I have been with AOL for years, and it's been ok as long as you don't use their software and just use them as a connection via a router. I have no download limit and pay ?16 a month with no phone tie in. Speeds are not great but when you live in the sticks you have to accept that. My bit torrenting works fine overnight, just gets throttled during day, I can live with that.. lol!
Years ago my wife transfered our phone to Sky because it was supposed to save money. What happened was our bill not only went up, but they just took funds from our bank account as and when they felt like it leading us to go overdrawn and incur serious bank charges. Resultingly, I would never sign my phone over ever again!
Set up my Dad on BT last month, huge problems... no connection for 48 hours after they were supposed to be activated. Several hours of phone calls to Indian call centre getting passed from piller to post and playing with differerent sockets in house and different settings on pc's and all of a sudden the router light shows a signal and it just works!
Now from first call, I told them my experience was that if no broadband signal showing on router the problem was them not giving us a connection, they disputed this and had me all but reinstalling Windows in a bid to fix a problem, that was at their end.. Hopeless service and huge accent problems!!
Graham