Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes UK broadband subscribers are being hit by a double whammy of service disruptions and above-inflation price hikes, but many are caught in fixed-term contracts and unable to switch, according to consumer advocate Which? These findings come from the outfit's latest broadband satisfaction survey, which shows more than half of …
Not really, but it is at least known. The Economist Style Guide (sadly alas no longer directly available online) has the following to say about it:
With other punctuation the relative position of quotation marks and other punctuation also differs. The British convention
is to place such punctuation according to sense. The American convention is simpler but less logical: all commas and full stops precede the final quotation mark…
I'm sort of meh about this to be honest as I think there are other differences, especially neologisms, which are more annoying. But it's also the hallmark of a poor publication that enforces this kind of thing on a language that is infamously resistant to prescription.
Fully.
When writing with ink the punctuation would have been written more
or less under the quotation mark and then the press came along and
Americans got it backwards and how could you expect an American to
admit that they'd made a decision which a European had made better?
Most issues are with the "last mile", and not the ISP itself.
I've been with talk talk for years because it's the cheapest and I've never had issues, and I always get the max bandwidth.
But then, it's a new phoneline and the BT FTTC junction box is just the other side of the property.
TalkTalk are great until there are issues - and then you'll be tearing your hair out.
My TalkTalk experience isn't atypical - 13 failed attempts to get VDSL installed (half the time the techs wouldn't even show up) with a mandatory 7 day wait between appointments
I finally switched to Zen and within 24 hours of the first failed appointment they had an openreach escalation team onsite to deal with it.
I found out later that I was the first customer on the cabinet which had been parked on my street for 2 years prior to that point AND that despite TalkTalk selling me the service (and being marked available on the BTOR checker), BTOR had only made actual installations available the week I switched to Zen
And (of course) TT attempted to bill me for service I was no longer taking from them - which led to some "interesting conversations" when I started mentioning OFCOM, time wasted waiting for no shows and billing them for each failed appointment beyond the first one
I'm generally pretty bullish on A&A and for problems with stuff they control they are *extremely* good. But I had a long running and very intermittent line problem that took about 20 OR engineer visits over a period of 18 months to resolve and I'm sorry to say I was just going through the usual script with A&A. "Is it plugged into the master socket ..", "Have you got another router you can try ... " (yeah I keep a spare 200 pound router lying around for just such an eventuality), "If we send an engineer and it turns out to be your problem then you get the bill". I think it turned out to be the line swinging in the wind just sometimes causing a dodgy connection so some days it was carnage then for months is was perfect.
I guess for situations like this all ISP's have their hands tied. At least A&A were willing to keep sending engineers. Majority of OR guys were of course a complete and utter dumpster fire. One engineer even refused to do _anything_ because there was an ethernet cable plugged into the router. Yeah that would be it... Frucking moron.
The one at the end of the alphabet (Zen), on my wife's line were just about the same. OR managed to swap pairs at one point (they do this surprisingly often...) so of course the router could no longer log in, and surprise, surprise the outgoing caller id was some other random number (can't do that diagnostic anymore now that voice over copper is no longer a thing). Took several days of pleading with them to send an engineer, "is your router turned on? its not even trying to login", "$%$#*". They are lovely people however.
"swinging in the wind"
I had that too. When I phoned BT several times over the course of 18 months I always told them the line always fails when it's windy, so send someone out while it's still windy.
Did they? Did they bollocks. They always waited a few days then came out when the wind had died down, and amazingly the line worked again! They never arrived with a cherry picker either, despite it being an overhead line.
Eventually a very persistent pair of engineers tracked it down to a dodgy connection up the nearest pole which only failed in the wind.
The problem here is that openreach never keeps records of previous conversations and frequently doesn't tell it's own staff what the problem is.
"The problem here is that openreach never keeps records of previous conversations and frequently doesn't tell it's own staff what the problem is."
I put in a SAR to Openreach about all records associated with my line (dozens of reports over the years) and what came back was a ssingle entry - my SAR request
The ICO wasn't amused
I have a similar problem at the moment only my cable is buried and the problems occur a few hours after rain starts following a longish period of dry weather (no FTTP here and none planned until 2026 (was 2024))
I'm very clear with them that I'm aware they're being held to ransom by BTOR, but because they insist on waiting at least 24 hours before sending out a tech the intermittent failts are usually cleared up
TBH I'm surprised that BTOR cabinets are still standing in some areas. After all it's easy enough to pour petrol in the vents and light it
I was told by Virgin (the only game in town for me if I want more than 60mbps) that they don't offer the best deals to existing customers because of Ofcom rules that penalise a lack of movement between ISPs. However, I couldn't find this in writing so it may be a tall tale.
