OT - ISP's

.www.bethere.co.uk/I pay tiscali =A317 at the min for a shit service.

I know it's terribly un-cool, but BT havn't put a foot wrong for work, and AOL is just fine for home (you don't have to have all the AOL front end rubbish for broad-band).

Richard (very un-cool, but always connected!)

I'll second that - in two and a half years my BT broadband was not down for one minute, and we used the connection *all* the time. Maybe a bit more expensive, but well worth it in my mind to avoid all the frustration of being off-line on a regular basis.

Matt

Mark> Evening Tiscali are doing my nut in. Their servers are up Mark> and down all the time, rendering internet / mail useless.

I've been on Demon broadband since about 2000. It's been next to flawless during that time - I think I might have had to reboot the router a few times, and a couple of mail outages for an hour or two. Not bad for 7 years.

For purely domestic use Nildram have also not put a foot wrong in the, gosh is it really, 4 years that I've been with them. I pay ~£15/month for up 8Mb/s - which actually hovers around 6Mb/s - and up to 2Gb download/month.

Look at

Richard

P.S. My father has decide to sign up with that well-known IT provider Waitrose on the basis of a Which? report that chose them as best buy. Why??? I guess that I'll find out when I have to dig him out of the mire!

Richard

You tend to get what you pay for. BT for 5 years, gone wrong twice, for a few hours each time.

Golly - a BT love-in. Have to agree. Been with BT since broadband came to this here neck of the woods (and on 56k before that). Not problem free (setup was a bit of a game) but they listen to what you have to say and fix things quickly. No complaints at all.

I've been with BT in the past and wouldn't touch them with a barge pole, due to their amazing inability to fix their own network or for their staff to understand simple questions or to behave professionally. Perhaps there's two BTs ;-)

Much as it pains me to be nice about BT, I signed up with them using Risc-OS, and the tech bloke quite happily admitted that he'd never heard of it, and would I be happy if he just gave me the necessary IP adresses - exactly what I wanted. Having been on NTL before, where their bloke insisted on telling me to insert the (Windows) CD....... Mind you, now they are called Virgin.net I suppose everything is perfect.... ahem.

Richard

I think you mean 24 Mbps which will drop to about 8 Mbps with a local lo= op length of about a mile. After that it'll perform more or less the same a= s an "8 Mbps" service...

Regarding BT the physical provision that is still BT no matter who you b= uy your broadband from. Unless you go for one of the Local Loop Unbundling =

deals from the likes of Carphone Warehouse. Even then I expect you'll still find a BT man fixing any physical line faults rather than a bloke =

from your unbundled supplier.

Apart from the local loop lenght the common gotcha's are any down/up loa= d caps and contention ratio, things that marketing puff tend to gloss over= or ignore.