What made you finally switch broadband — or what’s stopping you?

Broadband Discussions
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Switching broadband can feel like a hassle — but there’s usually that one thing that finally tips you over the edge.

Was it a price hike? Endless buffering? Terrible customer service?
Or if you’ve been meaning to switch but haven’t yet — what’s holding you back?

Let’s hear it :backhand_index_pointing_down: — your story might help someone else decide.

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This is an interesting question. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but I’d say that it’s fear about potentially locking myself into something worse, with a worse provider whilst trying to improve things. Kylie Minogue would call it “better the devil you know”.

I used to think that I couldn’t get any better than Virgin Media. But now I’m not so sure. Things that seem to have changed quietly over the past few years are:

  1. Not getting VM connection on the London Underground (this was a killer reason for me sticking with them)
  2. Worse customer service
  3. Cost seems to be hiking every year with a promise of improved service, but I don’t really feel the evidence of that
  4. Outages - they seem to happen when we’ve had bad weather which seems more frequent these days. Working from home and doing a lot of Zoom / Teams meetings means that I have to find alternative places to park myself.
  5. My TV channels seem to be ‘fluid’ - the important thing is that my husband can watch the cycling and rugby that he wants to see and I don’t have to buy a NowTV day pass add on

If I knew that VM was genuinely the best that I could get then I would feel happier. But not being able to properly answer the above means that I’m doing a Kylie.

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I switched from Sky to Plusnet and finally to BT about 15 years ago. Since having FTTP from them about 4 years ago I cannot complain about the service and reliability but…

When the Altnet FibreHeroes/FullFibre was installed locally I investigated the options to move away from Openreach with BT and eventually placed an order with Squirrel Internet.

Although a relatively small ISP I had read many good things about them and my communications with them convinced me they were the company to go with. Benefits were a higher speed at lower cost and none of the dreaded mid-contract monthly cost increases BT charge every year.

My hopes were dashed though when FullFibre reported back to Squirrel that they wouldn’t bring a cable to my property because of trees in the way which, Squirrel told me, would mean the installation would not be viable. This was very disappointing because Openreach had clearly negotiated the trees earlier, feeding the cables through the branches, whereas FullFibre reckoned they needed to remove whole sections.

I am wondering whether to try again in a few months as my current 24 month renewed contract with BT is up again. I would still want to move to Squirrel as I recommended them to my son despite the setback and he has had more than a year with solid service at a lower cost for him. I wonder if a different set of FullFibre engineers would assess the situation differently this time?

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