Their prices, for whatever actual reason, have become so bad that I'm willing to give mobile network broadband a try and, failing that, Starlink (slightly more but I'd pay it out of spite).
Sounds like a load of manure from VM
There's a reason why, at work, we call them Vermin Media..
(Had serious billing issues with their buisness division and, when home users get their lines from them, serious support issues and usability issues - like when they 'accidentally' imposed VPN port blocks on the basis that "if you want to VPN into work you need a business line".. They are also often the most contended serivice so, when schools are out or past about 4pm, service turns to complete crap in a lot of places)
If they tried to pull 'if you need to VPN to work you need a business account' on me they'd lose their customer immediately.
I'd consider swapping but the likes of cityfibre are pretty crap too. Colleague of mine has been living off a mobile hotspot for weeks as cityfibre have a problem with a box on a wood pole that isn't safe to climb to replace.
How the box got there in first place less than three weeks ago is something of a mystery.
And don't get me started in open reach and it's nonsense of renting capacity out to operators on what might as well be random service standards.
Ofcom, like Ofwat and Ofgem are bloated, toothless and have lost the plot as far as actually driving customer needs are concerned.
VM are probably one of the worst companies I've ever had the utter misfortune to have to deal with. Their "Customer Service" is an expensive joke - they expect their victims users to pay to talk to their "help desk". Their "help desk" staff seldom speak English very well, are usually connected over an appallingly bad VOIP connection and never have any sort of clue.
I suffered their "service" - with its frequent drop-outs, wildly variable speeds and heavily limited access to much of the web for several years. Every year they increased their prices, but their service never improved (despite their claiming that my connection speed had been increased by 30%)....
The final straw came when their cabling sent me a huge spike due to a lightning strike a few hundred metres away. Their modem smoked, and anything connected to its ethernet ports was fried. I got off lightly - my neighbour had all the wiring in his house destroyed, complete with exploding computers, Playstation and TVs..... VM - of course - denied any responsibility and tried to charge me for the replacement of their router!
Fortunately, the lightning splat coincided with the arrival of FTTH to our neighbourhood, and I had City Fibre installing three days later. I connected via the one at the end of the alphabet, and found their service to be exactly as advertised - their "900 Mb/s" service is actually closer to 1 Gb/s and is symmetrical, so large uploads are no longer painfully slow. Their prices are roughly half of the VM tariff for a service that's ~12 times faster....!
VM used to have >95% of the households around here connected because of poor off-air service around here - they now have fewer than 5%. Most folks have moved to Sky (satellite) for their TV service and to City Fibre for their 'net connections.
For info.... I had crap fixed line broadband speeds when I lived in central London until 2014, gave up the landline and started using my mobile as the router and it was brilliant. However given that Teams et al chew through gigs a day that isn't now an option so I've got Starlink which I love. I get a stable, over 300mbps connection for 65 euros a month and the benefit of world + dog thinking my location is where the ground station is.... In my case Madrid, where I've never been.
I did try SkyDSL for a bit which was ok at 40mbps but billing was hell and the ground station is in Germany which caused my Spanish banking app to scream FRAUD everytime I wanted to see my bank balance.
VM without doubt are THE worst compy, not just broadband, I've ever had to deal with. Incompetence at every layer.
From day one, I told them EXACTLY what the issue, having worked in networks and telecoms for 25 years.
If BOTH the live TV and Internet are dropping EXACTLY every 5 minutes. The logs showed a loss of synch and a reset exactly the same time.
It affected everyone we knew that were originally on the Telewest installs.
It's not
Turning of and on again (40 or 50 times they tried this).
It's NOT the router.
It's NOT the TiVo box.
It's NOT the hot weather.
It's NOT the cable into the house.
It's NOT the street box as it affected other streets.
Dozens and dozens of phone calls.
3 house visits
4 street engineers
It was never fixed.
In the end my parents switched to Sky and Plusnet.
