Orange have agreed to release me from my contract with them due to the unresolved problems I've had with the package, which have been ongoing for seven months, and to my subsequent complaints to ISPA. Obviously, I want to be very careful that this time I pick a provider that's going to offer me good customer service and support. If possible, I'd like to avoid ever speaking to another offshore support desk for the rest of my life. I'm 2 miles from the exchange and on the Orange service I get download speeds between 0.9 and 1.4meg. I work from home so I need reliability, and I watch movies online so I want a decent-sized limit or none, and if possible I'd really like better speed. I need to replace both landline and connection.

According to Samknows, the only ISPs with LLU kit in my exchange are O2/Be and TalkTalk. I've been to a few ISP sites to check the speeds they're quoting me, and most are quoting around 1meg. However, O2 is quoting me 4meg and TalkTalk is quoting me 2.7meg. Strangely, Be quotes me just 1 meg. Is it likely that because O2 and TalkTalk have LLU at my exchange they really would be likely to give me actual speeds that are so much better, or are they just making unrealistic claims? And if they're both on LLU, why would O2 be so much faster than TalkTalk? And if O2 is using the Be network, how could they achieve 4 times the speed? And how do I find out what contention ratios they use?

And if I do switch to a provider with LLU, would this mean that if I subsequently switched back to BT or another phone provider I'd have to pay a new line connection fee and possibly have to change my phone number? Even if that were the case, I'd presume that wouldn't apply when switching away from Orange, since although line rental is included in that package they apparently don't have LLU at my exchange - does that sound right?

If there isn't a financial downside involved in switching to an LLU provider, i guess they're the only choices for better speed. TalkTalk does currently still use offshore support desks, but they've committed to moving the whole lot back onshore as fast as poss and their online forums look pretty good. It has to be said their latest package is a real bargain at £16.99 including line rental, plus £30 connection fee, and the concept of dealing with just one bill/supplier is a good one when it works. Their call charges are higher than Orange, though. Using O2 and BT combination would come to £23 but with free connection (for O2, not sure about BT).

Can anyone answer these questions for me? And any comments on the pros/cons of these providers?

Online estimators are just that, pure guesswork. The only way to know for sure what speeds you should get is to find your line stats in your router - downstream attenuation, noise margin and connection rate. Lower attenuation faster the line (from 0 - 63.5) . Attenuation over 50 dB would see speeds from about 4 meg and under.

O2/Be the better LLU option since that means keeping phone line on BT's network (you still have a choice of who to pay rental to). £40 cashback for Be through quidco too.

With Talktalk they are full LLU ie. both phone line and broadband get lifted so you may well have problems shifting back to BT's network.

Well, my attenuation is 53, but frankly I'd be over the moon to be getting a speed of 4 meg :) Not only am I two miles from the exchange, but a lot of that two miles consists of rusty old overhead lines running down a country lane. A few years back, I was the first person in the lane to ask for an ISDN connection and poor old BT had to run lines down the entire two miles of the lane.

More than anything, I was just curious to know more about the techie aspects of LLU, whether it would necessarily give me better performance than a standard BT based connection and whether there was a marked difference between the performance of LLU connections from the different providers. I was also puzzled that Be and O2 would be giving me such wildly differing speed estimates, given that they're both running over the same network and estimating to the same phone number on the same info provided by BT.

I am a little nervous about taking my phone line away from the BT network, so on the whole I think i'm leaning toward O2, although I think I may take my line rental and call charges to Sky rather than BT, since I'm already an existing Sky customer and the line rental is a hair cheaper than BT. I just kind of have a suspicion that Sky (or almost anyone) might move a bit faster than BT. Thanks for the tip about quidco, I took a look and in fact I can get £60 back for O2, plus another £5 for Sky. The O2 rebate effectively means I'd get a year of the O2 package for the same discounted price that I'd get if I had O2 mobile.

You have the same attenuation as me and I connect at 4512 kbps, snr margin 9. At this line length it makes no odds what technology is used, adsl max or adsl2+ , only difference between LLU and normal BT ipstream is in the profiles used by BT which limit downstream rates for stability ie. on ipstream my line is capped at 3500 kbps , on LLU I would see near enough 4512 kbps. An extra few kbps and I would leap up to 4000 kbps profile.

