I've been upgraded...

[andrewb]

1.7Mb/s Download speed! Woo! Love Bulldog

[Mick]

Bulldog begins pull-out of residential broadband market
Gate starting to close on consumer broadband service

Dinah Greek, Computeract!ve 09 Jun 2006

ADVERTISEMENTBulldog is to pull the plug on its consumer broadband service.

The internet service provider (ISP) , which is owned by Cable & Wireless (C & W) will not actively seek to sign up any new customers to the loss-making service from 1 July.

The move comes despite the company spending millions recently on a high profile advertising campaign. Featuring actor Terence Stamp, it tells consumers that "the gate is open" for high-speed internet access.

However, Bulldog said the 140,000 people already using the service will continue to be provided with a service and they shouldn't see any difference.

Although C & W is axing around 140 sales and marketing jobs, a representative told Computeractive that customer and technical support will continue as normal.

"Things such as billing function and technical support will remain the same and customers should see no change," the company said.

However the company warned that its current consumers could find themselves 'sold' to another ISP. It said it would consider approaches from other companies to buy the customer database. How it said it couldn’t say how this would affect current customers.

"At the moment customers who are signed up for a 12-month contract will have to honour this. We can't say what will happen if another company buys the database because terms and conditions may be different for them, which could affect this," Bulldog told us.

C&W now intends to concentrate on providing a wholesale service to other ISPs. It has invested heavily in local loop unbundling. It already has its equipment in 411 exchanges and intends to continue with its plan to have 800 exchanges unbundled by September.

[WillowTheWhisp]

We're on Bulldog at the mo and can't say we are 100% happy. Lost internet Sunday evening, tried to phone them but despite Busman previously having authorised them to speak to me they wouldn't and he wasn't home when they were available. This is in spite of the fact that they send the billing emails to my email address and we both signed the original application.

He was finally able to speak to them briefly on Tuesday to tell them to speak to me.

They then tried to tell me that they couldn't do anything because we were using a router which Bulldog do not support - this despite the fact that the router came to us via them when we signed up last year!

Eventually I was able to contact someone who knew what they were doing and got it sorted out but it took a few days, countless phone calls and most of my time!

[andrewb]

Yes they're a bit crap when it comes to support Willow, you really have to keep ringing back until you find someone who has actualy been trained properly

Mick, it won't affect us, and you can still join up with bulldog after July, you just have to do it through webby, they're just cost cutting getting rid of all the advertisers etc

[claytonender]

I am with Virgin Internet, I have their £17.99 pacakage, with a total downlaod allowance per month of 6Gb, and a download speed of 1.1mbps.
You don't have to sign a 12 moth contract either.
I used to be with AOL, but found their customer support was abysmal, when I had a prolem in December I was given all sorts of weird and wonderful advice, and I ended up solving the problem myself.

[andrewb]

forgot to mention... its £25.50 a month for UPTO 24meg (no cap)
or £19.50 a month for UPTO 8meg (nocap)

AOL are the worst ISP, ever.