Don t get tiscali mate its rubbish im looking for new broadband too.

Me and my flatmate just got our wireless network set up, and we went with plus.net for our broadband. It seems to be a pretty good deal – no set up fee, 14.99 a month, unlimited downloading, 2mb connection – tis all pretty swish. Last night I was getting a download speed of 200 kbps while my flatmate was downloading music on his laptop aswell as ragging away on halo2 on xbox live at the same time so it seems to be fairly good from where I’m sitting.

My family have wanadoo and have just recieved a notice saying they exceeded their 2gb monthly download limit and thus broke their terms of service. ooer. They’re paying 17.99/month for a 1mb connection with only a 2gb cap limit? Methinks I got a better deal.

after 3 months trying to upgrade my wanadoo account to 2 meg… emails ignored, passed from dept to dept, lied to

i finally got through to a frank and true customer service adviser

who said, “my advice would be to cancel your contract and find a better company”

:surprised

nice one sarah… you’re the first honest person i’ve spoken to at wanadoo

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/

On a similar tack, what have peoples experiences been with upload speeds? :alien_abd(this is particularly in relation to live streaming)

TBH its (as you said) postcode lottery (some areas have better broadband capacity than others) and you its worth keeping an eye on the IT trade press like “El Reg” (the Register)

most broadband ISPs sell circuits and contracts until they run out of resources and start losing customers/get bollocked by Ofcom – then they start investing more in capacity/customer service

you need to catch them at the right times – for instance Wanadoo (Freeserve) was once good but from what Globaloon says they have expanded beyond their capacity

bulldog was OK but they also got more customers than they could handle. they are also now part of Cable and Wireless who do all the old bills and government comms – you may not wish to use them if you discuss or exchange data about activities in a legal grey area…

All ADSL connections are merely like very fast dial up modems and intermittently tend to reset themselves rather than being “always on” as claimed – which can be annoying if you are using them for streaming media.

This may be deliberate as if you want a reliable connection for streaming media BT sell higher priced data circuits for this purposes..

Apart from a few ISPs they all involve BT who own the cables to your house so you are stuck with BTs timescales for install/problem solving no matter what ISP you use (unless its NTL or telewest who have their own cables to your house)

NTL used to have ropey customer service but have improved slightly recently, and when their connections work they are remarkably robust.
Had an outage today but it must have been the first in about a year or so… and when the system works it works and stays working… Telewest uses the same kit and is supposed to have far better customer service.

Unfortunately you may not be able to get NTL or Telewest in all areas…

bellsouth and comcast are both good

bloody cheek of it 😉

Well im on ntl as i have a package, phone, net, tv all for 30 quid and free landline to locals

Net has never played up at all and download willy nilly as a when no problems

its a postcode lottery as to whether you can get NTL though

used it in Reading for years without problems but in Ipswich although the street is cabled there was a problem with the duct which leads the cable into my house.

NTL weren’t able to solve it in any acceptable time – they booked an install, found a problem and the team walked away from the job and said it would take two months to get the right team to do it – which shows how little resources they actually have to do the real work as opposed to call centres.

What annoyed me more is they weren’t even interested in keeping the business – if someone had done the site survey correctly or equipped the vans with sufficient kit to relay the cable duct (FFS all you need is a spade and an SDS drill!) it could all have been sorted out.

Ended up going to BT and have had no problems since…..