Who's the best ISP provider?

nigpd

nigpd

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I've just moved house and want to dump AOL as my ISP because they are carp.

We are lucky enough to have fible optic in MK, so who's the best broadband ISP?

thanks in advance for your suggestions
 
I would always avoid the "mass market" isps such as sky/bt etc and choose one of the smaller isps any day.
I'm with aaisp and have been happy with them for about 11 years. I would avoid any isp that even dreams of throttling a connection or blocking a port, the sort of behavior that is more common the bigger the isp it seems.
 
nigpd said:
Apologies for sounding like a techno numpty, but what is blocking a port?
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Short answer: blocking you from using whatever applications you want to (ie. artificially restricting your connection for no useful purpose other than to drive you to their service)
 
hunnymonster said:
Short answer: blocking you from using whatever applications you want to (ie. artificially restricting your connection for no useful purpose other than to drive you to their service)
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A good example is port 80 - many isp's "trap" port 80 traffic and drive it via their own web cache instead of giving you a "clean" feed to the web.
 
After being with AOL and then Pipex both of whom less than impressed I moved a few years ago to Idnet. Their service has always been excellent and I can recommend them.
 
I would avoid BT, what you want to do is find out how good they are when you have a problem, not how good they are when things are fine. I had problems with BT and got sick of pointless phone calls to people who i couldnt understand in India trying to sort it.
 
4737carlin said:
I would avoid BT, what you want to do is find out how good they are when you have a problem, not how good they are when things are fine. I had problems with BT and got sick of pointless phone calls to people who i couldnt understand in India trying to sort it.
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I had the same when talktalk took over tiscali I spent hours on the phone trying to resolve my connection issues. The tech support level 1 and 2 or in india and was very poor just reading a prompt card and they then cut you off and start all over again. I think the pc was powered down 10 or more times with the router power removed. In the end I phoned to cancel my contract then with in 2 mins a uk level 3 support guy phoned me back and it was fixed in 5 mins. Basically they switch off my broadband at there end due to migration from tiscali with no warning.

Not great when you work from home...

I need to have a change once contract ends.
 
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The best ISP is A&A.

That doesn't mean they will be suitable for everyone, especially those that think low prices should be considered when evaluating what constitutes "best".
 
I have just changed from BT to Virgin. So far so good. Very quick. As part of my TV and telephone package it works out very cheap.
 
Be Unlimited in my experience.

I'll probably be moving to Clara.net when we get FTTC as Be are dragging their heels on that.
 
Watching this one with interest...Might be good for me in the future as at the mo i am under contract.
 
I've been with Sky pretty much since they launched their broadband service, several years ago. Prior to that I was with PlusNet who said they could not get me speeds above 2Mb.

I've been on a stable 8Mb sync with Sky since day one. Due to my distance from the exchange I don't expect any faster, over copper, but in theory I could get up to 16Mb if I was closer. I'm on the unlimited plan and because I also have Sky Talk it costs me just £7.50 per month. Recommended
 
I was with PlusNet for years and had great service for most of them. In the latter years using started to be squeezed and if I did breech a limit then all sorts of issues would follow trying to get the cap reset. I left them when I moved and went to Sky. Very good customer service, hardly any downtime in two years but recently have noticed speeds have slowed from 6Mbit/s to 3Mbit/s.
 
tdodd said:
I've been with Sky pretty much since they launched their broadband service, several years ago. Prior to that I was with PlusNet who said they could not get me speeds above 2Mb.

I've been on a stable 8Mb sync with Sky since day one. Due to my distance from the exchange I don't expect any faster, over copper, but in theory I could get up to 16Mb if I was closer. I'm on the unlimited plan and because I also have Sky Talk it costs me just £7.50 per month. Recommended
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The "sync" apeed is simply the connection speed between your router and the exchange, and would not be affected by your choice of isp.

The true test is if download speeds actually match your "sync" speed, especially during the times when a lot of other users will be downloading.

I have heard horror stories of ISPs where the effective download speed at times drops to only 1 to 2 megs per sec despite an 8 meg sync :(
 
Just ran a Speedtest....

Router reboot.

For £7.50 per month it's good enough for my needs.
 
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I've just tried mine and it's much better than the speed test I have been using:

versus the one I normally use:
 
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1777721669.png

ASDL2 + Annex M over Be

I am more than 100 miles from London, whatever the graphic says.
 
onomatopoeia said:
1777721669.png

ASDL2 + Annex M over Be

I am more than 100 miles from London, whatever the graphic says.
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I was thinking of using the "Be" transit option a while back but I seem to remember that this cost a fair bit extra. The noise margin bug using BT transit would have been the main appeal of Be, but this bug now seems to have been largely fixed.
 
I've been with BT from the start and have never had a problem
 
Also with BT, for the last 8 years. I know you have to ring India but the last time I had to ring them was about 3 years ago, and it was resolved straight away!!
 
boliston said:
The "ping" time seems quite long for a wired connection ;)
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Yes. Nice low ping times you have there. But if it costs you an arm and a leg to move more than a couple of files around, it doesn't mean it's good value ;)

And anyway, what good is a low ping time unless you game?
 
arad85 said:
Yes. Nice low ping times you have there. But if it costs you an arm and a leg to move more than a couple of files around, it doesn't mean it's good value ;)

And anyway, what good is a low ping time unless you game?
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I think ping times can be a good indication of congestion on the network. I'm not a gamer but a low ping is kind of reassuring that the isp is not overloading their network.

