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Thread: Time to change but, who tells the truth?

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    Time to change but, who tells the truth?

    After being a long term (8 years) customer, Months of 'flakey' service with Virgin have made me decided that it is time for a change.

    But, Who tells the truth? 'Be theres' speed test shows my current speed at about 3Mb and claims they can provide 4.73Mb while 'O2' says my line is capable of 7Mb and BT says it's good for just ~4.5Mb

    So the question is who do I choose? I don't want to sign up for life, I've heard that BT throttle heavily during the evenings.

    At the moment I'm looking at Be or Sky. Be is looking the likely choice at the moment.

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    Re: Time to change but, who tells the truth?

    Can you find out your line attenuation, that will be most accurate to estimate from.

    I used Be*'s speedtest thing and it tells me 14Mbps, but I sync at 19Mbps with them, and ~17Mbps actual throughput.

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    Re: Time to change but, who tells the truth?

    Quote Originally Posted by Sputnik View Post
    After being a long term (8 years) customer, Months of 'flakey' service with Virgin have made me decided that it is time for a change.

    But, Who tells the truth? 'Be theres' speed test shows my current speed at about 3Mb and claims they can provide 4.73Mb while 'O2' says my line is capable of 7Mb and BT says it's good for just ~4.5Mb

    So the question is who do I choose? I don't want to sign up for life, I've heard that BT throttle heavily during the evenings.

    At the moment I'm looking at Be or Sky. Be is looking the likely choice at the moment.
    SKY is excellent.
    The connection is stable 24/7 and fast.
    The customer service is decent enough (especially Tier 3).
    The price is fantastic as no-one can compete with it.

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    Re: Time to change but, who tells the truth?

    Sky are good, especially if you are already a customer. I used to work for them (Dunfermline call centre) when we launched broadband. /shudders/
    I wouldn't of recommended them at launch, but most of the bugs are fixed now I think.

    Having said that I've been very, very happy with Be for over a year now.

    I used to get 4 meg from Eclipse and changed to Be and got 9-10 meg (with 1 meg up)

    When I moved house (about 1 mile) I was told by them I'd get the same speed, and the web speed thing said even less. I actually get 15 meg! (and 1.4 up)

    No guarantees what you'll get of course.
    The customer service is great, they are cool with changing packages as I wanted to see if pro would give me higher upload, it wasn't really worth the extra £4 so they changed it straight back.
    You can change the SNR and fastpath options from the homepage which can sometimes squeeze out some extra speed or stability, and is useful for gamers too.

    If I still had Sky TV (not staff now so I'm not going to pay for it!) I'd probably go with Sky on price though. You'll *probably* get the same speed from either as they use the same technology, it's just that Sky put a (high) artificial cap on the max speed.

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    Re: Time to change but, who tells the truth?

    all depends how far you are from the exchnage, i am approx 3 miles and on a 8mb line i get approx 4.2mb which is decent i as i was told by other 3.5.

    I am with o2 and have to say they are great i had initial problems due to their router.

    but perfect now,
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    2gb dominator 8500 + corsair 620w + 24" dell 2407

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    Re: Time to change but, who tells the truth?

    I had a bit of a bad experience with sky and trying to cancel is a total nightmare!

    I am with O2 now and its so good I don't want to ruin it by telling too many people!
    □ΞVΞ□

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    Re: Time to change but, who tells the truth?

    BT's line checker aims to be realistic rather than optimistic, so you're less likely to be disappointed. Also, they invest more in backhaul than most operators, so your actual speed at peak time is likely to be better. Throttling with BT is only a problem for P2P at peak times, not other types of traffic.

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