Broadband Woes

[Graye]

Does anyone have any suggestions on this please?

We are moving from North Yorkshire to mid Wales. As our cottage is old and a listed property it has thrown up no end of problems, and. combined with a pedantic solicitor (the buyers, not ours) we decided to go ahead with the purchase without completing on the sale. Hopefully it will be sorted soon but once again we find ourselves with two houses.

We have used Talktalk (ex Tiscali, ex Lineone) for our broadband since forever. We pay £9.99 a month currently. The new house has been empty for a year and as the previous owners ran a business from home we decided to take out a new phone line there. This will be connected on Tuesday so I've been looking at a new broadband connection. Talktalk apparently want £38+ per month despite only charging £9.99 currently. Apparently we also have to have their call plan too, I object to this as we want to be ex-directory and Talktalk sell on numbers to various cold calling companies etc. The final straw was the connection time - 21 working days!

So then i tried BT. This will be £28 per month, all calls free, wifi hotspots, texting facility, etc. BUT only 5 days connection time.

Very tempting but does anyone have any suggestions? I'm annoyed about leaving Talktalk in a way because it wil create problems changings emails etc. I DO use googlemail but I've got various things set up with Lineone & Tscali too. But the cost and time delay is a good incentive! We can't use cable, etc (can't even get a mobile or dongle connection there...) so that rules out quite a few options and the maximum connection speed is only around 1mb locally.

[Flo]

You should be able to keep your email account. I set up a dial up account long ago before I left Tiscali but I don't know if you can still do this with TalkTalk. That might be something to investigate - I did it through my control panel. That allows you to have time to reroute everything.

I'm with PlusNet which is cheap and cheerful, lovely customer service desk based in Sheffield. They are actually owned by BT now. Nothing special and some people have problems with them (but fewer than those who have problems with TalkTalk). Have only been there two weeks and am waiting for the telephone line to be changed over to them tomorrow. I moved over to a bundle from elsewhere because I'm feeling poor. If you pay the connection fee you can go onto a rolling one month contract.

I gather that price is important to you or I would recommend something more expensive and very reliable (but also with a UK helpdesk).

[Zech]

We had terrible problems with TalkTalk when we tried to move them with us to mid Wales - they obviously have something against the area!

We switched to Plusnet when we got fed up of the delays and appalling customer service. As Flo says, excellent customer service with Plusnet. We've been very happy with them since switching last autumn. Our broadband speeds are usually higher than they told us we'd get, which is a bonus.

[Graye]

Thanks for those ideas. We eventually went with BT, mainly because they offered a 5 day connection time and the others wanted up to 21 days. Also the download is unlimited (subject to fair usage) and the others are quite restricted.

Tha package only arrived today but so far so good. We still have the Tiscali subscription for the time being (we have until November on the old contract so it cost the same to cancel it anyway) so I'm working on ways to sort out the old email addresses. I mainly use gmail but I know there are a few places where I've used lineone or tiscali.

Now, if only there was a way to get a mobile signal here I would be one happy bunny...

[snapdragon]

best of luck with the mobile signal Graye, there's a site where you can look up the coverage of various suppliers .. I don't get a good signal at home on any of them unless I go out in the back yard or up the stairs

[snapdragon]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw4KVoEV ... r_embedded

awwww (but what's it got to do with broadband?)

[Dr.Syn]

Whilst in England Our e-mails were btinternet. We have moved to Ireland and of course no BT But even though we have changed our broadband supplier twice we still have our btinternet e-mail addresses. So in a nutshell don't worry there's enough worries with moving.

[Graye]

Thanks for that Dr Syn. Yes I suppose I'm basing my experiences on France & Spain where our emails disappeared as soon as we cancelled the contracts. Perhaps the UK is different...