On 14/10/2020 21:29, polygonum_on_google wrote:
On Wednesday, 14 October 2020 20:44:30 UTC+1, John Rumm wrote:

The people who did the work were excellent. Friendly. Worked hard
and long hours. Came from up to several hundred miles away as
well as some locals.

Yup, ours were good. The install of the actual fibre along the
street seemed to be mostly the work of one chap working for KMCO,
on his own. He climbed each pole in turn, pulled along and fixed
the next segment of wire, and then every few poles installed a
junction box ready for the drops to the properties. He came
knocking on my door to ask if he could park on our drive and climb
the pole buried in the hedge in the garden.


Afraid the few ISPs which at the time would offer FTTP were
either much more expensive or unimpressive outfits. A&A, for
example, were more expensive and had a download cap.

You often get what you pay for in service though. Of the more
budget providers, Plusnet tend to be somewhat better in that
respect than the big four.

I already had and account with IDNet so it was much easier to go
with them so I kept my static IP etc. They were initially slightly
more expensive than BT for the 160/30 service, and noticeable so
for the 330/50 - however their prices fell to about the same after
a few months.

I can see that there might be reasons but in the nearly-a-year we
have had no significant issues. The very occasional few seconds of
dropping out. And, though better than they used to be, I still
dislike their routers.

Of the bundled ones, their routers are better than some IME. Having said
that, you don't necessarily have to use the bundled router.

Although that is one area when the quality of support staff becomes more
apparent. If you phone them with a technical question using a third
party router, and a computer that is not a windows PC, many just refuse
to even engage in conversation!

I recall a while back trying to to get VPN remote access to an office
setup for someone. In the end I concluded that their sky router was
blocking all VPN traffic. Then we had the fun of swapping the router
since they will not disclose the account login details that they preload
into the router before supplying it. (fortunately it leaks them onto the
ethernet on power up, so if you are ready and waiting with wireshark you
can grab em!)

The companies that came out well were Openreach (once they made
their decision to go ahead), BT, and Plusnet. Our annual renewal
with Plusnet had only just been done when the FTTC option
appeared.

Plusnet did participate in a FTTP trial, but then decided not to
offer it as a service for some reason.

That was something of a surprise - I think I found out they had
withdrawn between news we were getting FTTP and it actually
arriving.

Despite their T&C saying we were stuck with them, Plusnet did
agree it would be unfair and agreed a refund. They were very
pleasant to deal with.

Yup they are usually not too bad, although not as good as they once
were with 24/7 support etc.

Thinking about it, I did have to send email to chief exec's office
(or whatever) because their drone-level did not have the authority.
But, as I said, once we explained, they were excellent.

Yeah, I remember in the very early days of the talktalk "free" broadband
deal, someone had got stuck with completely non working broadband, and
could not get them to fix it. I had already checked, and the router was
not getting DSL synch, so it was obviously a physical line fault, yet
she spent hours on the phone to them (at premium rate) trying to get
them to fix it. It was always the same story, "Have you re-installed
your OS", or go away, do this and then phone back. Next call she would
get someone different, "oh, we don't support Macs"...

There was just not a path through the tech support scripts that would
accept "just ignore the effing computer, concentrate on why the router
can't get DSL sync, and send openreach out to fix it!" In the end she
got Mr Dunstone's direct email from somewhere, and pointed out she had
so far spent £700 on their premium rate line not getting anything fixed
and she wanted out of the 18 month contract, plus a refund! (she got out
and got about £500 back). Ported to plusnet, where obviously it still
did not synch, and they had an engineer out in a few days who fixed a
problem with the line before it entered the building and it all started
working.


'Tis funny how experiences vary enormously. But I would never, ever,
ever, have gone with TalkTalk. Especially now Play-DiDoh Harding has
re-demonstrated her utter ineptness for, well, everything.

Indeed the above put me off fairly permanently.

The client who ended up on their business service kind of got there by a
roundabout route, first by going to a specialist ISP that did EFM
services, when that was the only (really really expensive - like
£360/month for 30/30) way to get anything useful in the area). IIRC that
was provided by Gamma (a fairly decent B2B ISP). Then a couple of years
later they had the option of a deal to go to 100/100 fibre at about
£180/month - but they did not mention on the ISP actually doing the
connectivity would be talktalk). However to be fair its been rock solid
reliable, and the actual infrastructure is installed and managed by
another outfit that specialise in B2B fibre.


--
Cheers,

John.

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