broadband - Sky or BT?

[HellinArcher]

I'm currently with Sky for TV, phone and broadband. Am thinking of ditching the TV package altogether and thought that as I have to rent my line through BT, might as well switch to them for calls, which leaves broadband.

I'm generally very happy with Sky broadband, but it makes sense financially to swap - unless anyone knows if BT is no good? Is swapping a complete hassle? I don't want to be left high & dry with no internet for weeks on end.

I've heard nightmare stories from people who have tried to move away from LLU operators like Sky and back to BT.

I'm sure there will be many people who never had any problems but from the sounds of things, if things do go wrong then its a nightmare to sort out as each will simply blame the other.

thanks Niceguy - that's my fear, that the swap itself will be problematic. What does LLU mean?

BT are mostly OK. Not especially cheap and the Indian call centres are a bit hit and miss. Plusnet are cheaper, they have UK call centres and they are actually owned by BT, IIRC.

I can't say how easy it is to swap from Sky to BT. There is always an element of risk, which is the main reason I stick with BT. I work from home and can't afford to lose my connection for long.

A second thought about the relative merits of BT. They have outsourced their email to Yahoo, who are particularly useless, probably worse than Hotmail. It doesn't affect me much, since I have my own separate domain with email, but if I was using my ISP's email service I wouldn't use an ISP that outsourced email to Yahoo.

I have been with BT for a few years now after switching from Sky. The switch was very easy and have had no problems with BT. I've always spoken to UK call centres when contacting them, don't know if that's just because of the time of day i've called.

BT seem to have some decent deals for new customers but as others have said it probably is cheaper with other providers, That said i've not had any problems with the braodband service, where as with Sky problems were constant.

O2 are good for broadband, cheaper than bt last time I checked too. We had BT and speeds were slow, the router buggered up a lot and it was very expensive, was a couple of years ago though.

Depends where you live, Blackletterday, as the choices of which ISP running their own kit depend on them installing at the BT exchange.

For example, Sky/Easynet have installed in approx 1400 exchanges, while O2/Be serves under 1250, TalkTalk around 2000 (though they also own Tiscali, so there may be some extras from their ~950). Orange has installed in about 1000 exchanges.

There are over 5000 BT exchanges, so there's no choice for people on the other 3000 (mostly rural) exchanges, but to use an ISP served by BT (not sure about line rental options, however, so some might be able to switch to Primus costing under a tenner a month vs BT at 12 quid).