Tens of Thousands Flee From BT and Virgin

twoheadedboy writes "The two biggest ISPs in the UK are losing thousands of customers. Earlier this week Virgin reported it had lost 36,000 cable broadband customers. BT, meanwhile, has seen around 125,000 active consumer line customers flee this quarter. With that many customers leaving, where are they going?"

Comments

Re:Are there small ISPs in the UK?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there are small ISPs in the UK. I run one of them - UK Free Software Network. The UK ISP market, while dominated by the large ISPs, is fairly open to smaller operators but it's a little challenging to compete with the larger operators who cross subsidise to offer services at less than cost.

The most likely route for those leaving NTL and BT however is not smaller ISPs but rather Sky and TalkTalk, both of whom offer DSL services for much less than cost of the DSL itself.

Re:BT are crap.

[History's Coming To]

The systems are generally OK - I'm in the middle of nowhere and get a reasonable 2Mb/s most of the time, the home hub does the job and is fairly easy to use, but where they really fall down is whan anything goes wrong. We were recently down to 20Kb/s max for about three days and got nothing from telephone support other than "your line is rated at 2.8Mb/s" and the usual "can you reset your router" (and, memorably, "have you tried unplugging the ethernet cable?" on a machine with no wireless card).

Yup, the telephone support absolutely sucks. Their Twitter support, on the other hand, is really rather good - good communication, the guy (Keiran I think) actually seemed to know what he was talking about, and they got the problem fixed. He even got the xkcd shibboleet reference, and that is what it felt like talking to them after the phone support debacle. I seriously hope BT read this and put whoever deals with their Twitter support in charge of everything. (@BTCare should you need them).