UK Broadband Service Providers

[redeye]

I intend to upgrade my pipe in the new year...

My choice of providers is basically British Telecom or NTL

I was wondering if any UK Gentoo users have used one (or both) of these.

My main concerns are hardware compatibility & service reliability.

[vrih]

i'm usin demon on their solo express package, its cheap and they dont screw you aroud like bt

[sisyphus]

You aren't restricted to those two. If you've an ADSL capable phone line then you can use any ISP that provides ADSL connectivity. ADSL good - NTL cable BAD (ADSL has double the upstream!).

I use eclipse.net.uk - 5 free fixed IPs and no restrictions on servers - joy.

I wouldn't touch NTL with a 60ft [expleteive]ty stick.


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wibble

[Elm0]

I couldn't recommend Nildram (ADSL) more. And all the people at http://www.adslguide.org.uk Nildram forum will be happy to confirm my experiences. I've only seen a few complaints in this forum, the majority are of people making the special time and effort to thank Nildram!

My ADSL went offline one afternoon (first, only and hopefully last time) due to a BT problem affecting the South East (nothing to do with Nildram, might want to look into how the UK network works by the way, helps you sort out problems quicker), and I rang up, got through to a support guy in less than 5 rings. He had all the information on hand and told me my exchange was experiencing a few problems, and he'll ring back to make sure I'm back online soon. And that he did. Awww

They aren't the cheapest around, though still reasonable (23 quid a month i think) but they seem to plan ahead capacity wise rather than waiting for the network to go to pot first, then upgrading, which is great. If your interested in gaming, pings are about 23 to good servers, and my average download speed is about 56K/sec.

Elmo

[redeye]

Thanks for the info... I will check out the links.

[amasidlover]

I've been on NTL 600 (was 512) for over a year and reliably get the 600kbps on downloads. Installation was within a week or so of ordering and worked fine with linux. I have had a brief outage which was fixed within 2 hours of reporting the fault.

Cable modem/set top box has 100BaseTX port which makes it very easy to link up to anything.

Generally I've been very impressed with the service and would recommend it. As for upload speed, yes its only 128Kbps but this does not affect me since I'm not running any high-load servers, if you are then you should probably get a commercial DSL/leased line (not ADSL) offering.

[Cuboid]

I've been using NTL cable for 18 months or so (was 512 now 600Mb) with nearly flawless technical service, very good download speeds, etc. I've built at least four machines with Gentoo from stage 1 and downloads were never an issue.

Useful that the cable modem typically has an 10BT/RJ45 connection, NTL are happy for you to have multiple machines and, so far, no talk of usage caps which BT have been playing with.

I do see some people complaining about ping times but since I don't play on line games, its never bothered me.

NTL's customer service is horrible (you can hang on the phone for literally hours) and it took me several weeks to persuade them to make the install for, though this was a bit new to them in my area then. However, I've barely had to interact with them since since the cable internet service just keeps on working!

[michaelj]

I've been using BT Openworld (Home 500) ever since they started, and had no problems at all. The most important thing IMHO is to get a decent Router. I'm using an ASUS EV(something) and it plugs straight into my ethernet switch, and I never actually think about a connection. It has a built-in firewall with a web-based admin console as well. All-in, I'm very happy.
(And I hope this works as I'm posting from Lynx, while compiling my gentoo ;o)

[gen2doggy]

Bump.

Thinking of switching providers as my current provider have problems all the time (which they always blame on BT changing hardware at exchanges here and there)

It's pretty consistent, seems like every 2 weeks I lose my connection. Bit annoying when I need access to my machine remotely and I need to reboot my router!!!

Also I cant seem to find any providers with as many "network outage" entries on their network status pages as my current broadband provider has!!!! - The reason I went with them is because they DO have excellent customer service, unfortunately their network reliability is pants!!!

[nobspangle]

I'll put in a vote for f2s it's cheap and reliable and you get a static ip which you can change the ptr record for, perfect for that mail server you need to run.

[cs02rm0]

www.plus.net

Great price - I signed up for 512k at 18.99 a month unlimited bandwidth originally. I pay 17.99 a month because I referred two people to them.

They have a bunch of uptime stats on their site, but they're always up anyway, in three years I think I've lost my connection twice - once because my credit card details changed and I didn't do anything about it the other time I rang up and there was an automated message saying parts of the ADSL service was down and they were expecting it back up shortly, press 1 to speak to someone... etc. (I didn't and it was bakc up within an hour - the problem was with BT not them).

They've got a ticketing system for customer support, usually takes 6-8 working hours to get a reply on it, whether you choose that, to phone them, or use the support forums I always seem to get someone reasonably technically competent to speak to - as in who know how MX records work, etc.

Very similar to nildram from what I can gather, main difference when I signed up was that plus.net do a 1 month minimum contract instead of a year.
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Rich