best broadband !!!!!!!!

moggy240

moggy240

Insurance Valuations Officer
Staff member
Club Member
i need to get decent broadband service as my dongle is too slow and its driving me nuts,i did try the Post office but after a month of trying to connect me to broadband i got fed up waiting and cancelled the contract:(.so i would like know what other broadband providers are you using and are you getting a good service.i am tempted to go with BT but they seem to be the most expensive:(
 
W

Wes

Well-Known Forum User
Sky were very good, Tiscali were amazingly bad! Currenly with AOL who also seem pretty good. Mother inlaw is with Virgin via her phone line and they are pretty useless.

Wes
 
JakTheRuby

JakTheRuby

Club Member
Wes said:
Sky were very good, Tiscali were amazingly bad! Currenly with AOL who also seem pretty good. Mother inlaw is with Virgin via her phone line and they are pretty useless.

Wes
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Basically the opposite of that. Virgin has the highest speed broadband in the UK by an absolute mile (I've got 20 meg broadband but they do do 50 meg). BT is the second slowest broadband in the UK after AOL, and everyone else who isn't cable based (ie Virgin / Telewest / NTL) just uses the existing BT lines that are already there, which is why you still have to pay a BT line rental fee. You don't have to believe me but if you just check out the BBC website it's even been in the news lately about how much faster Virgin is compared to absolutely everyone else... In fact, just CLICK HERE.
 
N

Nidge74

New Forum User
When you say Dongle are you talking Mobile Broadband or just A wireless Dongle to connect to your modem?

I know with many wireless modems, if you try to use too much bandwidth, IE donwloadsa etc, it can cause a failrure in the connection to the modem, This is not actually a problem with the ISP itself, just that wireless modems are pants
 
Martin W

Martin W

Well-Known Forum User
yep virgin is very good the ppl i know that have it all say good things but if you cant have it i would say o2 is good iv used sky. bt. aol. my dad used tiscali for about a week and they were crap altho aol was ok for about a year but that was years ago now. im still with o2 and im happy with them they keep you informed the call centre is in the uk and there very helpful all the time go have a look at there site, also quite good price. think i pay £7.50 a month
 
Mr Ex

Mr Ex

Inactive
We are stuck with a BT line about 3.5 MB (no cable up here) started out with Aol but it kept crashing, So now I'm with Tiscali & get free phone calls for up to 1 hour to land lines for about £17.50 & not had any probs.
 
Russ

Russ

Club Member
Use BT at two places of work and my parents, had fantastic speeds and service, the router was a bit crap but the newer ones are better it seems. 8mb connection as promised.

Use Sky at my house, again pretty good, only get 4.5mb but that's best I'll do this far from the exchange. My friend who lives nearer gets 16mb all day and abuses the line something terrible, no problems whatsoever.

You don't have to pay the telephone line rental to BT, but it's not really any more expensive. I intend to move my line rental to sky though one day just for convenience.

If you have the option though opt for some cable/fibre optic service and dodge ADSL, it's just a better technology.
 
T

tali

Well-Known Forum User
I'm with Virgin -but asking which is best ISP really is the dreaded "How long isa piece of string" question
 
moggy240

moggy240

Insurance Valuations Officer
Staff member
Club Member
i am using a mobile broadband dongle but it only picks up 2g and not the faster 3g network,there is no cable in the village but we are only 50 metres from the exchange.
the wife did ring O2 for there cheap broadband but because they have not got their equipment at the exchange they wanted £17 instead of the £7,99 advertised as we are both on O2 for are moblies and thought we would get a better deal.
 
twoforty

twoforty

Well-Known Forum User
If you are with O2 with your mobile you can get half price broadband....I pay £7.50 a month for 10mb.
 
