Originally Posted by
Photon
Virgin is really difficult to deal with when it comes to customer support. I bought a package a few years back that claimed to be "unlimited" but they throttled it after like 30GB to dial up speeds. Couldn't get any progress with them after a month of calls and spending hours on the phone. Sky did a similar thing so I'd avoid them.
I've used plusnet for the last 3 years. I pay about £30 a month for 80mb/s in a very rural area, including line rental. The customer support is brilliant, I barely have to wait 10 minutes to get a problem solved. They're incredibly cheap for their speeds and I've never had a single problem with the speed/network. If you need fibre setup, they'll send over a BT person within a few days to hook it all up and you're good to go. The router lacks a bit of advanced settings in their UI, though you can do a lot of it with telnet.
Edit: Even when I didn't have fibre available, I got the maximum for my area even cheaper (around £15 a month) which was a consistent 8mb/s.