At least 8 other households left them. It's probably still happening, but they are most likely fobbing off the remaining people to this day
For VM I had to debug THEIR network along with a few other Cambridge residents doing traceroutes etc.
We found a network node of theirs was throttling, so after schools came out 1/3 of Cambridge area would get rate limited and poor latency.
But, they never compensated us for our time to fix their problem.
After a while they throttled my 100Mbps to 50, and didn't compensate me, so I was off to Now! who have been quite reliable, and under half the price for 80Mbps ADSL2.
VM have also just lost me as a mobile customer, so even less money for Beardy.
VM's entire troubleshooting process has been turned over to a process flow, rather than engineers that actually think.
This has up- and down-side. The upside is for trivial stuff, it probably cuts their overheads.
The problem is, non-trivial stuff doesn't get looked at properly and the process flow doesn't have the relevant exit points to hand off to someone that KNOWS things rather than a robot.
Not unlike (most) IT helpdesks direction in large organisations.
... having a fixed price contract where one side can unilaterally raise the price and the other has no recourse. And the length of contracts is trending towards 2 years as a result.
Having said that, it's not all rosy elsewhere. Here in Portugal you pay an arm and a leg unless you sign up to a 2-year contract which restarts automatically if you change the service in any way, move house or sneeze. Broadband is also typically bundled up with TV and mobile contracts so once signed they're effectively inescapable without major inconvenience.
What I was getting at is that Ofcom explicitly permit these price hikes and therefore there are increasingly few suppliers in the mass market that stick to the initial price and the contracts are getting longer. I may be wrong, but I think Zen's contract used to be 12 months?
If you want a truly reliable connection, a separate Internet provider is a necessity. I'm with Andrews & Arnold who are at the top end of pricing in the consumer space, offer many business services, and are pretty technical. Overall this has been trouble free, but even so there are occasional dropouts for a couple of minutes, and one recently for nine hours - that was a BT major service outage.
Whilst A&A are good, and have consistently high speeds when the connection is up, they and practically all other providers are ultimately at the mercy of the infrastructure. If your Internet connection is that important, and in these days of home working it often is, we all need to be looking at backups.
When I had the recent connection outage I got around this with a mobile hotspot, and there are also many mifi devices on the market. Some routers have automatic cellular backup, my Zyxel VMG3925-B10B supports '3G' dongles but will happily handle 4G options. Following the outage it has a ZTE MF833U1 4G dongle plugged into it which 'just worked' (*) to automatically failover and restore, although the resold 3 SIM it was bundled with only supplies a 3G connection in my area so I need to replace it with an O2/Vodafone/EE SIM which do support 4G.
(*) It 'just worked' after I disabled the bridging config I had on the router - previously I used PPPoE passthrough to my firewall. The router will understandably only provide seamless failover and restore when you're using a standard NAT config. I'm presuming IPV6 will failover fine too, but haven't tested this yet.
That is unfortunate! In that case there's always the possibility of a separate FTTP connection, and hoping any issues don't occur at the same point with both FTTP connections. That's going to be pricey in any case.
A 4G sim seems to be between 6-10 pounds a month, it's a pity you can't really have a pay as you go that doesn't expire, but it's still about as much as a single day's train journey into the office so I might as well pay it.
I'm presuming you can't put up a 4G aerial to improve your reception? These certainly exist for narrowboats, I'm presuming it's also possible to install them in a house.
Yeah, the signal here is very bad. I could probably get a workable signal if I use something like this
A&A all the way, no problems (except when a BT engineer was ham-fisted inside a cabinet) excellent tech backup ; you can talk directly with their tech team without having to navigate a call centre; low contention lines; fixed ip addresses and as for prices, they have not changed my monthly rate since 2014 although they did offer a reduction to £37 a month if I wished to upgrade to FTTP.
I've never used anything like 1Tb in a month. A&A's algorithm adds a fraction of unused to next month's allowance so I regularly start out with around 1800Gb on 1st of month. I would have to watch a lot of 4k streams or go mad trying a large variety of Linux live distros to get anywhere near that.
Another A&A user, my lines have 2TB per month each and they carry over unused quota to the next month so I typically have close to 4TB available despite working over the Internet, running a business from home and having 2 oiks at home in their 20s who permanently live online.
