what ISP's

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Post by Homer »

Sid_the_Squid wrote:some digging on PHORM situation, heres an extract from the FAQ on phorm web site.
I think they are painting a rather rosier picture of their prospects than reality.

BT have pulled the plug, Talk Talk followed. Virgin are the only ISP still linked with it and even that is uncertain. But then Virgin can afford to stay with it since most of their customers are on cable and thus effectively trapped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
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Post by Mandrake »

When we first moved to our current address we tried to get Virgin cable but it wasn't available here, even though the entire street up to one clump of houses away from us did have it available...(according to their online checker)

So we ended up going with Sky with a bundle of Sky+ subscription, phone line rental, and ADSL2+ on their "unlimited" plan. I believe this unlimited plan is only available on "unbundled" exchanges.

On this plan they claim no cap at all and no rate throttling for different types of traffic, nor at different times of the day or based how much you've downloaded in a given day, and in the couple of months we've been using them I haven't seen any time where I thought they were deliberately throttling any type of traffic.

(A lot of providers including the plans we looked at on Virgin cable had "hidden" throttling in the fine print for example if you download more than X MB in one day you will be throttled to a much slower speed for 24 hours)

Speed is great, it's about 16Mbit measured down, 900Kbit up national most of the day and never below about 11Mbit down even in peak hours.

International is typically 5-10Mbit down depending on country and site etc...

For £10 in a bundle or £15 on it's own I can't complain, and it sure beats the slower and capped internet I'm used to in New Zealand!

Currency converted to pounds I was paying £28/month - (plus a mandatory line rental of £20 even though I didn't really need a landline for calls) to get 4Mbit downstream with a 11GB/month cap....and that was considered good. Until very recently 25GB was the largest monthly cap you could get from any residential provider at any price...

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Post by KP »

you wannaHAVEapoo??

Ahh sorry wannadoo....

Well AFAIK CPW and PCworld are not in bed together, its dixons, currys and PCworld that are the same underlying company.

For £20 a month orange is the last company i'd be with.
No offence but i pay a UK company and expect UK based services to be provided.

£17.56 a month is what i pay for a 12gig/unlimited service. Does exactly that. I know that sky have throttling services on their platforms so i would imagine like others its only coming into affect on the userbase that push's past a certain limit that is never published IME...
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Post by myglaren »

You could be right about PC World no being associated with Carphone Warehouse Dave, I read it a couple of months back and took it as gospel, never checked.
Carphone Warehouse. Nothing here about it, nor on their own web pages.
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Post by OwenP »

Carphone warehouse have no links whatsoever to PC World. The only phone shop that DSGi have owned is The Link. This comes from working there for the past year and a half.

In terms of what ISP to go for, I have used Demon in the past who were pretty good. Had a few dropouts in the last couple of months but nothing previous to that, we were on a 60Gb per month tariff that was in the region of £20/month.

I also used DataComms Europe a few years back, they didn't lock you into a contract at the time, don't remember any problems with them, but thsi was about 4 years ago.

Currently I'm on IDnet, who seem pretty good, had a problem on a Sunday a few weeks ago, phoned them at about 6pm it was sorted by 6.30pm. Not quite so keen on the download limits they impose however, currently have a 5Gb per month limit.
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Post by Sid_the_Squid »

I would advise against Demon, I was with them for 2 years, before my connection inexplicably dropped to 300k (thats kilo bits) after lots of complaining to them via their very unhelpful Indian call centers, they kept calming no fault could be found, it must be my end, eventually they summoned a BT engineer to appear whilst I was at work, without notifying me at all :evil: That was the last straw, I left for O2 where my connection went up to 3600k without any changes at my end, never been happier with an ISP than O2.
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Post by Xaccers »

It's reassuring to know I'm not alone in finding O2 to be a great ISP.
When I was looking for an alternative to Sky, I found a review site that pretty much had nothing but good comments when it came to O2, so much so that some were suggesting that O2 were paying employees to write them. Thankfully the comments were genuine and lived up to by O2 :)
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Post by Xaccers »

Well I'll be!
I've been having a few connection issues recently that resolved themselves by rebooting the router.
It's a linksys WAG200G
I had a look in the logs, and there were none.
So off to linksys I trotted and found a newer firmware file which I've duly upgraded to.
Now my upstream is 1151 and my downstream is 12096!
My syslog server is recieving data too :)
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Post by Paul-R »

Xac wrote:Now my upstream is 1151 and my downstream is 12096!
How far from your exchange are you?
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Post by Sid_the_Squid »

12mega bits... dam, I'm lucky if I can scrape 3!
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Post by Xaccers »

Paul-R wrote:
Xac wrote:Now my upstream is 1151 and my downstream is 12096!
How far from your exchange are you?
Can't remember exactly but it works out at 14Mbps being the theoretical fastest I should have.
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Post by CitroJim »

You'll be on the Wolverton Exchange Xac, up along Creed Street adjacent to Glyn Square, so you're about a wire-mile away I reckon...
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Post by xantia_v6 »

I was with Zen for several years and 4 house moves. Expensive but reliable and real service from their helpdesk in resolving BT ADSL issues.

For the past year I have had 20MB VM cable, and it (surprisingly) has been 100% reliable, other than the C****y modem and router they supplied needing rebooting every month or so.

I have my own domain with email forwarding set up somewhere in cyberspace, so I can move ISPs, and even countries without needing to change email addresses.
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Post by DickieG »

Sid_the_Squid wrote:12mega bits... dam, I'm lucky if I can scrape 3!
Three mega bits, I can't even get one! :(
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Post by KP »

My folks in law have just gone live with their first ever internet connection!!!

They should have gone live last week but when i checked on saturday they were getting no synch..

Logged fault with Newnet as knew that something was up at the exchange end not the CPE end.

Shock horror went over tonight to double check everything and the modem had synched up..... Something had been changed. Dont think it will belong before a BT CSE will be booked out though as they have a ring bell wired into their circuit which isn't filtered as its connected straight onto another drop cable... some funky wiring i aint seen for a long time is going on and with them being out in the sticks their exchange is literally like a big shed!!

Though they are getting 8.1meg down and just over 1meg up!! pretty good i think.

I set them up using an old Voyager 210 modem, then jumped that into a Cisco N class wifi router. Nice, secure and with a dam good range on it as well so they might even be able to sit at the side of their lake with their laptop as they become more confident with the tinterweb thing and progress with it all :)
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