If Be have unbundled your local exchange, then it's generally a no-brainer. If they haven't, and quality of service matters more than price, then I would suggest one of the Entanet re-sellers, like ADSL24. Been with them now for 18 months, and I'm very happy.
Stay away from Virgin Media if you can! They just upgraded me to 10 meg but what really irritates me is the throttling! You download over a certain amount at peak times, and you get put down to 2.5 meg, which doesn't sound that bad but it seems to affect latency/ping for everything you do. So websites take decades to load and you can't game at all with over 800 ping! Also, the so called "peak time" is not always from 4pm - 9pm, last night I was throttled (and therefore completely incapacitated) until Midnight!!!
My current ISP is Zen Internet. It wins the PCPRO Best ISP award every year due to the best customer service ever. I must agree.... since I switched to Zen Ive not had a single problem, and fantastic speeds. They may cost slightly more than most but you get a great deal in my opinion as the reliability alone (along with a web hosting package) was so worth it. (£25 a month for their 8Mb service). Their online portal is also comprehensive - you can view all kinds of stats about your connection and how much bandwidth you have used etc.. I would never go back to my previous providers.. see below for the horror stories : 1. BT - My 1st ADSL provider said my line could not go above 1Mb and refused to upgrade me. Currently on Zen I enjoy a sustained download speed of 6Mb. BT=lying idiots. 2. UKOnline - My 2nd ADSL provider. Was on their 8Mb service but it delivered about 3 to 4Mb. That wasnt too bad, but every week (and I do mean every week) we had disconnects, stale sessions, and speed drops. A must have spent hours talking to complete idiots on the phone with UKOnline. When I switched to Zen, UKOnline screwed up the handover as well, and I was left in internet limbo with no service for 6 weeks over a christmas period thanks to UKOnline. I hate them. Also note that UKonline is owned by SKY. Yep those buggers who overcharge us for our sat tv! The SKY service is as bad as UKonline... avoid at all costs if you ever want to play online games with a decent ping/latency. I personally would avoid any of the 'Get your broadband for free' options... as their customer service is rank. Offshored, untrained 1st line support and almost unobtainable 2nd line support is what you get for spending pennies on your broadband rather than pounds. The Mobile phone providers are the worst. Ive never heard anyone say a good thing about Orange's broadband. As others have said... avoid Virgin and Tiscali. They seem to have weird restrictions at certain times or for certain games that open up multiple connection streams. The last thing you want is to sign up to broadband hell.... there is a reason people have voted ZEN (and others) the best ISP's year on year.
The throttling lasts for 5 or 6 hours after you cause it to kick in, so if you trigger it at 8:59pm, you're stuck until as late as 2:59pm. It's also worth noting that if you live in a city or large town, Virgin doesn't work between about 5pm and 9pm while all the well behaved users come home from work and simultaneously check their spam. On our 4mbit connection, dialup speeds were common during this interval.
Im with Be Unlimited - 18squid a month for up to 24meg down and 2meg up (I get 10down and 1.5up on a crap phone line) you also unlimited downloads. They do cheaper packages that are worth looking at. I think you can get Be* in most big towns now. I recommend them.
Aha that explains it then, cheers for the info. Although that's still unacceptable service if you ask me.
I just got an email last night from Be saying I can get 24mb from them. Hmm.. tempting. As a matter of interest, do you know how far away from your exchange you are?
I live in birmingham, id say thats a fairly big city... never had any speed problems between 5-9 except when i go over the limit, are you on their cable or through the phone line?
How far from exchange? as in a telephone exchange building? well ill be living in plymouth, and im pretty close to city center. i cant imagine the exchange to be further than 0.5 - 2 miles away... at most. curious on why your asking? anything important related that im missing out on? edit: i would imagine im on a phone line. (didnt check house for it while looking around) ...and im guessing this restricts me to certain ....things.
Yeah; ADSL / ADSL2 speed drops as an inverse function of distance from the exchange. (due to signal to noise ratio issues).
I know you're the op, but I was asking WARHAMSTER, tbh, as he said he was on 16Mb and getting around 10Mb connection. I'm with Sky, 493m from my exchange (as the crow flies, so probably about 690m) and I consistently connect at 8128 iirc. Actual throughput varies greatly, from crap to blistering, i.e. 512k speed to nearly 1MByte/second. Mostly hovers around 600-700kbps. btw, put your postcode in here and get a good estimate of how far you are away from your exchange.
Pipex is a no-no.. They almost constantly throttle.. I get roughly 10-50kbps torrenting (no matter how many seeds/peers, I never reach the 100s) on a connection rated (by dslreports.net) at around 700kbps.. And this is when I'm supposed to be on 6-8Mbps.
i left tiscali for pipex, and have never looked back, 8mb unlimited, really cheap cant remember the exact price sorry. but alos they have superb customer support theyre english!!
RE BE* Unlimited I'm 1.6 miles from my exchange. I live on the Old Kent Road in London. I have had line problems but was BT's fault. The engineers say the copper in this part of London is poor. As I said before, I have an apparently poor line but I still get 10meg down. (which I think is more than enough). Don't Believe them if they say you can get 24meg download speeds. You are much more likely to get 8-15meg going by their forums.
I'm with o2 and they are brilliant. Love their customer service with their constant service updates via text. O2/Be is the best choice by far in my opinion. If you have an o2 phone contract you can also shave £5 of your monthly bill - £10 pm for 16Mb broadband is pretty awesome. Also, with whoever you decide to go with don't forget to collect your quidco.
yeah, just stay away from tiscalli, there hopeless and useless, and if something goes wrong with your line or just randomly suspened your account (just got my mate back online because they had done this, due to an error on there part and he had no service for a month! and refuse to pay him back his months subscription) it takes ages and many phone calls to sort it out! AOL is good, just don't use their software though, service is always reilable, and very rarely throttled
After my personal experiences with Virgin, I will not go back to them (despite that enticing high speed cable broadband). I had the full package from them, but I was prepared to go through the hassle of setting up new accounts for TV (I ended up just going with freeview plus Setanta) phone and broadband just to get away from them - absolutely dreadful.
