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Thread: Shared Broadband for Uni Usage (House)

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    Senior Trouble Maker muddyfox470's Avatar
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    Shared Broadband for Uni Usage (House)

    Ok I apologise for those that may need to repeat themselves to help me in my search, but finding the right broadband service is proving pretty difficult.

    Firstly let me explain the situation, In september me and 4 others (5 in total) will be moving into uni accomodation in Durham (DH1 1JX) and after checking we can get 2Mbps on standard ADSL or around 6.5Mbps ADSL Max. I have a DG834GT wireless modem that supports ADSL2+, is this ADSL MAX compatible? WHat is ADSL max and which ISPs provide this service?

    Ok after initial questions...

    The predicament, we really need an unlimited / unmetered service that is relatively reliable whereby i won't have to keep on calling the customer service reps at the ISP. Between 5 people it is going to be difficult to get a decent service, as some people are likely to be using P2P services so i guess an ISP that doesnt block ports could be useful. Also a low ping is pretty important for me as i will be hoping to be gaming (and continue the thrashing of the hexus clan members )

    And us being student it needs to be as cheap as possible. However between 5 people per week the cost isnt going to be 'that' great. Also I would prefer only a 12 month contract in case we are unhappy with the service in that year.

    I have come across Demon HomeOffice 2Mb, which supposedly has less blocked ports and more reliable, but i have heard bad stories about demon, HomeOffice costs £24.99 per month.

    Ideally as well we dont want to pay a connection charge or anything like that.

    Any minute bit of help would be very much appreciated.

    Ian

    EDIT: Bethere isnt available in our area
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  2. #2
    Senior Trouble Maker muddyfox470's Avatar
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    Is anyone with eclipse? Anyone had problems with the connection and P2P ?

    http://www.eclipse.net.uk/index.cfm?id=fixedmain_res The eclipse £29.99 doesn't seem too bad.

    Cheers

    Ian

    EDIT: What happened to pipex, as they used to be good? But i have heard people not being too happy with them recently (it's just that their prices seem very fair). For most companies I would mainly be looking at the home office solutions as it may be better suited to our needs? Or am i wrongly assuming that?
    Last edited by muddyfox470; 18-06-2006 at 11:56 AM.
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    YUKIKAZE arthurleung's Avatar
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    I would recommend you NOT to get Max because the usage limit is very strict on those packages and connection speed is still quite fuzzy from time to time.

    Max is at the moment can be extremely slow especially during peak time and hence affecting your ping rate if you're thinking of gaming.

    Apparently there is now no difference between Home and Office connections BT-wise and for Office product you're only buying the unlimited option.

    What kind of usage you're looking at? It will be pretty crap if one of your mate used too much -> speed capped / extra charge / black-listed. On the other hand afraid of using too much defeats the purpose of having broadband.
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  4. #4
    Senior Trouble Maker muddyfox470's Avatar
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    Well i dont know but i guess we would go over 50G quite easily, with 5 people using the internet at any one time, especially as people will either be downloading files, sharing pictures, looking on google videos and possibly p2p ing

    Are their any comments on eclipse? As they have a decent unlimited service (adslguide rate them quite highly) and capped from 6pm to midnight (50g per month) but otherwise un metered. It seems pretty good and has a relatively low contention ratio for the £29.99 package. Oh and we might also be able to get 6.5mps which i think would be appreciated by all!

    Any Advice?

    Cheers

    Ian

    PS> I guess i could use net limiter or something on each persons pc to limit their possible net bandwidth, but i think that would be a bit too intrusive!
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    Barely posting since 2006 bertie's Avatar
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    Durham exchange has got a bit better, was TERRIBLE until recently.
    I'm on BT Business 2mb ( I'm pretty sure ADSL MAX isn't available in durham yet) and it's consistently good with no caps or port blocking
    Highly recommended - you wouldn't believe the amount of stress I went through with Plusnet and another ISP before that!

  6. #6
    Senior Trouble Maker muddyfox470's Avatar
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    What is the cost of that per month? Any problems at all? Do you use it for P2P and the likes (i dont in case anyone is wondering, but my mates does).

    Do you use it for business, or were they happy to offer you the service despite you not being a business?

    Cheers

    Ian

    Is this yours? http://www.btbroadbandoffice.com/bro...ypartnerid=o41
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    Barely posting since 2006 bertie's Avatar
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    Yup that's the one except 2MB - not sure what it'll be like now it's 8MB

    A mates dad is a business so it goes through him, it's 29.99 + VAT
    I guess you may need to know someone who owns a business to sign up, sorry I'm not entirely sure, it's worth ringing to check.
    P2P is fine, I don't really use it except for bittorrent very rarely.


    Although, arthurleung says that there's no difference between Office and normal DSL - so if that's true it's pointless getting Business.
    I find it hard to believe that this is the case in Durham, but possible!