I mainly use the network "off peak" between 6pm and 9am when the cost is a fraction of "peak" business hours so my usage does not cost much - about £30 per month including line rental, and I normally download about 30-50gb per month.
 
boliston said:
and I normally download about 30-50gb per month.
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Exactly... a couple of files a month... Heck, I downloaded an OS I wanted to try last week and that was 2.5GB in itself... An update to LR is .25GBytes... and iPlayer streaming. Perhaps they are uncongested as they don't have many people taking up their service as it's overpriced.

Give me unlimited vs low pings any day of the week!
 
arad85 said:
Exactly... a couple of files a month... Heck, I downloaded an OS I wanted to try last week and that was 2.5GB in itself... An update to LR is .25GBytes... and iPlayer streaming. Perhaps they are uncongested as they don't have many people taking up their service as it's overpriced.

Give me unlimited vs low pings any day of the week!
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Everyone must decide what they want from a service and choose the right one that meets their needs. Amongst other things, I want a routeable subnet of 16 IPv4 addresses. That means my choices of ISP are quite limited.

I use a tiny fraction of my 20GB "allowance" every month, because I'm not at home during the metered time (9am to 6pm). Evenings and weekends it is effectively unlimited, at least there's no way I could download the 100GB of data that it would take me to run into the limit - and yes, I do download operating systems to trial (windows and linux) and use iplayer, but to download that much I'd have to be downloading for its own sake and not out of need.

Other people may need to download a lot of data during the working day on their home internet connection, in which case A&A aren't for them, or they may feel that price is the most important indicator of quality in an ISP, so likewise. I know what I want from my ISP and I choose the one that provides it, price is incidental. If a different / cheaper service doesn't do what I need, then it's no good to me, but it might be good for others and meet their needs.
 
I've been with BT on and off for about 6 years (changed to Be, but back to BT when fibre arrived).

Never had a problem with support.

The problem with having your internet with BT is they will always blame your internal wiring as they also have to deal with lots of telephone faults. Tell them you've checked everything and to send an engineer. They will explain it will cost you £200 if it is your fault etc. etc., tell them find and to send an engineer.

The engineer will fix the fault and off you go. I've had 1 fault with the cabling in the road (overhead cables), and 2 problems that were either in the exchange or cabinet.

My ping is 19ms, dl speed is around 35Mb and my up speed is 6Mb.

Love BT Infinity, also have the benefit of BT hotspots and flickr pro.

Ping is affected by so many things, not just how congested the network is.

Personally I cba with Sky as you are supposed to use their router and you have to do an almost soft hack to get your user details so you can use your own router. I need to have a router to router VPN which sky's router can't handle (don't even try and ask them about it :lol: ), so you have to use your own.

They also won't allow non sky email addresses to use their smtp server, very annoying unless you have access to an SMTP server!!!

I was with plusnet but never liked them overall. Lots of up and down and not a huge amount of support.

Be I like, we use 2 Be lines at work and we get a constant 5Mb on both lines and the connection drops once or twice a week (monitored, not just noticing) and normally between 2am and 4am, which i presume is some maintenance thing.
 
neil_g said:
what is everyone beef with SMTP providers locking down their service..

just use the one the email was provided for and authenticate against it.. its a complete non-issue.
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Not all hosts provide smtp. You used to use your host for incoming and ISP for outgoing. Now you NEED your own smtp which may be extra.
 
neil_g said:
what is everyone beef with SMTP providers locking down their service..

just use the one the email was provided for and authenticate against it.. its a complete non-issue.
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Because it's not providing a complete service. As for the rest of it, how long have you got? I started on a reply but when it had got over 100 lines and into Matthew Sullivan / SORBS (names surely burned into the brain of almost everyone that has ever tried to run relaying mail server in the last decade), what RFC822 and successors do and do not say about reasons for rejection and many other subjects I gave up as no-one would read it.

Also, I have no wish to buy a modem so I can dial into my Demon dialup account just to send emails "from" that address - why should I have to?
 
onomatopoeia said:
Because it's not providing a complete service. As for the rest of it, how long have you got? I started on a reply but when it had got over 100 lines and into Matthew Sullivan / SORBS (names surely burned into the brain of almost everyone that has ever tried to run relaying mail server in the last decade), what RFC822 and successors do and do not say about reasons for rejection and many other subjects I gave up as no-one would read it.

Also, I have no wish to buy a modem so I can dial into my Demon dialup account just to send emails "from" that address - why should I have to?
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Why should an ISP let every Tom dick and Harry route their mail through their smtp servers. It doesn't make money but costs them in server and bandwidth throughput. To name one of a few reasons.

Like you I just typed out about 20 more lines of reply but realised I don't actually care lol
 
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