Technology

The more a company is spammed in advertisements the less likely I am to use it, as I strongly associate ads with scams

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.

TL;DR: stay away from trustpilot, they are anything but trustworthy. The EU federation really has to provide such platform, and not rely on a private corporation, if they want to promote trust in the EU. In the meanwhile, we should really get a review website aggregator, to spot the inconsistencies.

If I learned anything recently is that trustpilot is essentially an online "private security" firm at best, and an online "protection business" at worst, where they abuse their market dominant position, and wait for users to post damaging (however truthful) reviews of a business to then "offer" said business an opportunity to "manage and display"[^1] their reviews (what is there to manage about reviews third parties left of your business, aside from removing them?) for a modest sum starting from 250E a month, more than doubling for every tier, and going to undisclosed amounts, for the "enterprise" offer.

However they will also do nothing against fake positive reviews (as evidenced by the sheer amount of different websites offering them), and you can buy several dozen online for around 250E (or see here).

I discovered all this recently after seeing concerning patterns and doing tests (with the means available to me). In the process of doing said tests, I discovered a very well rated (essentially 5 out of 5) company (that I won't name), that straight up lies about their entire offer, and merely sublets (without disclosing it) the offer of a much larger, and much, much cheaper company; all the while offering broken basic features.

[^1]: taken from their website:

Manage reviews for stores and branches

Stand out in local search as you manage and display content on each of your sites