[jon-wood]

You want to talk to ISPs that target themselves at business use, rather than consumer ISPs who are indeed all in a race to the bottom, with a side-serving of barely different custom routers.

Zen Internet (zen.co.uk) have pricing comparable to consumer ISPs, but provide significantly better service, and have support staff who can actually fix your problems.

Andrews & Arnold (aaisp.net.uk) are very much priced for business users, but on the flip side of that have possibly the best support available - on occasions I've used them in the past calling up their support line always resulted in immediately being answered by someone who knew how ADSL works inside out, and could happily diagnose routing errors without escalating to anyone. They also once called me to say they'd detected activity which indicated malware was present on my network, and that I might like to resolve that.

Depending on where you live, there's also quite a few ISPs popping up who are running their own fibre throughout cities and selling symmetric gigabit connections for about the same price as BT would charge you for 60Mbps.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Zen were terrible when we used them at home. Having used Zen in the past I was expecting better. They eventually provided a service, but it took longer than it should have and there were a lot of unnecessary mistakes and support calls along the way.

We were literally trying to get them to work through a set up procedure they had somehow forgotten to do - on Christmas Eve, which was at least a week later than it should have been.

A&A have a good rep among geeks but they seemed expensive and I've never used them.

The best service I had in the UK was with Virgin (on local coax). Apparently their customer service is pretty poor. But aside from the occasional random outage the service mostly just worked, and at the advertised speeds.

[PaulKeeble]

Zen used to be good, back in the early 2000s they had amazing support. But they like most of the other ISPs have been racing to the bottom and they are a shadow of their former self. Unlike Sky and Plus.net and such its not an acquisition issue it just seems to be the quality of what they do has dropped substantially over the years. They remain one of the better ones but that is only because the service is that bad at Sky/Plus.net/EE/BT that it is a low bar to pass.

[kawsper]

Agreed about Zen, we experience random dropouts at night sometimes for hours, I don't know if they are doing unannounced infrastructure changes or what it is.

[defanor]

I've observed it from the other side (failing to connect to a Zen customer for more than an hour), and additionally the zen.co.uk website refused to serve me either directly or via Tor when I tried to check its status and/or a looking glass service (though not recalling finding those anyway, when I've finally connected via a private server).

[arprocter]

Although I haven't had the 'pleasure' of dealing with any of this in a good while, my experiences mirror your last paragraph.

It seems like a lot of the problems in the UK are down to the state of the POTS copper - if you're in an area that got NYNEX'd back in the day then cable is the way to go

[arethuza]

We're in a rural area of Scotland so the only options appear to ADSL or 4G - I almost switched to the latter before BT Broadband got their act together.

[C1sc0cat]

Vodaphone Business are not to bad - I switched to them when Vodaphone finally shutdown Demon.