Massively OT: Fatband

Oooh... Go with Freedom2surf, say I referred you, I get a tenner! ;)

Tiscali's "baby broadband" package seems OK actually, free connection, free modem, 16 quid a month IIRC. F2S is 512k, free connection, buy your own kit,

22.50 a month, Pipex is the same, 23.50 a month and much better newsgroup access.

There's others, but I've had Pipex before and they're pretty good, F2S works fine for me, and a friend's on the Tiscali basic package and it seems alright from what I can tell. Of course, for serious bandwidth hammering,

150k is still going to be slow, but nowher near as slow as dial up. Don't bother witht eh likes of AOHell or BT, you pay through the nose for something no better IMO :)

Have you used a modem on a DACS line? 31200bps is flat out. I could UUEncode and morse data faster than that... 512 is pretty tempting as it's not much dearer.

I got their 2Mb off-peak package for £30 a month in a pre-xmas deal :-)

However, they don't have a news server(!) and you pay extra for email addresses(!!), so I subscribed to

for newsgroups, which is free but incurs a one-off setup fee of a couple of quid. I already had mailboxes with my hosting.

Bigus

Tiscali also do 512K with a 1GB/month download limit for £19.99 a month with Free connection and modem. ...

hth Mike

i'm on a 512k pipex connection and that's fine with me...

went down something like 6 times last year which wasn't bad, longest down time was 3 hours when a mate of mine on BT openworld connection has been down a whole day before!

I've got a few mates who've tried tiscali it's not all that, with frequent disconnections at random times he gave up and is now with freeserve I've never had it go bad on me in the 4 years i'vehad it and the broadband has limitless download and they give you a 10 mb/email limit as well :) great for file swapping :)

10mb? Is that all? I get 20 :)

But why bother with a capped d/l limit on broadband? You only need to mail a few photos, sub to a few busy groups, and you'll be getting close to that - I've been online for just over 5 days, not downloaded any large files, and have still pulled over a gig down!

Well worth finding another couple of quid a month to get unlimited bandwidth, IMO, and modems are dirt cheap now, new or off Ebay.

Yep. Either had DACS where I used to live, or something was very worng, as my V92 could only manage 32k ish on a good day. Somehow, that got alot better just after ordering adsl, I guess it was because they took the DACS off (was fitted by a previous tenant who wanted about 4 lines in the flat!).

My advice, FWIW, is go for a baby broadband if you want to save a fiver or so a month, or go with F2S or Pipex for their 512k packages. F2S are perfectly good other than limited newsgroup counts, and no binaries, Pipex have pretty much a full newsgroup access. Beware alot of cheaper deal, they may have P2P ports throttled (may or may not be an issue to you), bandwidth limits, that sort of thing. I have yet to find a better 512k deal than the ones those 2 offer, and believe me, I'm a tad bastard, I searched and searched for days before spending any money!

Nildram or Eclipse. A tad more expensive than others mentioned, but you get what you pay for! I've been with Nildram for over 2 years now with zerodown time. Yes zero. 'nuff said!

Nildram -

Eclipse -

go for eclipse adsl, very good.

Am I correct in thinking you can go with them and cancel whenever? I was under the impression that most (all?) ADSL contracts were 12 months at a time.

yer 1 month contracts

But a 50 quid connection fee, non refundable...

Go to

and do a comparison, look at the lists,etc. All I can say is I've had no problems at all with my ISP, and never hadmany probs with Pipex (other than BT managing to completely c*ck things up acouple of times).

I personally don't see the point in paying more than 23 quid a month including VAT, or in paying a connection fee - I pay 22.50 all in, no connection fee, and the few problems i get are connected to the local exchange being dicked around with by BT. True, I have a 12 month contract where if I leave I have to pay the connection fee, but I'd rather have it that way round and see if I like the ISP enough to stay with them, than pay the fee in the first place and then find I wanted to change :)

Eh ?

1GB a month ?

I can get about 14GB per month (20MB per hour) over my 56k modem !

A lot of broadband has a 1GB a *day* limit, variously policed and admitted.

1 GB a month is just asking to be DOSed off the internet.