No to both questions.
I have been a TT customer for more than 10 years and i am happy with the service, i did have a couple off issues when moving to fibre recently but a new D-link router (i used to have the HG633 which was fine for ADSL but in my opinion is not for VDSL) fixed that, TT get a lot of stick and a lot of it is band wagon jumping bull**** no one goes onto support forums to say how wonderful their service is every week but customers are on like a shot when things go wrong, i admit their customer service is not the best but if you use the online community rather than phone support you usually end up with your problem being sorted faster than when you phone.
This forum shows all results for ISP unhappiness and as you can see BT and virgin have more unhappy customers than TT.
http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/unhappiness.html
Good point about test files here are some with times -
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/download
.
It's the same with Virgin, they get bad press everywhere yet are the best we've ever had. Over the years we've been with BT (a joke), PlusNet (BT in disguise, complained and they offered to disconnect us...), Supanet (a good example of mis-selling, then tried to charge us for a router we never actual had... The MODEM they supplied nearly set fire to our flat at the time, and the drivers for it contained a ghost dialling virus... lol), Sky (paid for 2 meg, got dial up. Customer service that consisted of sitting in a queue for at least an hour at a time, only to speak to an Indian call centre reading from a script...).
What messes Virgin up is popularity. Every few years we get hit by the infamous over-utilisation, often hand in hand with one of their speed doubling promotions or over the Christmas period. Basically in our area lots of scrags sign up with Virgin for TV etc over the Christmas period, then quit in the new year within the 14 days, so we get 2 weeks of degraded service UNLESS it's in a year they've had to perform a re-segmentation and actually put enough bandwidth in place (takes a while as the council have to give permission to dig the streets up). As mentioned though, you get a rebate when there's over-utilisation, and around here Sky and BT are as bad as it's an area of high population density. Customer service though, I just use their support forum and my problems get dealt with directly by their Tier 1 techs, rather than a scripted call centre. Possibly helps though that we don't have Virgin TV (we have Sky, but in the process of cancelling) sharing the bandwidth. BT/Sky only goes up to 30 odd Mbps here anyway, which is nowhere near enough for our family (4 desktops, streaming sticks, smart TV, consoles, phones, tablets blah blah blah), was difficult enough back in the 50 Mbps days when that was the top Virgin tier.... :lol:
As to hardware, we have a Virgin SuperHub 2AC in modem mode, with a Securifi Almond+ pulling router duty. Our WIFI reaches half way down our street, and easily up to our bedroom on the 2nd floor (3 story house). Must drive our neighbours nuts.... :twisted:
Glad to hear you're not actually having any problems though. Usually people only discuss their ISP when complaining, as you say. I just made baseless assumptions.
