UK ISPs: Advice for a new subscriber

Hedwirez

I am just about to move house and as such will need a new ISP. Does anyone have recomendations for a reliable and reasonably fast internet I can get?

I currently have Virgin DSL and it is really quite impressively bad. It often struggles with streaming video and I generally have a ping of around 150-200 in any computer game.

I am a reasonably heavy user; mainly things like iplayer but I tend not to spend my time downloading torrents so I can deal with a cap of some kind, say 20GB a month.

I live in the london area and am aware that cable is available around here, however I am moving into a new build flat and as such I certain cable advisors tell me I cannot get cable yet, I am not sure if this is true or not.

Any advice would be appreciated, on companies to go for or avoid.

japan

I've had a generally good experience with Eclipse. It's capped at 40GB per month, but any activity off-peak (between midnight and 8am) doesn't count towards that allowance. Anything over the cap is billed by the gigabyte. They also have a web interface that will tell you how close to the limit you are, and let you control what happens when you approach/exceed it. You also get some control over the throttling that's applied at peak times(for example, you can set it to throttle torrents and ftp first, and prioritise VOIP).

I don't game online, so I can't really comment on ping times, but I do get the advertised speed (8Mbps, I generally get 950-ish kBps from the Ubuntu update repositories). Torrents seem to be throttled at any time other than off-peak, but I never really have a problem with streaming video or anything.

Their tech support and customer service used to be fantastic, but dealing with them when moving house wasn't as pleasant as it was the first time around a couple of years ago, I rarely have any particular reason to phone them, though.

Alternatively, I have a couple of friends who are very happy with O2 business packages (you don't actually have to be a business to get the business packages), but I have no real experience with them.

GrimReaper

Nildram, Demon are good bets. Pretty much all consumer lines have either packet shaping or caps.

Hence I'm on an 8mbit Demon Business Broadband line here, no limits etc. It's the only way you can avoid all that bs, get a business line.

Hedwirez

By O2 business do you mean the pro package? They appear to have dropped their business broadband offers and replaced it with that.

Ashcroft

If they're in your area, and you are getting Sky TV, their broadband is fantastic these days. They have 3 levels, min, mid, and max. Max is completely uncapped (no fair use policy) and is up to 16mb, mid is capped at 40GB and 8mb, min is 2GB and 2mb. You can get different prices depending on what TV or Phone package you get. I pay £10 a month for max with the full HD TV package, but on some packages you can get min for free.

Just make sure you get proper Sky Broadband, not Sky Connect, which they sell to people not in their areas and is double the price. And rubbish.

japan

Hedwirez wrote: »

By O2 business do you mean the pro package? They appear to have dropped their business broadband offers and replaced it with that.

Huh. When they set it up you could just go to the broadband section of the website and select Home, Business or Mobile.

I'm not sure what the equivalent would be now. The Pro package looks similar, but now you get a wireless box (as opposed to having to provide your own equipment) and the callout for engineers is next business day instead of within four hours.

Hedwirez

FYI, for anyone searching the forums later, I went with Sky max and they seem to be pretty good so far. Only thing i'd say is the free router can take a bit of playing around with for things like bitorrent.

Otherwise ping and speeds are reliable.

Deicist

I'm on Be Broadband (www.bethere.co.uk). 24Mb down / 1.3Mb up for 17.50 a month on a 12 month contract or #20 a month on a 3 month contract, never had a problem with downtime or outages. Any scheduled outages get Sent to your phone via sms.

I couldn't be happier with their service.