ISP recommendations and recent bargains

[Hohum]

Have been with Telewest (now Virgin) for eight years, haven't had a reason to change as yet. Always had the speed advertised, so guess my area isn't overloaded compared to others. This is their cable service, of course... don't know what their ADSL offering is like.

Regarding O2 - I don't personally rate them myself, a friend of mine has had to endure slow speeds and latency of around 200-300ms constantly for about six months now. They initially claimed it was him at fault, then admitted they were heavily oversubscribed and that it would be rectified 'soon'. Two months later, same rubbish service. Total farce quite frankly.

[Pavey]

Im currently with Sky and get the tv, phone and unlimited 16meg bb for ?40 a month. Moving house soon though and want to ditch the tv, so obviously will need a new isp, preferably with a phone tariff chucked on aswell.

Any recommendations? The bb has to be unlimited and the phone preferably free to landlines as i work from home a lot.

O2 looked good until i saw the above post.

[charlesr]

If you work at home, is this of any interest? 2.5Mb up

http://broadband.nildram.net/enhanced-upstream/

I use them. Whilst I can't get more than 8Mb down/1Mb up on my exchange, I max out at all times.

[Pavey]

Thanks Charles. Seems promising. We are moving to a small village, think i had better check what the bb is like there first.

[Mercian]

Regarding O2 - I don't personally rate them myself, a friend of mine has had to endure slow speeds and latency of around 200-300ms constantly for about six months now. They initially claimed it was him at fault, then admitted they were heavily oversubscribed and that it would be rectified 'soon'. Two months later, same rubbish service. Total farce quite frankly.

Damn. I was looking at switching to O2 as I've been on Orange (previously Wanadoo, previously Freeserve) since time immemorial and I'm sick to death of the constant drop outs and awful speeds. Does anyone else have anything good to say about them?

[MJ]

I've found TalkTalk's up to 8 MB ADSL service stable and they perform great for Xbox Live and PSN, but their snooping software is a bit over zealous and even legitimate downloads get throttled. They also have a monthly usage cap of around 30-40 GB.

I'm pleased with Virgin Media's 10 MB optical service, despite their traffic management, it performs great for all online content.

[elaniel]

I've had O2 since September. Been fine except some nights (which hasn't been recently) pages would time out. Think it was DNS issues IIRC.

No other problems I've had recently though. Plus, the Quidco back was great. Never had any problems playing on LIVE either.

Never had any throttling either.

Just make sure O2 is LLU in your exchange! Otherwise the service is horrible!

[charlesr]

Normally I'd recommend Nildram, but they might have Xbox Live issues at the moment. Up until recently their service has been amazing, but if they don't sort the Live issues out in the next few weeks I'm going to have to look at migrating.

[KIT786]

I've been with Be* (which is now owned by O2 and O2 use their network), for about 3yrs now and am very happy with the service. No speed problems (consantly get about 14-16mb) or stability problems.

[3x3cut10n3r]

Been meaning to post this for a while now, just not had a chance.

Recently upgraded to Virgins 50Mb service and can't be happier. I download a lot of data, 10GB+ a day at least so I was getting throttled like crazy on the 20MB, also as I had that contract for years, now I pay less!





I don't think I have got much more than 5.8MB/s from it but that seems about right. Best of all though is no more throttling.

I also have Be* ADSL2+, though only the basic service due to the length of my line. I get 7.4/1.3 out of it which isn't so bad. I had endless trouble with that Thompson piece of crap they gave me so replaced it with another and though no real issues, sometimes seem to get more laggy games on it then I should do.

[Number45]

Our phone contract with BT expires next January, I'm going to move phone and internet (BE) over to Virgin as well. Just the 20Mbps service, which will be more than enough for my needs.

[mikewl]

I recently moved to Talktalk, I get about 14mb at max but quite often my speed is halved to 7mb, im ok with 7mb though for now. The only issue i've got with them is quite often there is down time around midnight through to about 3am, sometimes its just for 30 seconds, other times it can go off for 2 hours, its fairy infrequent but when it starts doing it it seems to happen alot for a week or so.

[Escape-To-88]

Just been reading some of the comments on Virgin.
Having been a happy 02 customer and moving back to my parents, I now have the option of Virgin as cannot get a second line installed (and my parents' net is on the first). Is the throttling as bad as people have mentioned? I was looking at their 10 or 20 meg service, rather than their 50. I'm quite a heavy downloader (over 100gig a month) and wondered if this would affect me?

[MJ]

Having been a happy 02 customer and moving back to my parents, I now have the option of Virgin as cannot get a second line installed (and my parents' net is on the first). Is the throttling as bad as people have mentioned? I was looking at their 10 or 20 meg service, rather than their 50. I'm quite a heavy downloader (over 100gig a month) and wondered if this would affect me?

Here's VM's traffic management page:

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

[Number45]

Just switched over to BT in readiness for Infinity (Which is available in Basingstoke, but not at my post code. Boo! ). The switch went nice and smoothly I have to day, fingers crossed it stays that way.

Now it's time to harass them into hooking Infinity up for me.