Hey, I’m in the UK and have been getting bombarded by a somewhat-aggressive campaign by YouFibre for their broadband. The actual claims they make are pretty impressive and their Trustpilot score is good, but it’s a little too good and a lot of the reviews feel a bit off so I’m skeptical. Looking on sites other than Trustpilot they seem a little worse, particularly a lack of decent support. Does anyone have experience with them?
Also feels strange that Netomnia would have full fibre set up for my postcode before Openreach or Virgin…
The more a company is spammed in advertisements the less likely I am to use it, as I strongly associate ads with scams
There used to be a post socialist era mindset that people from my country used to have back in the 90s. It’s simply that if you have to advertise for your product, it’s probably bad. And overprized because you were spending money on ads. I remember the older generation specifically bought unadvertised products recommended by people they knew.
Filter by 1-3 stars and you’ll see the bad reviews. I agree with you. A LOT of good reviews… like, too many in a row.
Netomnia is a company that uses Openreach’s infrastructure (poles,ducts,manholes) to provide their own FTTP network. The cables and fibres they provide are ownred by them, but they lease the duct space from Openreach in order to get it from their own headend to a customers premises.
There are dozens of these PIA companies all over the UK who have varying degrees of quality when it comes to building a network.
I’ve not seen Netomnias build, but I have seen others like Airband and Full Fibre who are decent, to the other end of the scale like Virgin and Digital Infrastructure whose work is shocking to say the least.
I personally have Airband and I’ve been very impressed with their price and service. If Netomnia offer a decent no strings package, it might be worth giving it a shot as Openreach or Virgin might not have plans to build in your area in the near future.
Source: I work in the industry.
Where I am there’s a smallish internet provider, Sonic, that advertises almost-too-good-to-be-true service. As a former subscriber…nope, it’s pretty much what they say it is. It was gigabit fiber and I could iperf to a university server and get 900Mbps+ (depending on time of day). Fast.com would say 1Gbps.
My only complaint was that iirc the advertised price was for service, with an extra charge for router. BYO router meant you were charged slightly more for service (this is my recollection, not positive though).
They are a pretty vocal net neutrality advocate, and from what the tech told me they offer “best effort” service, meaning while ATT fiber may support gigabit, they’ll throttle it and upcharge you for the extra speed; Sonic, afaik, didn’t do that. They now offer 10Gbps Internet for I think the same price as the gigabit, but I think you need to BYO network gear to take advantage of it.
Unfortunately our new place doesn’t offer them, otherwise I would still be a subscriber.
Point being…too good to be true usually is just that, but sometimes it’s not 🤷
I was with them for two months before I had to move out of their area and I genuinely miss it. I was only on their 150Mb/s service but I can’t begin to articulate how fast it actually felt. With FTTP the boost isn’t in the bandwidth (though you do get that) but the latency. You can tell when you’re getting sub-millisecond responses. I’m now stuck with Virgin Media’s 250Mb/s service and it’s a total downgrade.
In fairness I never had any technical issues with YouFibre so I can’t tell you how good that side of their business is, but the installation was totally smooth sailing and the people I spoke to during that process seemed really informed and we’re very, very helpful. When I had to cancel because I was moving out of network they weren’t awkward or stubborn about it. When I move next it will definitely be to an address with FTTP, and I would rejoin YouFibre in a heartbeat if I could.
