I live in rural Essex and "cable/anything other than ADSL" seems to be a million years away, so I live with speeds of "up to" 8mb (usually less) from my exhange.
I was with BT for a long time and still have my phone package with them. But after 6 frustrating months of trying to play Age of Conan properly (and being "told off" by one of BT's foreign dudes for playing online games in peaktime - and THEN being told to only play it in the mornings.... ?!?!?), I switched to Fast.
It was a gamble, because I only suspected that BT were throttling my bandwith in peaktimes, I had no way to find out for sure.
Our house was a heavy user at the time, around 70+ gb per month, so I'm on Fast's highest package of 110gb per month - and it IS expensive :(
Thing is, I've had no problems since and I still can't be sure that will happen elsewhere. Tech support has been fine when I've had any problems (twice now, when speeds seemed to suddenly drop - turns out BT occasionally like to put my account back down to 1.2mb from 8mb >:( )
The only annoying thing for me is that two of my adult children have left home now and our average usage is around 45-6ogb per month, so we don't need the 110gb any more - but the next level down is 45gb per month and we can't quite hit that!
So I'm paying a high price for being able to play my online games in peace - even though I still occasionally have problems just because our exchange is using BT ADSL and it has problems of its own some nights.
So I'm staying with Fast for now because it gives me the certainty I need - but I can't really afford it, tbh, and some of the cheaper broadband providers do look tempting when it gets to the last week before payday....
Fast.co.uk broadband
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Customer reviews
Show all 15 Fast.co.uk Broadband reviews»
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Fast.co.uk have been very good to me... It's an actual human company that you can phone up and, quite often, the guy who answers the phone is the MD; his name is Mark. They give me free MX backup and static IP - not because of some marketing drive, but because I've been a customer for a while.
So many technology service providers in this day and age are nothing more than an 0800 number and an email address. This lot feel like a bunch of people trying to do something a bit better than the norm. It IS more expensive, but quite frankly, you get what you pay for. There is no 'fair usage policy' - if need more bandwidth, you buy it - they do not throttle the line at any point, on any port, if you are within your download quota. Which makes them fairly unique, I think.
I've needed to phone their technical support up on very few occasions; once, all the technical support people were busy, so I hung up. Three minutes later, THEY phoned ME up and said they'd seen that I had called and was everything ok and did I need any support? That's not the way most of the operators out there behave.
That's my experience with them and I can't recommend them highly enough based on that....
Cheers!
Jeremy. -
I suppose there is a natural bias on this sort of website for people to report bad experiences rather than satisfaction (which after all is no more than we should expect). I have to say that in the 3 or more years I have been with Fast I've had a good service, with reasonable speeds most of the time (and I am in the Scottish Highlands where this is often a big problem and fibre optics/ cables are a distant dream). Fast are markedly expensive for sure, and from time to time I'm tempted to move to cheaper alternatives. However, I then recall the sheer blood-boiling horror of being with Tiscali and that makes me very hesitant to leave an acceptable service for the unknown. My household is a relatively heavy user (around 80 - 100 Gb per month) and at least I know I can get that without being slapped down by a so-called "fair use" ( as in "f. u." ) policy, or have ports blocked or whatever. And customer service from Fast has in my experience been really good on the rare occasions I have had to use it.
Let's face it, the whole UK broadband market is a lottery and a disgrace, made even worse by the BT monopoly on landlines. It needs to be properly regulated, with some genuine consumer protection: government keeps making the right noises but doing almost nothing. Internet access is no longer a luxury, and if our electricity or water supplies were as dreadfully unreliable as most Internet services it would bring governments down. -
i agree with kieth fast.co.uk are over hyped poor internet service for the money customer service is good ok customer is a good thing but internet speed is what you want. i have changed my isp now and my speed is back up to fall line rate 6.5mb not 2.5mb no more problems which fast.co.uk could not fix
