OK, this is installation day so my opinion may change (or might not!).
I signed up for Brillband on a Saturday afternoon at about 4pm. CityFibre has destroyed the pavements round here over the last year and finally offered some providers. There were 4 on offer - Vodafone (I work in IT and particularly am dealing with VPN issues at the moment and almost all of the problem ones are Vodafone, so I wouldn't touch them), some other provider that I'd not heard of but had some awful reviews (ISPs don't generally get good reviews but these were bad), Giganet, which I'd heard of and Brillband which I knew nothing about. Virgin had also upped my 350Mb broadband, TV (which I don't care about) and phone (which I don't use) to £108/month.
About 20 minutes later I got a call to arrange an installation date.
Unfortunately that didn't happen and it's not really their fault. CityFibre found a fault and cancelled all installations but didn't tell the customers who were waiting a call and emailed Brillband and it wasn't noticed until late in the day. I called them and left a VM and was called back in 10 minutes. Was told that a new install date was provisionally 3rd March but they'd put a note on it to say to escalate if possible as I'd been let down. A couple of days later this got moved to 1st March then yesterday I got a message that it would be today, if that was OK.
CityFibre turned up (actually it was Kelly Services on their behalf) at 8am. Did a pretty decent job of removing and replacing some monoblock paving. Done in about 2 hours. No mess inside or out and no sign, other than the new box on the wall, that they'd even been there. I assume I'm one of the first people in this area as they were visited by some senior bods in a Range Rover and some people from marketing who were taking photos. At one point there were 8 people in my driveway. :-) I cannot complain about the installation at all. They did an awesome job, although had I known they were taking pics I might've tidied up a little!
I work from home, as does my wife, so I waited till lunchtime to switch over. I didn't use the supplied Eero 6 router at the time as I've already got Eero 5 Pro routers and swapping takes a while and we didn't have the time. As it's wifi 5 there wasn't a massive jump in download speed (near router was about 380Mbps vs 340Mpbs but upload speed jumped from 39Mbps to nearly 400Mbps. The gateway router itself was showing over 900Mbps up and down. I'm not naive enough to expect 900Mbps all the time, but it being symetrical is an unexpected bonus. Also, so far, latency seems a little lower than VM.
The reason I'm saying 4 rather than 5 stars is not the network performance (although if it starts to suck I will drop the rating! :-) Both my wife and I (different companies) were immediately back on our VPNs), the installation (which was excellent), the customer service (which has been unusually good for an ISP so far) - it's entirely because of the supplied Eero 6 router.
I suppose that's not Brillband's fault (Eero is Amazon) (btw how do you get the Eero app to show "Provided by Brillband" on the splash screen?) but, at least in my experience here the Eero 6 appears to have a worse chipset than the Eero 5 Pro. Eero 6 should have higher bandwidth with a compatible wifi adapter but when I replaced the gateway with the Eero 6 I was getting about 150Mbps but 380Mpbs on the Eero 5 Pro with both 802.11ac and 802.11ax adapters in the same room.
This isn't a Brillband issue. Other ISPs seem to have the same complaints, such as TalkTalk who offer the same router. I'm a big fan of the Eero 5 Pro, but not of the basic Eero 6. I suppose I'm more disappointed in Amazon rather than Brillband. I'm not sure the Eero 6 even supports near gigbit speeds.
TLDR: So far so good for the network connection and customer service but if you really need the faster speed then buy a better router. On a plus side if you buy a better router the config is minimal.
2 years ago
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