Broadband Questions

[jimpy0]

depending on where you live Virgin is the dogs danglies rock solid connection and constant speeds

 

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/

 

have a look here if you live in the places peeps are constantly whining about then try BT

 

i hav'nt even been bothered by the traffic shaping and some days i do hammer my connection both up and down

 

just noticed you in london know some peeps there and they run BT business lines £25 per month and 8 meg

Edited June 13, 2007 by jimpy0

[Ian FG]

I think Matt's post said it all but I have to say that my friend has Orange broadband FREE with her phone contract. A constant, fast connection. I sometimes go over to her place to download something because it so fast and hassle free. Just my opinion like.

[Guest Rabbit]

I have been with AOL since the dawn of time, and its hard to draw comparisons because I have not had another ISP, But AOL has had problems but to be fair they do seem to be trying to address them.

I have a 'free' netgear router, courtesy of AOL and a have wi fi connection for the sons 360. I do get the odd connection problem with the p.c but 'forcing' a connection by ringing my mobile gets me back on line

A bit of advice that has helped me. I now run my Internet alongside Unix, and have isolated Windows from any possible virus attack by pre selecting on boot up, so I choose either Unix with Internet or Windows without Internet. The Konqueror browser is by far the best I have used..and its all free of course

[Chris Goddard]

Aside from the AOL thang, that sounds like a VERY sound setup Rabbit?

 

And apologies to all, PDB is right it WAS pipex!! Sorry got carried away. It IS the morphine though I ASSURE you and they are STILL crud!!

[Tog]

Another Virgin vote here, Recently moved to the Metropolis that is Bournemouth and called Virgin about the £30 package they do, came and hooked me up 3 days later (tues after bank hol).

All worked out of the box although I supplied my own wireless router to plug into the supplied cable one.

Now here's the cunning bit - it would seem you can negotiate with them! - my girlfriend talked to them and has got us free calls 24/7 on the phone!

So we have BB, Telephone (with no £11 PCM ripoff charge to BT) and TV package for £30 PCM and I'm seriously thinking of adding a mobile to the mix for another £10.

I expect if I didnt have cable I'd go for the Sky £26 package - but with £11 to goto BT each month on top - and your BB will be provided by BT - so you must be close to your exchange to get decent speed.

Oh- speed on my BB line - excellent 2Mb, all the time, no throttling, no probs, if I wanted I rekon I could swap the 24/7 calls for 8Mb BB, but to be honest it's the websites slowing down the web most the time now.

 

PS - Tiscali who I used to be with are offering a £20 PCM calls and BB package in some areas - very good value as you do not pay BT the ripoff £11 PCM rental.

I'm signing the wife up for that one!

(some of you may have noticed a change in my domestic arrangements! - a lot can happen in a year;)

[Steve Walker]

First class post Matt . I would recommend Demon Internet.

 

Usually, so would I. I've just moved house, however, and their management of the move sucks big time. It's not an isolated incident either, my sister says she had similar problems with them.

 

We phoned Demon on May 12 after we exchanged contracts. They said that they couldn't do anything until after we moved in, and that we would be without internet for 7-10 days. We moved in on May 23rd. BT provided our new phone number bang on the dot, as promised. I've spent since then harassing Demon to get the service live, which finally happened today. I make that 23 days. Again, the bit of work BT were scheduled to do happened as promised, on the dot, the delay was all of Demon's making. I don't currently have my correct email address (I have my hostname suffixed with a '1'). As I understand it, any email sent to my correct email address since the move has bounced. I should have my old hostname back shortly. My homepage webspace is gone, presumably permanently. There was nothing on there I wanted to keep, but there might have been. I wasn't warned that would happen.

 

Here's what I would have liked;

 

* Some honesty about how long it would take to get back online. I work from home, the office is a two hour drive away, Internet access is crucial to my job. I planned my work around how long they said I'd be blind. If they'd said 23 days rather than 7-10 days, I'd have planned things differently. This has been an enormous pain in the backside.

 

* Dialup for the duration of outage. They provide dial companion as part of the standard service, would it be so hard to keep it up during the changeover?

 

* Proper management of the move to provide continuity of email delivery and home page availability.

 

If Demon were still a small, techy ISP I could forgive them some of this, but they're not. They're a significant sized company, big enough to have offshored their call centres to India. The whole process was clunky. I have effectively been forced to close my account and open a brand new one. If it were not for certain technical conveniences afforded by Demon's peculiarities and my desire to retain my hostname, I'd have told them to stick it.

[ricksteruk]

i was with demon up untill the begning of this month when i had to phone them for support. Now i had a 8mb connection and connecting at 1.3mb which was my reason as to phoning them, i phoned their support number for broadband only to be told i got the wrong department they gave me another telephone number which i dialed and got the wrong department again this happend 7 times in the end they gave me a premium rate phone number to dial. Forget that i dont dial premium numbers. I asked them for my MAC code which i got emailed a couple of minutes later. i phoned up sky as i get tV through them anyway they supply my broadband now for £5 a month ontop of my tv package, i was paying demon £19.99 a month,

 

Now just to touch on Matts post about the 8000max line, that is true they all rent the line from BT but this is changing as adsl2 becomes un bundled this is happening all over the country now. The connection speeds you get will very mostly on the line quality the distance from the exchange but also with the contention ratio, this is how many people can connect to the same broadband pipe at the exchange up to 50:1 is acceptable but over that you are asking for trouble, Just ask Talk Talk when they made a mockery. The speeds will also depend on the company, like i said i use to connect at 1.3mb with demon now im with sky same 8mb connection but im connecting at 5.7mb big difference and also come next month i get adsl2 which means i will be able to get up 16mb i expect a connection speed of around 11mb which is not to bad. the ADSL2 package from sky costs £10 on top of you sky subscription

[Mat Hillman]

I don't actually have anything to do with supporting demon broadband anymore, all the broadband support is now handled by the outsourced helpdesk.

 

And I'd best not post my opinion of them as I still work for the parent company in another capacity . . . . .

 

Mat

[ricksteruk]

to be fair to demon/thus

 

until the begining of the month never had a problem with them, then when that happend it was abit much all i wanted was some answers, i dont expect to get pushed from pillar to post all the time, espically when there is 1001 other companies out there more than willing to take my money and to be honest demon are not the cheapest out there, i would put them in the higher price bracket,

[spasor]

I had nothing but trouble with NTL. But since they`ve re-branded as Virgin Media things have looked brighter. I`ve gone the `dedicated` BB cable route, it`s very fast and reliable. But the price is not for the faint hearted. £37 pm for a 20meg service.