Which sucks least? Sky, Talktalk to BT broadband?

[William Blunn]

On 30/08/2012 07:15, Andrew Beattie wrote:
> i am moving out of the london.pm area, into a broadband wasteland in PA17 5DA, where the nearest exchange is here:
>
> http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/WSWEM
>
> What, in the option of London.pm would be my least lame broadband option?

Your options appear to be:

Sky
TalkTalk
Any provider that re-sells BT Wholesale ADSL services.

Yes, I can see your point. That's quite a tricky and annoying choice and 
I don't envy you. Still, better than some places (WMBIS) where it's 
BTW-20CN-ADSL-"1" or nothing.

WSWEM has 21CN so on BTW you should be able to get ADSL2+.

Which? has assessed satisfaction ratings for some relevant providers as:

Zen 84%
PlusNet 73%
Sky 51%
BT 46%
TalkTalk 40%
Orange 37%
AOL 28%

So I think you might want to rule out TalkTalk. (I mentioned Orange and 
AOL just to illustrate where the, er, least satisfying players were 
sitting.)

Choosing between the other two is more tricky though.

If you want a "technical" style service, you could go for AAISP 
(includes native IPv6!) or Zen, though you will tend to have to pay more 
per gigabyte.

Sky ought to be better for being cheaper per gigabye transferred because 
they're LLU and so not tied to BTW's exhorbitant backhaul rates, though 
you'd be be getting into bed with a provider rated at 51% satisfaction. 
It's not the worst, but it's not brilliant.

If you want a good satisfaction rating AND fairly cheap then you could 
do worse than PlusNet (73%). Though their middle-of-the-range package 
allows (only) 60GB per month. That may be enough, though if you 
regularly do a lot of traffic, this may not be your best option.

Bill