Sky Falling

I knew today was going too well.  The weather felt milder, it was a Friday, the weekend was beckoning, I had several bottles of 'Two Hoots' golden ale cooling off in the fridge.  Then I saw on the BBC News site that my ISP had been sold to BSkyB and would be absorbed into Sky Broadband.  Jesus!  What a disaster!  It took me many years to find a decent ISP that gave me genuinely unlimited broadband at a reasonable price, combined with decent customer service and reliability.  I detest having to change ISP - it is usually a chore and inevitably goes wrong at some point, leaving me with no broadband for a day or so - but this news leaves me with no choice.  Most fundamentally, there is a matter of principle involved here - I absolutely refuse to give money to any part of the Murdoch empire.  I won't buy his newspapers and I won't watch his TV stations, so I'll be damned if I'll take his broadband services.  There is also a purely practical consideration too, namely that Sky insists its broadband customers also switch their phonelines to them.  Again, no way.  I don't especially like dealing with BT for my landline, (my experiences with them have been chronicled elsewhere on this blog), but at least they aren't Murdoch.

But, having made the decision to change ISP, the question is, who do I switch to?   BT's stewardship of my phoneline has been so miserable - characterised by appallingly dismal customer service - my instinct is not to let them also handle (and probably screw up) my broadband as well.  Virgin are out.  I won't have anything to do with any business linked to Richard Branson.  He's as poisonous as Murdoch in my opinion.  Moreover, Virgin Media is actually NTL and I had a very bad time with them when I was a cable customer - poor reliability, extremely bad customer service.  Eventually I threw them out of my house, lock, stock and barrel.  Which is the reason I don't have cable TV any more.  As for TalkTalk, the other main player, I've only ever heard bad things about their services.  All of which brings us to the crux of the matter: the UK ISP market is currently dominated by a handful of players - many of the smaller ISPs, upon closer inspection often turn out to be owned by one of the main players.  The remaining independent ISPs are frequently so small that they offer prohibitively high prices for home users.  Luckily, the migration to Sky won't start for another six months, so there's no rush to switch just yet.  There is a positive side to all this - I can seriously consider upgrading to a fibre service, which my current ISP doesn't offer.  One thing seems sure, judging by the comments on my current ISPs forum, I won't be alone in giving Sky the cold shoulder.