mbps on sky thru copper wire
I dont need all this speed lmao

Download full movies in like 3 mins...
They take longer than 3 mins to watch so downloading too much is a waste of time
And bandwidth....

We've just gone with plusnet because they have UK call centres. I just can't deal with Indian call centres. Nothing against Indians, but it can be frustrating sometimes.

We are supposed to get fibre optic this year which should be good but I'm keeping my options open at the moment. Don't want to get one on a 12 month contract and find they throttle the speed like BT did with me many years ago.
Many thanks for the suggestions and I will take them on board and have a good look for the best around here

reply to post by TheDoctor46


I had a similar experience with Virgin Media.
I was getting random drop outs of service so I asked a question on their official support forum about it, a person there asked me to post some data from the modem diagnostic and a new modem arrived the next day without me even asking for it

I only get 20megs but that's all I need. Can't think of what I would do with anything faster than that.

They do however as someone else mentioned in the thread have a throttling policy once you download over a certain amount of data which you can find details of here
It runs from 10am till 10pm so pretty much all day

They also slow down torrent traffic seemingly whenever they feel like it