And unless the leopard now carries stripes, they can be interestingly hard to get away from in the first place.
When I met my now Mrs AC, she was with Stalk Stalk. So I waited for the contract term to come up (they'd sent her a new router ready for the non-existant FTTC complete with new contract term) so I could leave for someone less irritating - and who allowed fixed IPs. Then I get home from work one day, a few weeks before the contract is up, to be told that we were getting one of their TV boxes - but what she didn't mention was the new 2 year contract. I was not amused.
Of course, we exercised our legal rights during the cooling off period, returned the unwanted TV box, and made it perfectly clear we were leaving. And we did. But after leaving, they billed us all the penalty charges the contract would have allowed had we not used our legal right to a cooling off period, and started down the route of sending us snottygrams. In hindsight I wish I'd just gone to the police and reported them for attempted fraud, but it took a while to realise just how utterly 'kin incompetent they were - of the "agent assures you that it's all sorted, then you get the next step up in snottygram" type of incompetence.
No bargepole in the universe is long enough to make it safe to even think about going near them ever again.
That said, with a previous work hat on we did have clients with connections supplied by them - but via ISPs we dealt with. When it was just their business section providing a connection, and you never ever had first hand dealings with them (we only dealt with the SP who'd subcontracted the provision of circuits to them), their network was OK.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