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    YUKIKAZE arthurleung's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by bertie
    Yup that's the one except 2MB - not sure what it'll be like now it's 8MB

    A mates dad is a business so it goes through him, it's 29.99 + VAT
    I guess you may need to know someone who owns a business to sign up, sorry I'm not entirely sure, it's worth ringing to check.
    P2P is fine, I don't really use it except for bittorrent very rarely.


    Although, arthurleung says that there's no difference between Office and normal DSL - so if that's true it's pointless getting Business.
    I find it hard to believe that this is the case in Durham, but possible!
    Performance of the ADSL line itself (between your adsl modem and the ISP) will be identical whether its home or business, on some ISP's network (if not most) business traffic have a higher priority (your data from ISP to the internet).

    Not sure what difference will that make. You can always start with home and move up if you're not satisfied
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  9. #9
    Senior Trouble Maker muddyfox470's Avatar
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    I just thought Business broadband might have better reliability and as you said, may have priority over home users. But also wouldn't have ports blocked?

    Ian
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    The late but legendary peterb - Onward and Upward peterb's Avatar
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    Probably one of the best unlimited ISP providers would be ZEN with their office MAX product - but it will cost something of the order of £90/month. Most of the budget ISPs will either cap you or have a restrictive acceptable use policy.

    Nildram are reputed to be a good ISP - and I think still offer a fixed 2Mb service, but their may be caps/AUP in place. Most ISP's offer max - which offer UP TO 8Mb/s download (the actual fiure depends on the line condition from you to the exchange, contention on the network etc) and a higher upload speed. When MAX works well, it works very well, but needs about 10 days connection for the exchange to determine the optimum speed for your line. In the majority of cases, afer that training period, the service is good, but there have been a realatively small (in percentage terms) of cases where the line has been unreliable after a regrade to a MAX product. These instances should reduce as the training algorithms are refined.
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    Senior Trouble Maker muddyfox470's Avatar
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    So would the DG834GT be compatible with the MAX service, i.e. up to 8Mbps ?

    Cheers

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    Will work for beer... nichomach's Avatar
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    Nildram's 8Mb Business Broadband service would give you 8Mb all day every day (the lower speed business connections throttle down outside business hours). It's a completely unlimited service, BUT would cost £70pm with a £47 connection fee. Their residential BB service has a 50GB FUP limit as standard, so although it's a good service, with 5 sharing I can see issues arising. They're a good ISP, and I deal with their business broadband people all the time. Min contract is 30 days, so it's easy enough to ditch them if you're unhappy.

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    Comfortably Numb directhex's Avatar
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    you're gonna need something better than that netgear if you want p2p and games to cooperate peacefully. we had a linux box with an incredibly intricate traffic shaping routine, which required constant tweaking (and even altered itself to fit the preferred gaming hours of some housemates)

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    Senior Trouble Maker muddyfox470's Avatar
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    sorry for not replying sooner (have been at a course)

    we have to keep costs down, and if it means that there will have to be a compromise then so be it, a netgear wireless router is what we have to play with as it needs to be small. but as for everything else (cost) it needs to be reasonable, as some housemates who use it less may be unhappy with paying more for something that would have little impact on them.

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    Quote Originally Posted by muddyfox470
    Well i dont know but i guess we would go over 50G quite easily, with 5 people using the internet at any one time, especially as people will either be downloading files, sharing pictures, looking on google videos and possibly p2p ing

    Are their any comments on eclipse? As they have a decent unlimited service (adslguide rate them quite highly) and capped from 6pm to midnight (50g per month) but otherwise un metered. It seems pretty good and has a relatively low contention ratio for the £29.99 package. Oh and we might also be able to get 6.5mps which i think would be appreciated by all!

    Any Advice?
    I've had eclipse for my uni house since september. Started on the 2mb unlimited £29.99 / month package and it wasn't great - but this was due to exchange congestion. Once I regraded us to MAX (synced at 8mbps), speeds vary from around 2mb to 8mb (at some crazy time in the day), which again is most likely down to VP congestion.

    To be fair I don't think any of us download much at all - which is shocking really.

    Bare in mind usenet is capped at 15k/s or something if you plan on using that.

    Overall it's pretty good. But I'd look at getting bulldog LLU if it's available.

    Oh, i also have the wired version of your router, the DG834. Supposedly one of the better routers for MaxDSL, I was pleasantly surprised when i synced at top speeds - with an SNR margin of 22 and attenuation of 35.

    Also, as directhex mentions, you might have issues with everybody downloading (p2p'ing especially with this router). I did when we had a poor 2mb connection (though it actually ran 500k most the time). All depends on how much bandwidth is being used. In my case, pretty much all bandwidth problems went away when we regraded to max, but probably just cos we had an awful 2mb connection.

    good luck

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    Senior Trouble Maker muddyfox470's Avatar
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    what is bulldog llu?

    i have heard a few bad things about bulldog.

    i may see if we can go down the bt business broadband route. i will give them a call next week and see whether it is possible to get business broadband from them, and also to see if my dad can get a discount

    ian
    Last edited by muddyfox470; 22-06-2006 at 10:12 PM.
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