Gio

Gio

Well-Known Forum User
Most ADSL broadband is the same: in most cases no matter what ISP you have a contract with, it's supplied by BT Wholesale. They're the ones that supply the postcode database which is supposed to tell you what speed you might get. That's why it usually gives the "best possible" answer rather than reality. There are exceptions who do "LLU" (local loop unbundling) like Easynet who are part of Sky but they are the minority.
The best tech is cable - at least until we all get fibre to home which isn't going to happen. So if you can fight through the marketdroid jargon, cable best, then ADSL, then dongle. Dongle is more location dependent than ADSL - even Vodafone only claim "80%" coverage so if you're outside that, tough.
If you're stuck and let down by coverage issues or speed issues with ADSL or dongle, satellite is installable just about everywhere and two-way stuff is a lot less expensive than the first time I sponsored a page in the ZClub mag!
(God, and that would be my 666th post hoho spooky)
 
zeeman1972

zeeman1972

Well-Known Forum User
twoforty said:
....I pay £7.50 a month for 10mb.
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Not to specifically pick on anybody especially you twoforty, but right there in that quote is why the broadband speeds in this country are so bad. Shortsighted marketing numbskulls defining price-points that allow no further investments in the underlying networks for a customer base that wants something for nothing then complains when they inevitably don't get it, especially as the network reaches and (at 7pm most evenings)exceeds capacity!

There is a good reason that countries like Japan do have large fibre to the home (FTTH) networks covering millions of homes offering AVERAGE speeds of 100 Mbps in both directions, customers are happy to pay a fair price to use them and the owners don’t give away cheap access.

Ultimately, you are getting what you have paid for!:mad:

Phew!

Soapbox has now been stowed!:)

A bit of advice, leading on from Gio's post above, in respect of ADSL services via BT copper, yes the maximum permissible line speed is defined by the physical issues; distance, equipment used, quality of copper, etc however, different suppliers do specify different quantities of customers allowed to share the same connection port, this system of ‘contention’ is key to the service level you will actually receive, do some digging with the suppliers and always try to head for the lowest!
 
Russ

Russ

Club Member
I *believe* ADSL2 doesn't have 'contention', my town Taunton just became ADSL2 enabled and hopefully contention ratios will be a thing of the past :) (although I don't understand how they've avoided it).
 
twoforty

twoforty

Well-Known Forum User
zeeman1972 said:
Not to specifically pick on anybody especially you twoforty, but right there in that quote is why the broadband speeds in this country are so bad. Shortsighted marketing numbskulls defining price-points that allow no further investments in the underlying networks for a customer base that wants something for nothing then complains when they inevitably don't get it, especially as the network reaches and (at 7pm most evenings)exceeds capacity!

There is a good reason that countries like Japan do have large fibre to the home (FTTH) networks covering millions of homes offering AVERAGE speeds of 100 Mbps in both directions, customers are happy to pay a fair price to use them and the owners don’t give away cheap access.

Ultimately, you are getting what you have paid for!:mad:

Phew!

Soapbox has now been stowed!:)

A bit of advice, leading on from Gio's post above, in respect of ADSL services via BT copper, yes the maximum permissible line speed is defined by the physical issues; distance, equipment used, quality of copper, etc however, different suppliers do specify different quantities of customers allowed to share the same connection port, this system of ‘contention’ is key to the service level you will actually receive, do some digging with the suppliers and always try to head for the lowest!
Click to expand...

Usually at 7pm I get 4.5mb/s and other times 9.5mb/s on one speed test site and 1.5mb/s and 4.5mb/s on another site.:rolleyes:
 
Russ

Russ

Club Member
Gio said:
If anyone is telling you ADSL2 "doesn't have contention", this is what we in marketing call, technically, "a lie". Sorry for the jargon :D Contention ratio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ALL shared bandwidth systems whether narrowband or broadband have contention.
Click to expand...

That's what I imagined, but the BT business dude insisted, maybe I'll ring them tomorrow and give them shit about it :) In fact I think you're looking more at 10:1 with ADSL2 whereas old ADSL could be 50:1.
 
moggy240

moggy240

Insurance Valuations Officer
Staff member
Club Member
it just really annoys me when you check on these websites for broadband deals and you think it is cheap and then you ring and they say 'we do not have equipment in your area or we are not in your area but we can do it for twice as much as advertised '

all i want is broadband that works ,fair price and a decent service,i would have stayed with orange but they wanted £120 to reconnect a phone line when BT would do it for for free if i signed up for line rental for 12 months
 
W

Wes

Well-Known Forum User
Wes said:
Sky were very good, Tiscali were amazingly bad! Currenly with AOL who also seem pretty good. Mother inlaw is with Virgin via her phone line and they are pretty useless.

Wes
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Sorry just commenting the virgin via her phone line is poor. It was good when we had it via cable but in West wales there is no cable and very little choice!
 
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