The broadband market in the UK is retarded

Coming from Sweden I may be biased. But how about getting the information to the customer right?

Virgin Media

They will tell you if they can give you internet, but if they say they can't provide TV you have to explicitly ask them if it's ADSL they're offering. They won't tell you, and it's not in the product information.

I ask them if ADSL is the only internet this house can get, even from other providers. They say yes.

Sky

You're expected to know that TV services require a dish. And as for "Sky Fibre Unlimited", oh dear lord. It doesn't require a dish, but they sent us information that our fibre box must be connected to a phone line that can make outgoing and incoming calls. WTF? I called them and they tell me it's optional (I'm not interested in having a land line). Fine.

The send a letter saying they've scheduled the install for 28th of Jan. Then we get another letter saying they've rescheduled the install to the day we preferred, the 13th of Jan. Turns out that was just the TV installer, not Internet.

When the TV installer comes over he says that he's sure "Sky Fibre Internet" is ADSL, and it's called "Fibre" because it uses BTs fibre backbone. When I object that Google uses fibre, that doesn't mean you can call something fibre just because it can access Google he just shrugs. Also ADSL doesn't do the 38 or 76Mbps that they sell.

So I call Sky. No, they assure me, it's a fibre cable coming in to the house. I ask "so in my house there will be a box that takes fibre in one end, and normal network cable in the other?". They say yes.

So Virgin can only offer ADSL for our place, and Sky can't provide TV. And both are retarded liars.

BT

Girlfriend calls BT to see if they can offer Internet & TV (without dish). They can. They offer the same fibre, that can give us speeds similar to what Sky offers. They say it's the same technology as Sky would offer, since it's actually BT that'll own the thing either way. Great. So it's fibre with 60-odd Mbps down? Yes, depending on the distance to the house. Wait.... wait what? No, fibre doesn't work that way. I ask "is it actually a fibre cable coming in to the house?". Yes, and it connects to the fibre modem. "This fibre modem has fibre coming in one side, and normal network cable in the other?". Uhm, no, she says. It's copper to the box down the street.

GAAAAAH!

So it seems we're getting FTTC, with some unknown copper handoff technology. (63.5/20 is not exactly what you'd call an even number).


PS:
At the previous place we had Virgin Media cable. It was actually quite good in terms of speed and services. It did have some packet loss problems though.