Again the figures provided by ISPs can only be estimates - your own internal wiring can have a big effect on the end results - see this for tips

Damn. I was told by Orange that I had to switch over the phone line first, and then order the broadband service, so I first placed the order for line rental/calls with Sky. When I then contacted O2 and asked them if I had to wait for the actual line rental switchover to happen before I could order their broadband, they're telling me they can't provide me with broadband unless I'm paying line rental to BT. Why on earth would they need that? The line is still a BT line, not going thru an LLU unbundled service and not thru cable.

No reason at all for O2 to insist you must pay line rental to BT retail. As you say it's a BT network line no matter who you pay rental to as long as it's not LLU or cable. This post on Skyuser suggests lack of knowledge by O2 customer services and it is indeed possible to get O2 with a sky line.

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Well, I've questioned this with O2 and they're adamant I must be paying rental to BT. I've also posed the same question to Be and got exactly the same answer. Clearly there's no technical reason for this restriction, so I can only assume they must have some kind of arrangement with BT.

I've found out another little nugget of information today. I had a phone call from TalkTalk sales, because I'd previously carried out a check on their site to check that their service covered my phone line. They assured me that if someone took out the TalkTalk fully unbundled package and then subsequently switched back to BT, no reconnection or other charges would be payable to BT. I've searched the FAQ and support sections on the BT website and what I saw there seemed to support that. So I guess that's just a rumour going around that isn't true. It seems to me there's very little clarity about the rules and pros and cons of using the various bundled/unbundled packages.

If I'd known all this from the outset, I think I'd have gone with TalkTalk. Their current package is at a very good price and although O2 may have good customer service, in order to use them you have to put up with BT's appalling customer service. I've spent an hour on the phone tonight, talking to four different people in BT's customer service, and not one of them could track down my order or give me any kind of go-live date on the BT line rental activation date. It's not the people, it's the systems they have to use, and that's a legacy problem that will take a very long time to get rid of. And given the choice, I'd prefer to be dealing with one provider for both phone and broadband, it just makes life easier. I wouldn't even consider BT's broadband packages because they're horribly overpriced unless you're prepared to accept a low download cap.

PS I will be keeping an eye out for Sky making their LLU service available on my exchange. In the course of placing an order for phone rental/calls and subsequently cancelling it, I've had a few phone conversations with their sales/customer support departments, and every person I've spoken to has been switched on and well informed, and has dealt with my order/cancellation in a very efficient and competent manner.

The issue with migrating from TalkTalk's full LLU product back to BT's network seems to hinge on the line being active when you want to move. If TT have stopped it before you migrate a charge may be raised.

Also it appears that other line rental providers are either unwilling or unable to take on an ex-LLU line.

It shouldn't be necessary to go back to BT retail for line rental, customers should be able to choose say Sky and TT shouldn't be pushing customers back to only BT.Doesn't help matters when providers still insist on confusing BT retail with BT Wholesale ie. a BT line just means it's on the BT network, not that you pay line rental to BT retail.

If you organise yourself in advance the line shouldn't be stopped, though, because the new provider takes it from the old as long as you set things up before the old service has stopped.

And O2's website is far from helpful on this issue. This is what it says on the subject -

If you already have a BT phone line then no changes are necessary. We’ll just add O2 Home Broadband to it. If you get your telephone line from someone else (like Virgin Media), you have to transfer it to BT to get O2 Home Broadband.

That, to me, says that if I have a BT phone line as opposed to a cable or fully unbundled line, there's no problem. If they mean that you need to have a line rental agreement with BT, for whatever reason, then that's what they should be saying and they're not. It's difficult to understand why they'd need to place this restriction. And given that the whole system is supposed to be open and unrestricted now, it doesn't seem right that any of the providers can place restrictions on who you pay rental or call charges to, particularly when they're not clearly declared upfront. If it's a locked combination, then that's kind of like a mandatory bundle whether you like it or not, isn't it?

That's it, I've had enough, I've given up on BT and I'm going with TalkTalk. Four days down the line and about half a doz customer service reps later, they still haven't managed to find any trace of my order, despite the fact that I have a printed confirmation that their website processed it. I'm leaving Orange precisely because of their poor customer service, and I'm not going into another contract where I have to put up with that nonsense again. O2 could have the best customer service in the world, but it doesn't compensate for having to use BT. I know TalkTalk had a bad rep in the past, but from what I've seen on forums it looks to me like they've now got their act together on customer service, so I'm betting on them, fingers crossed.