Well Pipex and I have finally parted company.Been on their Max service for fifteen and a half months of which I have actually been able to stay connected more than a minute or so for only eleven months.Needless to say they have only been paid for eleven months but that`s another story.Download speeds have hovered around 1meg although BT and Pipex insist the lines capable of 6.1/2 meg with downloads up to five meg.Brought home to me tonight just how slow it was as I`m back using my ic24 dialup and groups and email are not much slower. Now I`m in the market for another provider and I`m leaning towards BT who provides broadband at the work and which is consistently reliable.The only reason I did not go with them here is that they would only give me business broadband if I upped the phone to a business line and I didn`t want that as it brings in other issues. Before I sign up has anyone got an ISP they would recommend.Has to be unlimited downloads,free groups etc.Not interested in free or cheap phone calls. Mark.
I've been with BT for about 10 years now, currently the 8mb package. There are times, mainly evenings, when the system is painfully slow, could be the conntention ratio in my area, North London, also, recently, some emails have taken a day or two to arrive, mainly from ebay, so it could be them. The BT help desk is in India, polite well spoken people, who seem to follow a script, and are often of little help, although they do call you back. Last year my slow line was blamed on Christmas tree lights, when in fact an upgrade of the router firmaware cured the problem. I wouldnt say they are bad, but if you read the bt.broadband.support you will see all sorts of horrors and depressive individuals who seem to hate BT. Bob
I have been with BT from day one that I connected to the internet, a little dearer than most but I have had no real problems and what I've had have been sorted quickly. I live in a village at the end of the line from the exchange in the next village, I was promised upto 5 Meg and so far it keeps up there with no probs.
I'm with pipex they were bought out by tiscali a few months back ..
ever since have had lots of disconnections and they are now throttling till 1:30 am
news is ..
pipex will get rid of 800 staff soon .
outsource customer services to the far east .. and probably charge top rate for help line tech support
my bt line tests at 6800 but never managed anything over 3250 with pipex .
and if you look at sites that log servers tests ...you will see that most people on pipex are getting 3000 or there abouts ... so they are holding back band width for all .
needless to say ... I'm migrating to ADSL24
reckoned to be one of the best.
I'm going for there reduced service called Home30
this will cost me =A319.99
its 300 gb's a month off peak
and gb's mb's peak.
but will still fare better than pipexs restricted offering that they call unlimited at =A324.99
they also have mail filtering and blocking ....so ..lot less spam .
phone 08450722865 and ask for your mac code while you can still get hold of them. (before the staff disappear.)
from " snipped-for-privacy@ems-fife.co.uk" contains these words:
I've been with Zetnet for nearly 11 years and have nearly 40 of MY customers with them as well. Not the cheapest but very reliable and with their tech support in Manchester staffed by 'geeks' I'm very satisfied. No download limits, free newsgroups plus some exclusive ones as well.
They've just changed to a new BT pipe which gives the potential for an 8 meg service in the near future.
I've been with Zen for years - not cheap, but the service/helpdesk is great, speed is Wow!, and the connectivity is near 100% - had problems for about 6 days in the last ten years, mostly fixed really quickly.
The service I have is 20 GB per month download, after that they charge extra. AFAICT there's no bandwidth throttling etc.
BT is probably the way to go, as ultimately all broadband has to come through them.
Get one of the business broadband modem routers for your home use, the 2700HGV
2-Wire model, it is MUCH better than the BT Home hub and has a better firewall as well. Includes Wireless as well as a 4-port Ethernet router and USB.
We have BT at home and work, no problems generally and the help people we connect to are generally UK based, although we have had the Indians a few times.
Peter
-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk
Another vote for BT. I've been with them since about 1995 apart from a short and fraught few months with screaming.net.
One thing I have noticed recently with BT though is that there 'appears' to be a little it of throttling in the evenings as it is noticably slower than daytime, although still plenty fast enough.
Q for Peter Forbes - I tried to get my old business 2-Wire BT router working at home, as I agree it really is an excellent piece of hardware, but ran into problems as it would only allow connection to a BT business broadband line. How did you manage to get round this?
Been with TalkTalk for a few months now. The broadband service is "free" and the phone service cheaper than I was paying with BT (same line rental, but cheap calls package). The broadband side isnt wonderful - performance suffers in the evenings, but for the most part it is OK for what I need. Better than the service I was previously getting on Virgin Mediocre's cable feed. I suspect the BT service would give me an improvement in line speed but I don't really need it, and the TalkTalk price is definitely right. I have chosen the all-in "free" UK and international calls package as I do a lot of overseas calls, but if you are not bothered about that you basically get phone rental and broadband for £10.50 a month.
