Hello,
I am based in South Cambridgeshire and I am trying to find valid alternatives to the major/biggest ISPs in UK because I feel that big names simply don't care much about their customers.
I am struggling because I am not an expert and it's not easy for me to understand things at many levels; for instance (not a complete list):
who is only a reseller of services produced by others and who is not
the ISP comparisons which I found online are mainly dealing with costs (which are surely very important) but not much technical details (at least not the ones I am looking for)
I have intentionally avoided providing the tech details that I'm looking for since in this moment I am looking for any generic-level suggestions.
Same reason for which I intentionally avoided to provide details on what I mean with "valid" alternatives and what might be for me the "big names".
Why am I posting this request here?
Because I think that OpenWrt is "technically close-by" to the network connections offered by ISPs and so I hope users here will be able to help.
Hi misterb,
thank you for your feedback: it reminded me that in a previous post of mine here in this forum I was already pointed to A&A as a reputable ISP.
I know you deliberately didn't include tech requirements, but worth noting that some of the "alternative" providers offering high speed FTTP connections using their own infrastructure use CGNAT. If you're looking into alternative providers and this is an important distinction to you, then you should query them on this before signing up. IPv6 support also varies.
Zen. Their support is not quite as good as A & A but it's pretty good and way better than the big ISPs. They can supply FTTP either via Openreach or City fibre As @dl12345 says, check whether CF use CGNAT.
Google identifies several ISPs using CGNAT, mostly you can pay a little extra to get a public IPv4
I will put in a small shout out for TalkTalk though - these days I access A&A via their L2TP option using TT via CityFibre and it actually works OK (900Mbps symmetric).
TT don't always have the best reputation and I doubt they are as niche/tech oriented as you want but they do give public (though non-static) IPv4 addresses and don't insist you run their router (presentation is Ethernet and DHCP to configure the IP address).
Their (TT) customer support is a bit rubbish though and they will want you to have the Eero router connected if you try to report a fault (A&A support was much better when I had an issue with slow upload in L2TP even though the problem was almost certainly not within the A&A network).