OT. Broadband

Just gone Eclipse broadband. Technically very good and amongst the cheapest but their service/admin is absolutely totally abysmally irredeemably appalling. ttfn

You might find the information available from this web site useful.

You can get ADSL which comes through the phoneline, or you can get cable. I prefer cable, which I have from Blueyonder Telewest, NTL cable is bad.

If going for ADSL I recommend Pipex, if cable, Blueyonder. BY cable is £30pm, Pipex is cheaper than that I think, £22 or something.

Tiscali are the worst dialup provider i've ever come across, if you end up deciding to stay with dialup, go with Clara.net :)

Chris

This is where I get confused, what do we mean here by "technically very good"? The only variable I can see is the so called contention ratio, which appears to mean that the provider can effectively sell the same connection to many different users and just has to hope that they do not all want to use it at once!

Thanks for that Richard, a nice clear and informative site. I shall certainly use it to compare shortlisted providers.

My dial up ISP was originally Gateway 'cos that's what came with the PC. But they were bought out by Tiscali and I was forced to 'migrate' which is when the trouble started, two or three attempts to get in, long gaps with no data going in either direction and connections dropping out after a few minutes.

Thanks for the advice.

According to the site reccomended by Richard H., Eclipse is one of the top scorers in terms of speed, reliability *and* customer service - what problems have you had? Pipex is not far behind and beats Eclipse on price with the 1Mps service looking particularly good value.

We stopped using Tiscali a few months ago however they are still using my Switch details to extract money from the account every month despite the threat of legal action.

Paul

-- ____________________________________

Internal Fire, Museum of Power, Wales

(under construction)

That's interesting: I came from lineone when Tiscali took them over, and I've NEVER had ANY problems with them!

(touches wood)

Brian L Dominic

NB Rumpus

Web Sites: NB Rumpus:

Friends of the Cromford Canal: Mid-Derbyshire Light Railway: I may work for British Waterways, but my opinions are my own.

Gentlemen, Your lucky you can get broadband, the local exchange to me will not be converted for the foreseeable future, BT words, and cant have cable because cable companies will not come out of town, dont want satelite because of all other crap that goes with it. Regardless of back up etc at least you have got it.

Martin P

Touch wood, Blueblunder have been fine. Always there when I want it, seamless and invisible. Very occasional problems sorted out with a human being on a FREE phone line!

So, Blueyonder does it for me.

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

Hi Kim.

Had the same problem first line one then Tiscali then Freeserve. Then moved to ADSL with work I can highly recommend

Cheapest, customer service excellent. We as a company use thier ADSL access for remote access to the site. We now have 60+ users with plus net. Excellent service.

Rich

In message , Nick Highfield writes

You could do worse than Nildram.

I declare an interest - we resell Nildram accounts.

You could still do worse :-)

Pete

I've been with Onetel (ADSL) for a couple of months, just one major problem - their News service is total cr*p, doesn't work at all sometimes for days at a time, other times only half the messages get through, and if you finally get through to a real person on their support lines (Very friendly, in Orkney I think, at least it's not the far east) half of them don't seem to know what a newsgroup is :( Everything else seems fine, and their news server *is* working this morning!

Cheers Tim Tim Leech Dutton Dry-Dock

Traditional & Modern canal craft repairs

IME, Pipex are one of the original (80's) and most professional providers in the uk. Have had a Pipex account since around 1995/6 and there are very rarely problems with the service. I also have an ntl account because cable modems are faster than adsl and seem to suffer less contention, but still use the pipex account for stuff that matters like email etc.

Have a look at:

for more info. If you can get cable modem though, go for it because adsl speeds depend very much on contention and line quality and you often don't get the rated speed. With cable, you can pay for any bandwidth from 128 k to 2 M/bits second. It's a shame that Pipex don't offer a cable modem based service...

Chris

Just ordered Pipex. Here's hoping!