Best broadband services for the Woolley exchange
For villages connected to the Woolley exchange (such as Spaldwick, Alconbury and Alconbury Weston), there are now several choices of broadband service available that are superior to BT’s retail broadband services, in terms of pricing, quality of service, upload and download speeds, customer support and/or usage allowances. This page provides guidance on the best services currently available. Now that local loop unbundling has arrived at the Woolley exchange, there is really no justification for staying with outdated BT services.
Local loop unbundling is the process of allowing other telecoms operators to use BT lines from the telephone exchange to customers’ premises. An LLU operator installs its own equipment in the BT exchange.
On the 19th December 2011, Talk Talk switched on LLU services at the Woolley exchange, provides customers with a range of new options. Talk Talk uses the more advanced ADSL2+ technology, which can provide significant benefits over the older ADSL technology currently used by BT, particularly in terms of improved speeds and reliability.
Compared with standard ADSL services delivered over the BT network, LLU services will typically deliver much higher upload speeds (nearer 1Mbps compared with 448kbps for BT-based standard ADSL services) and better downlink speeds and throughputs.
Talk Talk offers very cheap consumer broadband services, which combine line rental and broadband. These are now available to homes connected to the Woolley exchange. For example, The Talk Talk Essentials package provides telephone services with a line rental of £9.50 a month with broadband costing a mere £3.25 per month. However, Talk Talk has received a lot of criticism about its cheap consumer services, particularly in terms of the quality of customer care, so take this into account when you consider changing. Talk Talk’s network itself is very advanced and there are few documented issues about the basic service, from a technical perspective.
Less well known is the fact that Talk Talk also provides wholesale services (just as BT does) to a number of ISPs. These ISPs benefit from access to Talk Talk’s highly-advanced network and yet can provide superior customer care. While these services are not as cheap as Talk Talk’s direct services, they do allow you to get the best of all worlds – broadband and phone services that are still significantly cheaper than BT services, excellent customer support and superior broadband performance and data rates.
The following ISPs offer broadband and/or phone services using the Talk Talk network:
Some of these offer combined phone and broadband deals (which tend to offer greater savings compared with BT) and some offer broadband only services (where you keep your existing phone contract with BT). All of these ISPs have an excellent reputation (and are rated in consumer satisfaction surveys above BT).
If we were asked to pick one, we would currently opt for Xilo, as customer service is particularly outstanding, with a call centre based in the UK.
Xilo’s starter Talk Surf 5GB package costs about £21 (which includes line rental and VAT), and offers a 5GB monthly allowance.
At the other end of the spectrum, Xilo’s premium service is called Talk Surf Pro 75GB, which costs £29.66 per month, inclusive of VAT and line rental. This provides a 75GB usage allowance and offers prioritised traffic. It is substantially cheaper than low-contention BT-based equivalent services.
