Need new ISP, any advice?

[watercooled]

Oh yeah I forgot to mention the traffic management, here's the table: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html...t/traffic.html

[abaxas]

Oh yeah I forgot to mention the traffic management, here's the table: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html...t/traffic.html

No it's not just that..

I'm on a business ADSL package about 80k/s up.
Mate is on Virgin about 25k/s up.

He can saturate my up when downloading from me. I get about 15k/s from him.

The we look at father on normal BT adsl (+45k/s up)

I get full speed from him.. Something is different about VM, what I dont know.

[watercooled]

Haven't experienced anything like that myself AFAIK. Unless they cap speed by port number but it would be pretty ridiculous to cap their upload speeds (although they still do if you hit limits) since you need pretty much all the upstream bandwidth to allow you to download at the rated speed.

[Shooty*]

More and more, I'm looking at Plusnet, to be honest.

[Time Bandit]

I often keep an eye on this site to see how the ISPs are doing.

http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php#

Obviously you will see a lot of negative posts about all of them but the majority of companies in the top 10 have been there for some time. I left tiscali some years ago because of their unbelievably poor customer service and went to ADSL24. Service there has always been outstanding (someone knowledgeable always answers the phone) so I have stayed with them. There have been issues over the past couple of months with Entanet's pipe juggling antics but ADSL24 have always maintained their level of support.

Now ADSL24 are leaving Entanet so the service levels are expected to improve again. Migratation is going to take place in batches and volunteers were being requested to go first to help iron out snags. The thread for volunteers is currently 45 pages long! The vast majority are offering support and best wishes - nice that can ISP can generate this amount of loyalty.

I shall certainly be hanging around for a while yet to see how it goes.

[Chan]

BT are rolling out BT Infinity from 25th january, if anyone is lucky enough to be in the available areas and gets it would like to know how it performs! 40Mb/10Mb unlimited for £24.99 is.. well it'll give Virgin a serious kick up the arse if it delievers what it says.

www.bt.com/infinity

[Shooty*]

Big "IF", and to make it truly a great product, they'd have to pledge to stop those god-awful adverts with the bloke from My Family.

[watercooled]

I'm moving house next Friday. Anyone got views on Virgin?

Just edited my other post because I forgot to mention:

the engineers/technicians who come out to install/sort stuff out are very polite and helpful in my experience.

[floppybootstomp]

Originally Posted by daniel_owen_uk:

In which case do you have a whole host of other LLU companies you can choose from?

Me:Yes, but they are not offering a significantly better deal than the one I currently have.

In my opinion 02/Be are offering a better deal, but it's unavailable to me.


Originally Posted by watercooled:

BT aren't allowed to reserve so many 'slots' - LLU is there partly so BT doesn't have a monopoly and reserving slots would be unfair competition. By slots I'm assuming they mean the amount of customers and AFAIK a BT exchange has to allow up to every customer to go LLU.


Me: I'm simply quoting what 02 told me, I have no idea about the hierachy or indeed what a slot actually is.

I phoned adsl24 about their C & W service yesterday, 20 quid a month for unlimited bandwidth, speeds up to 24Mb d/l and 250Mb web space and they gave me the same reason as 02/Be why they can't provide me with their service: the Greenwich exchange has no 'slots' or 'rackspace' left and they won't let any ISP's have any.

Apparently, according to the guy from adsl24, Greenwich is possibly the most popular and oversubscribed exchange in the UK.

Bugger.

Apparently I could register and queue but that may take months or even years and all that time I'm waiting I'd have to have a permanent months' notice in with Zen.

So, to re-answer this question from daniel owen:

In which case do you have a whole host of other LLU companies you can choose from?

No, it would appear I do not.

Looks like I have two choices:

1) Stay with Zen. Not so bad.

2) Sign up with BT. I would rather eat my own poo.

[Shooty*]

OK, sorry to resurrect, but getting my MAC from O2 on Thursday. People still happy wqith plusnet?

[Phage]

Yup. I'm on an unbundled and over subscribed exchange in a semi-rural area but I still get 5-7Mbs down and 350k up.
More to the point I've found their customer service - on the rare times I have to call them, quite good. In the last 3 years I've had to upgrade to a premium account for data usage but only ever had one outage last week when something major failed waaaaay upstream.
As a BT re-seller on this exchange the speed and other performance indicators are largely out of their control. So it's down to price and customer service. I would rate them much higher than Tiscali or TalkTalk. Preobably the best available to me given that most of the ISPs that people quote here are unavailable to me.

[shakerist]

virgins's speeds are great i get 10mb like it was advertised , but the phone package is rubbish its expensive and everythnig else is expensive, orange, o2 are quite gd and cheap and i heard that post office does a good package

[Spookie]

+1 to Be* been with them for 2 years and had my speed increase 2mb over said time! Still only 3mb but I am silly far from the exchange!

[Shooty*]

CAn't get Be* here, and O2 WERE fantastic, but since December have capped speeds ridiculously.

PLusnet it is then.

[Phage]

CAn't get Be* here, and O2 WERE fantastic, but since December have capped speeds ridiculously.

PLusnet it is then.

They do have monthly contracts if you decide you don't like the service...

[mr-zeeman]

go with 02 order via quido you get cashback. its unlimted and upto 20mb