ISP recommendations and recent bargains

[Largo]

Im so fed up of uk net now, ive been on demon since i was 18, and for the most part its fine, well it certainly was back in the broadband hay days.

But now its just developing weird problems, for example, from 9am to 7pm, it works like ****, then at 7pm suddenly this magic switch gets flipped or something and everthings speedy again, i keep trying to explain this to them on the phone but its just a waste of my time and theirs tbh nothing ever gets done or even understood.
Its been like this for 8months or so but half the time i dont even bother ringing up, waste my fking time.
they always insisit on engineers etc, but ffs this isnt a wire problem, how can it be by the gdamn hour every week, its some account settings or something.

Thing is my account is ancient now as cornwall the ass end of england isnt adsl2(or whatever) enabled, so the isp has moved onto new adsl2 accounts, and mines still last-gen as it were, which is prob why the service is throttled so to speak, no daft bastards using it anymore, only farm yard idiots like me who dont have a choice.

Thats another thing, choice. Switching provider is like playing russian roulette with myself, i can never justify it because its just such a gamble, all isps now have thousands of horror stories or just general **** talk about them online, its impossible for me to justify juggling to another provider thats in all probability going to be worse than my current situation.


Also another thing that really really really fks me off, and fks me off hard, is if you put your number into an isp website, just to checkout your options or something, you know, doing it yourself. They ring up and say "oh hello you just put your number into our site blah de blah can i sell you something" no you cant, f u c k o f f, im well aware that i just put my number into your site, and the site kindly displayed all the options that you are now feeding me down the phone, piss off

[k0pp0]

Tiscali/talk talk here. Seemed to have speed issues over the last few months but no where near as bad now - probably because everyone is leaving them.

[Gradius]

Help needed

I currently have Sky broadband and phone line and i'd like to change over to Be Broadband. I have called Be and they say they cannot switch me over unless i have a BT phone line (which mine was originally). I called BT and they said Be could switch me straight from Sky and i should get back in touch with Be.

Does anybody know whether i have to get a BT line again or should Be be able to switch me over themselves? I really don't want to keep going back and forth between the 2 companies trying to find an answer.

[Number45]

BT will need to provide the line for Be to run their service across.

[charlesr]

BE can do your landline as well if you want to ditch sky completely.

[Gradius]

Does this mean i would have to have to pay BT line rental for a year before i could get Be to take over my phone as well as my broadband? I don't want to involve BT at all if possible.

[Number45]

BE can do your landline as well if you want to ditch sky completely.

Really? I didn't think they did the phone service.

Does this mean i would have to have to pay BT line rental for a year before i could get Be to take over my phone as well as my broadband? I don't want to involve BT at all if possible.

If Charles is right then you should be able to get Be to do it all. I've just moved from Be though, who provided the service to me across a BT line. If you need to go that route you'll need to sign up for a BT line and pay the rental to them.

[Gradius]

I'll call BE again and see what they say.

I swore i'd never return to BT after i got stung by their auto renewing contract.

[JP]

Any service provider can supply you with a telephone line but some choose not to because it just simplifies things for them. When any service provider activates a line they all just send a request to Openreach to do that work for them.

All companies are then charged to activate a new line by Openreach and it's at this point of the order that things are most likely to fail on Openreach's side. Companies who refuse to order a line for do this as it's just simpler and cheaper for them to ignore you until you start giving them money and everything is safely set up.

It makes sense in a way, why would companies want to inform you that you have to cover the costs that you've raised and deal with you at the riskiest point of activation when they can get the competition to deal with it for them?

As I said, you can have the line activated with any service provider not just Be or BT but many companies will understandably pass on Openreach's charges and/or hold you to a set contract.

[charlesr]

TALK TALK/Opal you big sack of fail.

I've been with Nildram (business package because I wanted best service) for what, 10 years now.... My router would stay connected for months on end, with the only thing interupting it being the occassional power cut. It survived being bought out by Pipex remarkably, with no impact on my service (same cool website functions and customer service that answered within a couple of minutes etc) and again with Tiscali.

But now since Opal announced they were taking over, Nildram service has been all over the place, with months of intermittent Xbox Live misery they denied all knowledge of causing only to later say they found a problem with their firmware on their back end kit (Nildram support guy was super helpful though).

These last few weeks, since they announced the official change over to Opal, the service has been up and down and just generally **** with no explanations, and today, their DNS servers stopped working for a couple of hours. My attempts to phone them over the last few weeks have mostly ended with my giving up after an hour on the phone. Today, after 20 mins on the phone I choose the "call me back, press 1" option, only to be passed to a message saying "sorry, you have called outside office hours" WTF (I tried this several more times, but it's for real! you are given an option that essentially hangs you up after ages hanging on in the hope to speak to someone with no hope of them calling you back. gah).

Oh, and the new website they provided has almost no functionality, not even the basics like checking my usage, or connection times.

So Nildram are now screwed. Who should I move to? I can only get 8Mb (but I max out) and 832Kb/s up (780 or so in reality) because my exchange hasn't been upgraded and isn't likely to be for a few more years. My current package is 50GB/month with unused rollover up to 100GB/month for £22(incVAT)/month. Any suggestions? What will SKY give me UPstream?

[EvilBoris]

Can you get cable in your area?

[abigsmurf]

Be/O2 give a very good service so long as you change the router settings to use a different DNS server (requires telnetting into it)

[charlesr]

No cable here. Houses are too far apart for them ever to bother.

I've been looking at BE.

[Number45]

No hesitation recommending BE here.

As for changing the DNS, just do it manually on the clients if you don't want to telnet to the router.

[charlesr]

I normally have opendns on my router, but changed it recently to ISP and forgot to change back.

What upload speeds can I expect on BE etc, bearing in mind I'm on 780Kb/s real time upstream now? (router says 832 up, 7616 down)