Which broadband out of 16mb Sky or 20mb O2

[phillai]

I'm on Sky 16mb Max broadband now (bundled with 2 TV mixes and Sky Talk).

Can someone tell me if it's worth moving from Sky to O2 broadband?

Obviously I know I can get an (upto) 20mb line over 16mb but I just wanna know if O2 are really any better than Sky...

Thanks to all replies in advance.

[Psyduck]

I'd put very little weight into the number quoted with your broadband, unless you literally use it to download stuff and nothing else. For gaming you'll have to do proper research into which has the best pings for gaming. My 512kb pipex connection however many years ago (before they went crap) was much better than the 16mb sky one I had recently.
out of the 2 I'd say O2 would be better, but far from the best you could get.

[phillai]

To be fair, I mainly download everyday (quite heavily!) and play Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo online using www.2dfighter.com

I might have to give the O2 20mb broadband connection a try as I get it half price at £7.50 a month.

I'm hearing nothing but good things about O2 broadband but I'd rather hear it from guys here if they are on O2 broadband themselves...

[Escape-To-88]

A vote for O2 here; After years of crud service from isp's such as AOL, BT, Pipex and Tiscali I feel I have found one who actually meets what it advertises. In short O2 is f--kin' great, make no mistake. I get a consistent download speed of a 900 kbs and I've downloaded over 200gig this month with no hassle, limits or worries. I'm someone who is naturally quite picky and must admit to being very impressed by the service they offer.

[VR46]

200GB is an obscene amount, that's 10GB a day ! you need to go to Downloaders Anonymous or something !

[Escape-To-88]

It does seem rather a lot doesn't it...bloody HD!

[Rick]

Heard nothing but good things about O2 broadband. A few mates are using it because my cousin works for O2, so he can get people signed up for £7.50 for the top package

[abigsmurf]

I need to change from AOL, they're really poor and I'm convinced they're throttling my bittorrent (which is odd as I use a non-standard port and encrypt it). They also seem to be blocking DC++ as that's not working and I'm convinced I've got my port forwarding sorted fine.

[abigsmurf]

considering changing from o2 now

They've started limiting downloads by quite a heavy amount and their general quality of service is pretty shoddy (high pings, awful DNS). Sky broadband unlimited is advertised as having no acceptable usage policy which makes it sound exactly what I want.

anyone able to comment on the quality of their service?

[gware]

I'm with be broadband and they have been excellent, I'm on thier pro package and have a 2 meg upload which is good, a little expensive at ?22 a month but worth it for me

[Jei]

I've been with Sky Broadband for years now with no problem at all. Live pretty far from the exchange and always get 14meg which is morreeeeee than enough for me

[^Katsu]

O2 for certain! I was with Be There prev (diff flat) and was all good but expensive tbh. I am now on O2 for £9 a month I get 16Meg here not one issue and about 1.3Meg up perfect for LIVE and Life

[samanosuke]

I've recently switched from Sky to Be There, which I believe is a subsidiary of O2. Even though Be is more expensive, I dumped Sky out of principle when they reduced the 8meg limit from 60gb p/m to 10gb p/m, effectively forcing me to upgrade to max. After giving me six months reduced broadband as a "good will gesture" (yeah, right) I left Sky for Be.

To be fair I preferred Sky overall. I get a few dropped connections using Be which I never got using Sky but the most annoying thing is that Be only allow you to use their server for outgoing SMTP mail, and something doesn't quite work with either Entourage, my GMX account, or both, so I'm limited to using webmail at home. In Be's defence, the upload speed seems a little quicker when comparing their 20meg line to Sky's. Can't comment on download 'cause my wireless router seems to be capped at 1mb/s.

I still don't regret leaving Sky though as their annual price hikes were getting on my tits.

[abigsmurf]

I discovered the cause of my poor connection:

Sky came around a month or so ago , put in a new sky HD box... then stole the microfilter for the phone socket!

Didn't occur to me they'd do something that stupid/dodgy until I checked the engineer socket and got 8000K off of it.

[djtickle]

Sky and O2 the only performance difference your going to have is what router they supply you. The only other difference will be you would authenticate to either sky or o2. The main bones of the connection will be the same e.g reliability as most of it is rented from BT. Go for the best price/unlimited deal.

Im on sky and over about 6 years only ever had 1 problem which they sorted fast.