On or around Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:22:48 -0800 (PST), " snipped-for-privacy@ems-fife.co.uk" enlightened us thusly:
[ISP crapness - odd, isn't it, that every time piss-cali take summat over the service becomes crap...]
back with BT here, on their top-level package cos sometimes I do a lot of downloading. seems pretty good, and pricing is a lot more competitive than it used to be, for what's reputed to be genuinely unmetered, unlimited.
Line speed is up to spec, as well, considering we're 2.9 Km along the copper from the exchange.
The other point that I think I have mentioned before, is that we still use our Easynet accounts, while having a full set of BT email addresses.
We (and you) can still access POP3 email accounts through your BT Broadband account (although they don't 'officially' know why) and it saves changing email addresses etc every time you change ISP or they get taken over and change their name, which I believ NTL are going to do with their NTLWorld accounts.
We obviously have to pay Easynet for the accounts, and they do have web access which is useful; for us if we are overseas. Peter
-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Rushden, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk
I would wander over to thinkbroadband.com, or the newsgroup uk.telecom.broadband
The choice is essentially down to:
Large mass market providers. Tend to include kit. Tend to have long rental lock-in periods. Support is usually scripted front desk, who are of variable standard. If your kit is not the supplied stuff, generally their scripts prevent them assisting.
Smaller niche providers. Tend to not include kit. Tend to have one month contracts. Tend to be fractionally more expensive than others. Tend to have much higher levels of customer support with UK staff who try to fix your problem rather than follow scripts. Probably better suited to the slightly technical user.
I hope you still have a connection from Pipex, and a MAC code for migration. Without a MAC, there is a "new provide" fee to pay by the ISP. The smaller niche suppliers usually pass this fee onto the customer (typically just under £50), whereas the mass-market cover this in their lock-in term rental. Also, if you have actually cancelled, you may find yourself unable to get broadband until the flag on your line has been cleared. This can take a couple of weeks in normal circumstances, longer in the rare circumstances when something goes wrong. (And no, you can't ring up BT and get the flag cleared early because OfCom would not permit BT to clear a flag on a line set by another company as that might be anti-competitive).
If you are coping with such a slow current speed, why the requirement for "unlimited" downloads. From my work, I know that many users ask for "unlimited", but in fact never get near 10% of their monthly download limit. Most (all?) consumer priced ISPs have some sort of download limit in their terms, its usually either a quoted limit, or its a "fair use" policy. They exist to protect the ISP from the activities of 0.1% of customers who try to run data servers and major file sharing systems from a consumer (or small business) connection. I would recommend a think about how much data you put through the network. (illustration; we have two machines at home, running a small business, with regular searching of major medical/scientific databases, downloading dozens of PDF articles per day. Email can peak above 20Mb/day (work attachments). Use audio services (BBC listen-again) extensively through Internet Radio device. Moderate use of photo uploads to websites. However, don't tend to download much video, and software downloads are occaisional rather than regularly rebuilding new versions of Linux every day. We're a long way from the 40Gb on our service contract).
OfCom put a number of restrictions on how BT operates, so any perceived "integration" by the customer is somewhat illusory, it only really extends as far as a single bill. BT's consumer and business front offices do not have any special access to the back-end engineering who maintain exchanges and lines. Any special access would be a breach of OfCom regulations on equivalence of access to all providers.
You are correct in perceiving BT's business ISP as working differently to the consumer one with different service levels. But there are other restrictions, such as the class of phone line rental, which you are hitting.
I would drop your "free newsgroups" requirement. Put it down as "nice to have", but an annual subscription to a quality newsgroup provider is peanuts, eg. news.individual.net are 10 Euros per year for non-binary groups via NNTP, and offer a service which is far superior to most ISP delivered newsgroups. If/when I change my ISP, and if the new one lacks newsgroups, I will go back to news.individual.net.
- Nigel (ex BT R&D employee, so know a fair bit about how BT operates its ISP)
I'll second that recommendation, I've been very pleased with the service I've had from Zen. Ditto Idnet, who are slightly cheaper than Zen on some packages.
It is a pity to hear that Pipex's service has got so bad as they were
top performing ISP at one time.
As other people have said look at thinkbroadband, particuarly this pag which is where you can start to make comparisons from.
formatting link
I've used Plus who are at www,Plus.net for the last six years as business and a private user. On the whole I've been very pleased wit their service AND you can 'talk' to an intelligent individual, eithe by phone or by a messaging board.
One thing to remember is the ownership, Zen - a long time to performer, was bought by Plus - another long time top performer, wh also bought madasafish - yet another well thought of ISP - and Plus ha recently been bought by BT!!!
Good luck with your search - I'm not going to consider a change, it not worth the agro.
Thanks for all the replies.They have confirmed what I thought I knew all along and I will go with BT.I have had their business broadband at work for two years and have had one problem which was speedily solved by an engineer in less than twenty four hours. Mark.
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.