Good ADSL provider?

[wedge22]

Which adsl provider would you guys recommend for a family that only require a faster internet connection and will not be doing alot of d/l. They have been looking at either Tesco's or Virgin.

[kushtibari]

I've been with plusnet for a couple of years now. Swapped to one of their 'plus' accounts a bit ago - 2mb line for £14.99 a month - Do a bit of downloading but not a huge amount. Customer support is consistently good, although I haven't used them a huge amount and had next to no downtime.

[Taz]

Another vote for Plusnet. Moved to Plusnet recently. So far so good. Cannot fault it for £14.99 per month for a 2Mb ADSL line.

However, I tried to download a large binary from easynews.com during the day and my download speed was only 10-14Kb per second! So, the £14.99 package is definitely no good for downloads (as is well known but I thought i'd try it anyway). Also, running the speedtest on adslguide.org has shown my speed to be deteriorating over the last two weeks - could Plusnet be a victim of their own success? Having said that, no down time that I know of and excellent 24/7 customer support.

[Trippledence]

The trafic shapeign on the £14.99 account for plus is a bit set back if you want to do anything other than surf the web and check your mail. Ive been with plus since i got bb. And my servce hasnt deteriated at all. So one further vote for them, PM me if your interested in plus. /me wants referals.

[Wiczy]

Zen are the best i have tried so far and they have no caps whatsoever.

[GizmoStu]

I'm looking to get myself set up with broadband sometime in the next month or so. At present, Plusnet are my choice, although I'm also considering Freedom2Surf and possibly metronet. What are people's experiences of gaming with Plusnet's £14.99 package? I've heard conflicting reports about it!

[kushtibari]

I've had no problems at all - don't do large downloads, though trailers, drivers etc have all been extremely quick and speed tests show no deterioration. I will be downloading XP pro X64 tonight so i'll soon see how fast a big download goes.

[TheAnimus]

Freedom2Surf i've stuck my parents on for the last 4 years now. Consistantly great service, great pings etc.

Plus.net i used last year (having not used them since the before ADSL times), and i found there service to be slower in comparison, but much cheaper, i was paying £25 a month for traffic shaped 2mbit, that didn't allow me to host anything (ie no P2P) but with plusnets usenet, why would anyone use P2P.

Freedom2Surf i think are worth the extra money, there less than zen, but better service, someone used a laptop (with my parents consent) on the wireless, it had some spamming software installed (the user was un-aware of) i didn't have any packet inspection set up at that time, i got an email from F2S telling me about this. Nice service.

[Trippledence]

When i got the blaster virus after a formatt plusnet blocked the ports to stop it activating. Which I was pretty impressed with.

[TheAnimus]

yeh problem is i had an IP range last year (student house) when Chris got a blaster varient from "Two Goth Lesbians Sexs.scr" or something similar, they blocked the WHOLE RANGE, this is not acceptible. It was just his IP that was infected but they blocked all the traffic on our network. Not just EMAP ports Damn you plus

Another cool thing about f2s, they let you set your own reverse DNS settings, for instance my IP at my parents house can be resolved to, as well as found to be l3.3t.me.uk or by.t3.me.uk depending how geeky i want to feal.

[GizmoStu]

Hmmm... it would seem the jury is still out then. Ah well, I've got a bit more time to think about it. At least there haven't been any negative experiences with either of the providers I'm considering.

[sdl]

I've been with metronet for about 18 months with no problems. They have some cheap monthly 'PayGo' packages (from £11.75 per month) ideal if you are a light user.

However the set-up costs are high - you have to pay to activate your BT line (if you've not had ADSL before) and also buy your own modem/router. Although I preferred choosing my own hardware as I wanted an ADSL router rather than a USB modem.

[UHT]

Got to recommend Zen, top notch.

[rolph]

I'm in the same position. My exchange has just been enabled so i'm looking to go from Wanadoo dial up to broadband. I'm not that bothered by speed because anything is an improvement on dial up. So the Tesco offer looks good 512k with no download limits for £14.99 but as nobody else is offering this kind of deal i assume there must be some kind of catch.
Anybody suggest what it might be?

[toadoftoadhall]

I would have recommended Pipex, I have been with them for 3 years, networked to 4 bedrooms ( shared house) about 20Gb dl per month, and no problems at all.
But it does cost £25 per month.
Not sure if they do capped accounts , but worth looking into. A company really serious about delivering ADSL.

toad

[killie99]

I got my girlfiends parents freedom2surf and was well impressed. They got setup with a 2meg line straight away so I've ended up ditching Nildram and switched over to them. Been with them now for around 4 months and not had one single problem - never had to reboot my modem since signing up...which is miles better than Nildram as I was rebooting once a week or so.