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Bogstandard British Broadband

Started by lazyhour, March 05, 2004, 07:59:37 PM

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lazyhour

I've just returned from Japan where I enjoyed broadband download speeds of 1.2MB a second at about 25 quid a month.  This was quite a standard speed and price.  It seems like here in Blighty the average speed is 500k/s or less, and for £20 a month.

A bit of pointless preamble there.  Now the meat:  Broadband users!  What service provider do you use?  How much is it?  How fast is it?  Who do you recommend?

The slight snag is that I'm currently living with my parents, who will probably plump for cheapness over speed.  So is this 150k Tiscali thing actually any good?  Is it fast enough to download big files?  Films, software, etc.

Any help would be much appreciated.


(I'm not some new chancer, by the way.  I used to be Bearbrick before the Big Crash)

Dangermouse

The 125k is only in a really limited area. I think it works like easyjet seats to Spain for £1. Only a minority get it and they use if to front an advertising campaign.

I went for the 256k Tiscali for £19.99 but they have given me 512k by mistake and are not charging for it. Which is nice.

I heard NTL do a higher speed but cap the limit you can use a day.

Abbie

We use Zen, no capping and we've not had any downtime since we started with them a year or so ago.

About £27 a month - highly recommended.

Timmay

Although I considering moving to Bulldog soon. Even out in the sticks here, we can get 2Mbps down (2Mbps off-peak hours, 512Mbps peak) for £29.99, with a 40:1 contention.

no_offenc

Blueyonder are good as well, if a little pricey, but their service is virtually rock solid - it's something like £25/mo if you're a telewest customer and £30/mo if you ain't, but it's worth it.

lazyhour

Fanks for the lightning-fast responses!

It all seems a bit expensive, actually.  My parents already feel they're spending too much on communications (mobiles etc).  How about cheap-end options?  What's the lowest price people on CaB are paying?

Abbie

Cheapest option?  Get yourself a wireless card and leech some other suckers bandwidth.

Timmay

http://www.e7even.com/'s annual package works out at £16.66 per month, for a 512kbps connection. Although I can't vouch if they're any good or not.

fanny splendid

So which are you on now, Timmay? Zen or Bulldog? Do you have the 2mb service now?

terminallyrelaxed

Eclipse is good - almost everyone I know has now switched to them, my favourite thing is the 30-day minimum contract, so you can cancel at any time, but they consistently do well on the coparisons on adslgiude.co.uk or whatever it is. I'm on 512down/256up at about £22 a month after you deduct the domain I pay them for (£4 a month with extra services included). I'll be going up to the 1Mb after I've moved house next month.

lazyhour

That sounds really good terminallyrelaxed!  I'll investigate.

bill hicks

Quote from: "no_offenc"Blueyonder are good as well, if a little pricey, but their service is virtually rock solid - it's something like £25/mo if you're a telewest customer and £30/mo if you ain't, but it's worth it.

I second that. Blueyonder are excellent.

I get the 1mb service (1mb/256k) for £35 a month and only ever had one problem with it (and that was a fault with the Digital telly box not the broadband connection).

I don't know what the actual contention ratio is for Telewest, but my download speed has never dropped below 100k.

Of course you might be in an NTL area so ignore me if you are.

Uncle_Z

I'm an NTL minkeh.  £35 for the 1mb.  Reliable downloads up to 120k ish.  Gaming ping hovers around 40.  Occasional outages but a modem restart usually solves.

Same ping when I was on the 600k (£25) but obviously with slower downloads.

Still Not George

I'm on PIPEX. 29.99/month, was a stunning deal when I bought it (free install, free setup, and they had a partex scheme for shitty old modems to get a DSL modem half-price, which was lovely in the extreme).
Reasonably quick, Customer Service is good and TechSup always responds within about 3 hours (even in the middle of the night once). Includes reasonable deal of mailboxes and webspace.
Had a few problems - downtimes are somewhat frequent and the contention ratio gets fucking awful at certain times of day, but I can't be certain that isn't a 'living in Aber' problem as opposed to a PIPEX problem. Also their webservers like to go offline with no warning for no reason.

Timmay

Quote from: "fanny splendid"So which are you on now, Timmay? Zen or Bulldog? Do you have the 2mb service now?
Still on boringly reliable old Zen unfortunately. The move to Bulldog should be a no-brainer (much faster service and lower contention for same money), but I've had so few problems, well none, with Zen, that I'm a little nervous it'll all blow up in my face.

And thinking about it now, Zen have 30-day rolling contracts, whereas Bulldog I'd have to sign up for a year. No biggy, but you never know...

Ignore all the above posts.

http://www.plus.net

I'm on 288 down/576 up for £21.99 a month but there are various packages, almost definately with one to suit your needs. They recently won "Best Broadband Provider" on some ADSL Guide type place although I can't find the link.

If you do sign up, could you please enter my username ("camerondevlin") in the "referred by" section of your signup - I know this could be seen as slightly self serving but it'll take money off my subscription and since I have referred you it seems only fair.

Same to anyone else who happens to be reading this incidentally.

falafel

I'm on cheap 150k NTL broadband because all the house entertainment fund is going towards Sky Sports... and it makes me want to cry.

Bastard housemates.

Purple Tentacle

I have a quick question, and I'm sure that even if someone replies next week it'll get a quicker response....

These 1 year contracts, do they tie you to one house, for instance I'm not sure if I'm moving to another flat in London soon, and if I get a 12 month contract can it be transported to another location and another phone number?


The Bulldog deal looks very good by the way.

Matthias

I use standard BT 512kbps @ £27 per month and I am very satisfied. It actually connects at 576kbps and it has never let me down.

You need 512kbps if you intend to download movies and stuff. For those speeds on a budget (if you have a BT line) I can't recommend V21 enough!! My pal uses V21 and gets a consistent 576kbps for just £19.99 per month.

fanny splendid

Quote from: "Purple Tentacle"These 1 year contracts, do they tie you to one house, for instance I'm not sure if I'm moving to another flat in London soon, and if I get a 12 month contract can it be transported to another location and another phone number?

In my experience, yes, it's for one phone line, in one property. They'll also charge you another connection fee, as well as making you wait another ten days for the privilege. At least this was the state with freeserve as of last september.

I'm now with Eclipse, the same deal that terminallyrelaxed mentioned up there.

gazzyk1ns

Some useful info, links and comparison here.

Bulldog's basic service appears to be good, if you're in an area where datastream is available.