I used to have 2 bonded FTTC lines, I recently upgraded one to FTTP and if I don't get download speeds of over 100MB/s it's a "them" problem. Latency from home to A&A is typically <5ms, so not quite down to leased fibre levels but not that far off.
Up to a point – in many situations the uplink may actually be on the same network (mobile cell connects to trunk via the same cabinet). I've had that once here when there was a massive failure on the Vodafone network which provides us with cable and mobile and other providers may be renting the same capacity… But this can be a very cheap backup because you pay only in the months when you use it.
It would be interesting to see more details of what causes the speed issues that people report. I've helped a few people out in the past, and it usually comes down to:
1) Poor software in the router - "fixed" by a restart;
2) High-density housing, with everyone using high bandwidth on 2GHz channels (they interfere with each other) - fixed by moving to 5GHz (if possible) or trying to find a clear channel (or one with lower power signals).
3) Generally poor WiFi signal within the house - moving the box may help.
A lot of the time, there is nothing wrong with the actual internet connection*.
* my kids do not understand the difference between "WiFi" and "the internet", so claims that "the internet is down" often mean "the WiFi is down" (normally because I'm mean, and restrict the times they are allowed to use it).
> * my kids do not understand the difference between "WiFi" and "the internet
From what I've seen, this seems to apply to most people under 30. Initially I thought they were stupid, then realised they have likely never used an Ethernet cable - to not even speak of an RJ11 - in their life, and that actually I'm just old.
"It would be interesting to see more details of what causes the speed issues that people report"
The vast majority of internet users are on VDSL or cable connections, all running over cables that are decades old and seen as "end of life" by their owners. So they invest the minimum in repairs as they intend to roll out fibre at some point, though nobody knows when.
"Perhaps people should learn to read contracts before just signing up to the (apparently) cheapest supplier?"
The alternative being having no broadband. The article makes clear even in your quote that there are very few alternatives. You not only need to know these exist, but also they have to be available to you.
The article makes clear even in your quote that there are very few alternatives
Really? You mean where it says "an issue in the UK may be that the broadband market is overcrowded, with too many players chasing too few subscriber pounds" ??
There are players with Ts&Cs which allow customers to leave if the contract terms change, but if people don't look for that when they sign the contract it's hardly reasonable to later blame the supplier they chose just because it was cheap. It never seems to occur to some people that there might be a reason it was cheaper than the others.
Perhaps there should be a requirement for all the relevant information to be displayed in a standard format, similar to the Key Facts document that is required with mortgages and the like?
Contract duration : X months
Contracted cost: £
Early termination costs: ...
Mid-term price increases: Yes
...
My biggest bug gripe is upgrading a service, too only have end up slower or unstable, then fighting with, in this VM to get it sorted and taking weeks while paying up and good luck getting a service refund, last one was to a 1Gig service and waiting months for the new Hub5 to replace the Hub4 to fully utilise the provisioned bandwidth and when they finally did order a Hub5, the cheaky gits wanted to recharge me the install fee again, that I already payed for when then filled in a couple of web pages to change connection plan, always think this charge is a nice way to rip off your customers !
Vodafone likes to randomly kill my DSL session (but not the whole connection) at random - but fairly regular - times of the day.
Knocks out my access for several minutes as it resyncs.
Often coincides with me sitting down with my tea, or just needing to check something important online.
The DSL session is dropped (but not because of lack of signal, it's a software session drop), the router re-dials (TRAINING, etc.) and then goes back to SHOWTIME - at exactly the same speed, etc.
It's too regular to be incidental. It's too irregular to be a scheduled restart of the session (e.g. it's never something like 24 hours since the session started).
Same router as I've used for years, plugged into the master socket, no extensions (or even phones!), etc.
The worrying thing is that they have just announced they are moving me to "Digital Voice" (which is a brand name for SIP) and cutting off all voice on the line, so I will have to dial up a SIP session to take calls on my home phone number (no biggie for me, I don't even know what it is and don't care as nothing is plugged in). That's going to screw loads of people who have phone extensions that are wired (they even have the cheek send you only one SIP adaptor, and to recommend DECT for all your extensions).
And if their DSL connection cuts out that regularly, it's going to drop the call too, isn't it?
When I moved house, I did wonder whether to get Starlink but I just can't bring myself to give Musk money - and they are changing the terms and conditions all the time. I can fall back to 4G, but that's the same kind of problem. I ran a house off nothing but 4G for 5 years, no problem at all, even with all my CCTV and gadgets, but I'd rather not have to.
