ISP recommendations and recent bargains

[Hohum]

Their adsl service I've no idea about... but I've been with Telewest cable for years, and had no problem with them. Obviously the company name has changed, but the service seems to be exactly the same. They don't block anything nor cap anything in my experience.

[VR46]

Been with NTL for about nine years, have had the odd up and down as you'd expect, but never had any trouble with the aforementioned kind of downloads or any problems with download caps, got a warning letter reagrding "my excessive bandwidth use" about four years ago, ignored it and not heard another peep since.

[phillai]

I need to change my ISP cos Nildram have got worse and worse and now they introduced this to piss me off even more...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/23/nildram_bandwidth_throttling/

So I need a different ISP. What do you suggest?

I'm mainly a heavy downloader using newsgroups everyday and I do play the odd game on Xbox Live or PC PES6.

[ExpertKing]

Try one of the entanet resellers , UKFSN , ADSL24 etc. No blocked ports or throttling .

Peak cap of 60GB ( 8am -10pm , weekdays ) and off-peak of 350GB .Prices is usually around £29.99 p/m.

Other packages available if that doesn't suit you.

[phillai]

ExpertKing, they sound good but which one do you recommend and what do you mean by 'entanet resellers?'

And which ones have a low retention ratio?

[AllYourBase]

ExpertKing, they sound good but which one do you recommend and what do you mean by 'entanet resellers?'

And which ones have a low retention ratio?

These guys are entanet resellers:

http://www.vivaciti.com

I am happy with my switch, no throttling so I can use my bandwidth the way I want, when I want!!

I get much better speeds with them that Tiscali were ever able to get out of my crappy local exchange too!!

[ExpertKing]

Entanet provide broadband to businesses only as far as I know. And basically lease lines to small ISP's , who in turn provide a service to the consumer.All of the resellers provide the same DSL deals , however their domain services etc differ.


Forgot about Vivaciti ... Orz
http://www.entachoice.org.uk/forums.php covers some of the resellers.

I'm with ADSL24 at the moment , but if you visit the forums at www.thinkbroadband.com you can see most of the resellers provide a good service.

( Sadly the newsgroups are text only , but I guess you could subscribe to giganews etc ).

[phillai]

I use a separate thing for newsgroups so I should be OK!
i just read this - Speeds should be good if you're close to your exchange.
I've just found out that I'm 580m from my exchange...
Is this close enough?
I also read that my area is an 8mb area but I should get 6mb speeds but since 8mb was introduced I've only had less that 2mb speeds.
Is this Nildram being a twat to me all along?

[ExpertKing]

Quite possibly Nildram suffered from really bad contention.

There was a period where I was looking to save money in various places , so moved from Entanet to Eclipse , making sure I retained a monthly contract.

I'm currently 480M away from my exchange ( direct line ) , and with Entanet I was getting 6-6.5Mbps. After the migration to Eclipse I was only getting 1.5-2Mbps , and there was a period on a few days I was only getting 59kbps !!!.

Suffice to say I had enough and migrated back to Entanet within the month. On the day of migration I was getting speeds of 1Mbps with Eclipse. Migration came and went , logged in with my Entanet details and straight away I was up to 6Mbps.


I'm not saying Entanet are faultless , but their speeds are pretty good. Best idea is to try and get a monthly contract , and if your not happy with your service move away.

[charlesr]

My nildram p2p speeds have got a lot quicker since they've introduced that traffic shaping! I now zip along at 300k/s.

[phillai]

Nildram's custie support is truly ****ing shocking!
I called them up today to tell them about my slow speeds and sort it out.
They confirmed that my speeds is 1mb and that it's a problem with the BT line and she asked me to dial 150 and tell BT about my problem.
I called BT and they confirmed it's nowt to do with them and that it's truly Nildram's fault!
Now I've been trying to contact Nildram and I've been kept on hold for 30 minutes!

[phillai]

Finally got thru to them and I spoke to a guy called Jey. He confirmed it's not Nildram fauly, it's a fault with the exchange near me and that a BT engineer will check it in the next 48 hours.

Why couldn't the 1st person tell me this?

All in all tho, I still think they are playing tricks with me and ripping me off.
I need to change ISP and fast.

[ExpertKing]

Not sure if this is still possible , but you could bypass your ISP and test your throughput by logging into the BTspeedtester.

More info here mate..

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/btwspeedtest.htm

[k0pp0]

Any recommendations for a decent ISP? I have had it with Tiscali. P2P and online gaming is a waste of time.

I was thinking of a Enta reseller such as vivaciti.com - I don't have a LLU in my area btw.

Any suggestions as I want to switch this week?

edit: I ended up going with vivaciti

Good place to compare ISPs here!...

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

How's that vivacity thing going? I've just hit 'the wall' with tiscali (P2P networks/DC++ all pretty much impossible to use) so I'm thinking of changing..

[AllYourBase]

How's that vivacity thing going? I've just hit 'the wall' with tiscali (P2P networks/DC++ all pretty much impossible to use) so I'm thinking of changing..

It's been alright, much faster than tiscali was, no drop-outs either. Torrents work OK now which is the best thing.

It's my crappy local exchange that is slowing me down! Bloody BT!