As above really. Being home for Easter is making me miss the Virgin 50mb line I have at my house at uni. At home they're on AOL something package, with the standard router etc. Now, I would like to change provider/package to something a little better, was wondering what people would recommend? (not had a lot of experience) Don't want to spend a lot, apparently they spend 10-15 on the internet currently (so that's not including phone/line rental I think) Also, wondering what router etc people would recommend? Me and my brother were trying to watch Avatar in 1080p the other night, streamed from my PC upstairs, (pc downstairs is connected via a 30m cable) but had some stutter issues as I presume the 100mbps router couldn't cope (average bitrate of the film was 16Mbit) The other issue, is the router keeps seemingly crashing, therefore meaning we lose the internet for a couple of minutes, and it doesn't seem to happen with any regularity really, sometimes won't happen all day, then will happen several times within an hour (me and my brother cannot join a tf2 server at the same time as that is a surefire way to cause it to crash and reset ) So, looking for a half decent broadband package (we live in Essex in case that limits anything) and then a router/switch combo. Any recommendations? Thanks
get Virgin 30MB broadband or if you can't get Virgin try BT Infinity its 50MB but you don't reallly need 50MB unless your your both hardcore gamers. I know nothing about routers and stuff so I will let overs cover that
Well if you are looking to swap to a different ISP, the first place I would look is here: SamKnows Broadband Checker. You can find your nearest BT exchange and see what providers you are able to get. For the networking side of things, I would simply replace the ISP-supplied ADSL router with a better one that is capable of wired gigabit networking. Others on here will probably be able to give you more details about that.
I'd go for Virgin 30Mb as above. I got it for £22.50 a month As for router, obviously put the superhub they'd provide into modem mode, then get a decent router. ASUS ones are good, I love mine.
Is that including line rental? Yeah, at uni we use a DLink something I picked up on the marketplace actually I think. Was hoping people would have some specific recommendations
Virgin Media dont charge line rental because they dont go through BT's phone lines, they have their own network which is operated purely by them so the price you see is the price you pay. I would always recommend Virgin Media for broadband, not so much TV. I have the 50mb and I get that speed 100% of the time, its a really solid stable connection. Plus customers are getting speeds doubled this year so the 30 will be 60mb. 50mb customers will be upgraded to 120mb!
They couldnt double the speed of the people already on 100mb so they were going to drop the price for those customers. What they actually did was mistakenly send out an email saying it was going up to 120mb but then quickly send out an email telling people it was a mistake. A few days later they decided to make good on the first email and announced all 50mb and 100mb customers were going up to 120mb
I'm getting confused over all the different ratings etc. If my router has 10/100 ports Does that mean it's 100mbps, 100MB/s or 100MBits? (or something else entirely???) Is there a nice table somewhere showing me the relation between them all, 100MBits = 12.5MB/s I think? Or am I getting confused between something else again?
That's what I think I've come to the conclusion of. So any specific routers people would recommend? I currently use a Dlink 825 at uni I think, and I'm open to possibly giving that to the family then getting a better one myself if people think that would be a better course of action.
No problamo. And I've just realised that the one for the family will need to have a phone line input. So my 825 wouldn't work unless I put another router in modem mode (how we currently have the virgin superhub setup at the uni house)
A 100 mb router (or any other network connection rated at 100 mb) transfers 100 Mbits of information. That includes all the network packet headers, routing and other info, so it is not 100 Mb/s (12.5 MB/s) of data. It would be closer to 10 MB/s of data.