But if they keep putting the prices up, and can't keep basic connectivity up (and I've never had a DSL ISP just randomly drop my session like that), I will just find an alternative.
I don't like being trapped into a poor-performing monopoly. I'd actually rather pay far more money to someone completely unrelated who can deliver a decent service.
POTS is disappearing for everyone in the UK at the end of 2025, so no-one will be able to use their existing analogue equipment directly to the master socket, it will need adapters.
I suppose there's nothing stopping a product that supports extensions from adapting to VoIP, but frankly it's probably easier to use a number of wireless VoIP phones/run VoIP on your mobile, or stick an adapter on DECT.
If you want reliable, in decreasing order of expense try Andrews & Arnold, Zen Internet, or possibly Plusnet (BT, but better than basic BT). Although I haven't heard much about Plusnet recently.
The loss of SystemX (to be replaced by MetaSwitch) is a total travesty for voice connectivity in the UK.
Whilst most of us think in terms of loss of voice if the internet connectivity is down (voip) we tend to forget what it means for things like life lines and other services that are powered from the telephone exchanges (with the associated ups/generators, etc) when local power cuts occur.
I understand that it's no longer making money, power costs and maintenance of SystemX, etc are high but it was "engineered" to very high standards and with more thought involved.
I assume the belief is mobile telephony will be "good enough" but it all smells of short term monetary goals.
I spent a lot of my career with all sorts of different parts of System-X over the years, from the 'edge' at the concentrator / DSSS that your 2W line terminates at, all the way to the processor at the 'middle' (Both the 3.5MWord and 28MWord versions), with a few stops at DSS on the way. My initial involvement was repair of faulty slide-in-units to component level (Anyone else remember ED0618 and PSC-South), then into 'System Proving' (QA/Testing) of every facet of the thing....hardware, software, you name it, we tested it :-) I dunno about the others (Under the guidance of DickMon), but I had real fun and learnt an absolute shit-tonne of stuff which still stands me in good stead today...I was taught my hardware, firmware, software, 'testing' and systems engineering by my peers and a bunch of shit-hot developers of the same - no degree necessary :-) Some of the people I knocked around with were seriously smart [I am merely very smart :-].
The Proving teams later morphed into the 'core' of the integration function for a whole load of emerging technology - SDH, Kilostream (Old by then) and the management thereof. VOIP and DSL came along and we had a thoroughly fun and challenging time getting to grips with the new-fangled packetised speech and signalling protocols. In many cases, it was us 'Integrator' types who came up with test tools and/or simulations leading to *us* developing the fix rather than the devs.
I had the most fun in the whacky world of System Design, which is where I finished when E/// closed the site at Ansty Park in Coventry. By this time System-X was - and still is - cared for by Telent.
I can confirm that it was indeed "engineered" to very high standards, which arose because the people involved were professional and gave a toss about their product. I cannot over-emphasize the professionalism of the engineering teams involved, the attention to detail and drive to do a good job. Our definition of a good job was usually doing something that Joe Public never even noticed happening.
This is a joke survey by an organisation that does not seem to have a clue. THE BIG ISSUE is as above, POTS disappearing in 2 years. There has been no consumer publicity for this. How can any company offer a 2 year contract when the hardware existing will not be usable in 2 years.
Ofcom is a complete waste of time. Has anybody mandated what is going to be offered at switchover time. Or is this date another load of cobblers that will be put back because BT is not ready. Or is it a ploy to stitch up all the non technical consumers and force them into another 2 year above inflation new contract otherwise they will lose service and their existing numbers.
That's going to screw loads of people who have phone extensions that are wired (they even have the cheek send you only one SIP adaptor, and to recommend DECT for all your extensions).
I use digital voice via a port on the router. I just used a BT-RJ11 cable to link it to the master phone socket, which is disconencted from any POTS line. All the extensions plugged into that work/ring just fine, the only downside is that there's no caller ID. The router has a built-in DECT base station, so I also have a couple of handsets paired to that. That gived me caller ID on those, as well as a voicemail service which emails me messages. Since router and ONT are on battery-backup it will even ride out short power outages, maybe not as well as a true POTS line but better than nothing.
