Hey Alex here, I'm sure that "what is the best ISP" is a fairly common question nowadays however it doesn't seem to have a definite answer. Sadly, I'm here to find that answer! Here is my situation at the moment; I currently live in a 200 year old house, my room has a slanted ceiling and various cutaways in the walls. This victorian layout reaps chaos upon my shoddy 300kbps wireless AOL internet connection, (not even wired connections/various new routers/modems has improved on this) hence the reason I am seeking a new ISP (and a wired connection). As a gaming enthusiast with a fairly decent pc capable of maxing out my favourite games, but on completely unplayable terms I find this to be extremely frustrating. After reading a daunting amount of reviews I am considering signing up with O2. Is this the right move or should I consider BT? (My area has been chosen as one of the 41 smaller UK towns to be part of BT's £2.5 billion fibre optic service rolling out 2012) Do you have any thoughts/experiences regarding ISPs? Please let me know! Thanks, Alex. P.S I live just outside of Edinburgh and I have a 2 minute walk to the BT Telephone Exchange. P.S.S For anybody considering AOL, don't..Just don't. (even wired I have never ever ever reached 1Mbps and AOL were consistently bad in the customer service department)
type you post code in here: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search and let us know what services are available to you then we can suggest something from there what LLUs in particular and cable ?
Been with them for several years now, never had any real problems, always get 7Mb+ out of the 8Mb connection and they have a freephone technical number. If you have a monthly O2 mobile contract and link it up you get a tenner knocked off too.
I agree with adidan. O2 is cheap and reliable, and cheaper if you have o2 contract. My brother has an o2 contract and we are on an old deal, I can't remember how much we pay, either 7 pounds or 10 pounds a month which is dirt cheap. I just checked its 12 pound a month if you are with o2, 17 pound a month if you are not, it is also a 20mb line, uncapped.
+1 for Be (www.bethere.co.uk) Been with them since 2007 - they were bought out by O2 a few years back but still operate as Be - offering their 24MB service (O2 max is 20MB i believe).
I am with BE and have been for a few years. In the 3 or 4 years i have been with them I havent had a single problem and have always had excess of 21mb download speeds. I moved from BT which i can also say i never had any problems with apart from their billing and limit on my d/l speed. In my last house BT gave me a maximum speed of 7mb download and told me that was all my line was capable of....I switched to BE and was getting 21mb on the same line...Not sure of the reasons for this. The other problem i had with BT was the charges for going over my data limits each quarter. I have never been a big downloader but i do a lot of online gaming and streaming and i was being charged more than double my bill in excess data charges..
Thanks people for all the insightful replies, personally I reckon O2 will be my best bet and I have been an O2 mobile customer for several years now so that is a nice little bonus, I'll be sure to update when everything is all set up and running Thanks, Alex.
Alex i recomend going to this site http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ Register on the forums and post in the Which Isp (Residential) there is a great amount of helpful people and companies on there that will be able to show and suggest you're best option depending on whats avaliable at you're exchange and to you're budget.
It's worth remembering BE is unlimited while O2 offer a capped service. Cap size depends on price point. Offers Here!
If Virgin is available in your area, go for it. You actually get the speed you pay for instead of that "up to" nonsense on ADSL. If not, then go for Be - exact same network as O2, but without any traffic management. By the time FTTC/VDSL rolls around in your area, you might even have a choice of ISPs instead of just BT Infinity.
The service you are talking about is Cable. It uses a single shared 'pipe' for you and your neighbours that has a much higher bandwidth than an ADSL based service. But the problem lies when your neighbours are using the internet at the same time - as the bandwidth is shared your connection speed decreases. So on Cable you can get anywhere between nothing and the stated speed. On ADSL, each line has a separate 'pipe', meaning the connection speed along the line does not fluctuate. So you get what you pay for with ADSL, and with Cable you occasionally get what you pay for.
Nope, both technologies have contention of some sort (if not, then you have some sort of expensive leased-line). I don't know what the exact contention ratios are though. What I do know is that in my area we pay for 10mb and consistently get 10mb (with the option of 30/50mb), whereas on ADSL we'd pay for 24mb and struggle to break past 5mb. Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk
