Picking A New Broadband Service

Associate
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Well im moving soon so im looking to find a new broadband provider.

But after having NTL and thinking it was a good deal at the time, Im making sure that I dont end up making the wrong choice like I did with NTL.

I need some tips on what to look for and any good providers people use.

Best value for money, dont want naff usage limits, quality service.

Oh and before people start talking about providers that use cable, I cant use cable because its not provided in the area im moving to.
 
Soldato
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Couple of generic tips:

1. Don't get locked in to a 12 month contract, there are plenty of ISPs offering 1 month contracts
2. Avoid PlusNet if you don't want caps or confusion.
3. If a company are offering unlimited 8meg on a BT Wholesale service it's either going to be damn expensive, slow or not really unlimited.

What speed are you looking for, an unlimited 2meg connection or an up to 8meg service? Also, how much are you prepared to spend?

Eclipse are doing a free for 1 month offer at the moment for new customers and do a £29.99 "up to" 8meg service that is apparently unlimited during the day but between 6pm-12pm has a 50GB cap + traffic shaping on P2P/FTP. Unfortunately they removed their old unlimited 0.5/1/2mbps services when introducing the newer Max products though.
 
Associate
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I'm currently with Demon, £19.99 for a 2mb unlimited (uncaped) service, no fair usage policies either, the speed and reliability are top notch too

However.....

They will be upgrading all customers to th 'upto' 8mb service this year and implimenting some sort of usage policy on the service but according to Demoin you will have the option to stay on the 2mb uncaped service if you want.

Hope this helps

G
 
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Im with KeConnect, i've never had any problems. My internet is always up and working 100% of the time (toutch wood lol). Their customer support is uber, they are fast and helpful. When I ordered boradband from them a while back it said the usual takes 4-5 working days...lah lah...but they activiated it the next day which i thought was very good. You also get 3 e-mail accounts, and they now have a 8mb service :D :D They are at least worth a try! http://www.keconnectgroup.co.uk/ [normal site]
http://www.keconnectgroup.co.uk/index.cfm?page=1506 [8mb 'ADSL MAX']

Good luck!

Also worth noting is that loads of my friends are on BT, and they are disconnected about every 90mins, and BT say thats normal...great..

One last thing this site shows loads of providers. http://www.adslguide.org.uk/isps/compare.asp KeConnect gets good points on their graphs :D

Cya
iCEMAN/Dan
 
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iceman911 said:
KeConnect gets good points on their graphs :D

Cya
iCEMAN/Dan

Not wanting to **** on your bonfire mate, but I dont think 41 votes, compared to all the others pulling 1200+, 2000+, 4200+ votes, can say that KeConnect is a good provider. Perhaps when it gets lots of regular votes month in month out then I would consider them.
 
Soldato
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Also worth noting is that loads of my friends are on BT, and they are disconnected about every 90mins, and BT say thats normal...great..
It's also worth noting that the vast majority of people are on BT. Most ISPs just resell BT's IPStream service. If they're having disconnections with BT Retail, they'll probably still get them elsewhere. Unless it's BT Retail's network that's kicking them off.
 
Associate
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ok thanks guys.

Ill look into all these.

its hard atm because one the new address well yeah its new so not in royal mails listings yet so not on BT's and same with the phone number so i cant find a lot of details about what I can and can not get in the area.
 

Vai

Vai

Soldato
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3,347
Phil99 said:
Couple of generic tips:

1. Don't get locked in to a 12 month contract, there are plenty of ISPs offering 1 month contracts
2. Avoid PlusNet if you don't want caps or confusion.
3. If a company are offering unlimited 8meg on a BT Wholesale service it's either going to be damn expensive, slow or not really unlimited.

What speed are you looking for, an unlimited 2meg connection or an up to 8meg service? Also, how much are you prepared to spend?

Eclipse are doing a free for 1 month offer at the moment for new customers and do a £29.99 "up to" 8meg service that is apparently unlimited during the day but between 6pm-12pm has a 50GB cap + traffic shaping on P2P/FTP. Unfortunately they removed their old unlimited 0.5/1/2mbps services when introducing the newer Max products though.

Does Eclipse have traffic shaping turned on constantly, or do they only activate it from 6pm-12am?
 
Soldato
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GTCole said:
I'm currently with Demon, £19.99 for a 2mb unlimited (uncaped) service, no fair usage policies either, the speed and reliability are top notch too

However.....

They will be upgrading all customers to th 'upto' 8mb service this year and implimenting some sort of usage policy on the service but according to Demoin you will have the option to stay on the 2mb uncaped service if you want.

Hope this helps

G

Hello mate,

Where did you hear about the 8mbps usage policy for Demon?

Im also on Demon but the more expenisve Home Office Service for £24.99, have been for 3 years stuck on 512 :(

Really don't want to wait for them to start offering a MAX service only to limit it when im waiting in the hopes they are not going to cap (I know unlikly). If this is the case i might consider changing to another ISP Now rather than waiting for the summer for Demon to introduce MAX. Thing is i don't expect i will get much more than 1.5mbps~ and thats normally uncapped on non MAX anyway :( Its Unfair on us users at the end of the exchange.

I wish an ISP would offer unlimited MAX upto 2mbps or something, don't think its really possible with this technology though?

Any information you have on this would be good to know!

Thanks,

Michael
 
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Phil99 said:
Unfortunately they (Eclipse) removed their old unlimited 0.5/1/2mbps services when introducing the newer Max products though.
Does anyone know why some ISP's are no longer offering standard ADSL packages :confused:

Are Max DSL packages more profitable for ISP's then?
 
Soldato
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Vai said:
Does Eclipse have traffic shaping turned on constantly, or do they only activate it from 6pm-12am?

I'm not entirely sure, I've got a ticket open with them at the moment so hopefully they'll get back to me tomorrow with the answer to that one.
 
Soldato
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CurlyWhirly said:
Does anyone know why some ISP's are no longer offering standard ADSL packages :confused:

Are Max DSL packages more profitable for ISP's then?

If anything I think I read on here they can cost the ISP more?

At a guess it costs more to offer a wider range of products than it does to just offer a core set of products.
 
Caporegime
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::1
Port cost is exactly the same, the only difference in Centrals - so for the same average usage across the Central, the difference in cost is zero.
Suspect it's more to get on the "OMG 8MEGS WTFBBQFFS" bandwagon than anything else.
 
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