Almost precisely what's happened to me, I'm with Origin who I was very happy with for a long time but they ran in to difficulties and got (very quietly) bought over by TalkTalk, a fact that I never even knew until certain websites stopped working correctly and I started getting regular CNAT issues that would force me to bbc.com instead of bbc.co.uk for example.
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Maybe they could've thought about a network that intelligently was ready for full unbundling? In Italy there's two networks and they can do full PON unbundling with compact and small street cabinets housing splitters, so everyone could use the passive network as they want (GPON/XGSPON/10GEPON/whatever you want), invest together in fewer cables around the country and lowering costs for everyone. But of course, why thinking about it before... Meanwhile, I don't complain surely about my FTTP, but having these poles outside with 6 CBTs on them and wires around like it's 1910.
> What if anything has gotten better over the past 10 years?
CEO and other executive pay- inversely proportional to the quality of service delivered to the customer, especially for monopolies, together with their public school pals- sorry, 'regulators'.
And that is Absolutely true. It is, it's true!
Of all the people rushing to give Ukraine the least possible assistance and remain appealing to their voters and shareholders, Britain is leading the pack.
> I’m not looking for an argument about politics by the way,
What is ...
> Is there anything at all in our country that isn’t standing still or getting worse?
... if not that?
The UK has has a Net Fixed Capital Growth of 0% for 30 years, so whilst we are producing more wealth the cost of our imports has also gone up and they cancel each other out.
Having money help you make more money, and when the pie stays the same size this means that wealth begins to accumulate amongst the already wealthy.
For comparison Germany has been at 1% for the last 30 years.
I know its not strictly the "mid term price hikes" but I thought I'd chip in here with a comment about renewals. My [major UK home ISP] contract came up for renewal this month. I got the notification about a month before autoreneal.
I have FTTP with a bundled 4G backup service as I work from home a lot and I don't use conventional satellite TV but stream everything and play a lot of online games, so does my partner. I've got the FTTP modem and my router and the 4G backup on a small UPS for resilience.
Instead of just calling up the renewal team I called the cancellations team. I'd already seen what "major competitor" could offer and told them I wss unhappy and what could they do for me.
I got an offer of a bump up in bandwidth and a reduction in cost. plus a bundled Xbox subscription for 6 months. I've just saved £190 over the course of the next year, and while not much thats money that I'm not handing over to my ISP.
Just goes to show if you want to keep the cost down don't blindly accept the first offer - negotiate.
I couldn't agree more. It's crucial to be aware of your options and be prepared to negotiate in order to get the best possible deal. I'm glad that you were able to save money by negotiating a better offer. That's also what we do at breviusapp.com for our users.
Always make sure you're speaking to the cancellations team and never accept the first offer - calling back multiple times can sometimes reduce the price by 50%, saving you hundreds of pounds a year. It takes nerves of steel but if you are friendly and patient - I know it's tough ;) - but it's incredibly rewarding.
I decided to leave VM when I found that the only way they would communicate if after I sat on hold for an hour first. No email, no snail mail, no Twitter DM or anything else. It took a 79 minute call to terminate but only 17 minutes of that were actually talking to a human.
My problem? An increasing number of Wifis here cause it all to come to a grinding halt in the evening. I just wanted (to pay for if needed) my router moved next to the TV.
CityFibre likes phone calls too but seems to have a "third ring" policy or something so it was all nice and easy. I had a look at the website, picked one, and a nice chap phoned me from Gigabit ethernet called me and arranged it all. The new router is a short ethernet cable away from the TV so that WiFi doesn't matter. I put a Wifi card in the PC where the router originally was and the GE router tells me that there are 50 to 60 wifis most evenings and all sorts of other stuff that my wife doesn't care about but I like to!
I don't know if that was poor service by VM but it got rid of me!
Great customer service getting me up and running, all problems were due to Openreach and BT not releasing the line on the right day.
Solid speed as far as I have seen.
The only downside was I couldn't get the phone app to talk to the supplied router to set it up, but I was always going to use my own anyway.
I finally cancelled VM almost a month ago, stopped using it's crappy disconnecto service, using Smarty Unlimited for £20 a month on a rolling monthly contract instead via a SIM router and quite honestly, I haven't missed VM's crappy broadband, even though I'm still paying for it till disconnection in a few days. I'm long out of contract, so there should be no penatly fees, and if there are I will sue their arses.
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