Broadband Internet Access (in the UK)

Last year I moved from somewhere with a 2mb exchange yet to somewhere which does 8mb, then found that since I'm a mile from the exchange I can expect, oh, a whisker above 2 on a good day. Is this the best we can do? Time to move to South Korea.

I'm almost 3 miles away and can get 6mbps down and 1.3 up. Sounds like there may be problems on your line, or you need a new ISP.

Hm. I'm with Be (on their cheapest plan as obv no point in paying for the higher bandwidth) and am otherwise quite happy with them. The phones do sound a bit crappy, but I thought it might be because they're cheap wireless phones.

How can I tell if there are problems with the line? I fear I'll have to work out what the hell all the numbers on those line check websites mean.

have be/02 been throttling torrents these last couple of months or is it just me? i get 5-10 minutes of regular speed and then it falls to >10 every time

No, I always get maximum if the peers are there.

Man, I was very happy with the deal I had with O2 but BT said they wanted to charge me over £100 to move my landline to my new house, so the only way I could do it without paying that was to cancel and set up with Virgin. Two months later I still can't get them to help me set up router access.

ARSEGRAPES indeed.

@r|t|c the guy on the phone at o2 told me that i shouldn't "abuse" bittorrent, but he declined to elaborate on exactly the policy was

yeah it just seems impossible for it to be a technical problem on my end, given its sudden development and the way it cuts so dramatically after the same duration every time. i've tried utorrent alpha encryption type shit but no dice.

there's a fair bit of talk online of subscribers accusing and bt denying also

i mean it's no real biggie to me anyway since most stuff is available on the more reliable rapidshare type things now but it's handy for the odd humongous thing

Hello so I am going to have to do this for work. (Get Broadband installed in my house.) ((The good news is, though, that Working From Home has just been offered to me as a reality.))

Just Broadband. Not cable, phone or blah blah blah (in fact I don't have and don't want a phone) South London area.

Boss says he uses Virgin and I keep getting offers from them through the post but basically would rather use ANYONE but make Richard Branson another penny. Anyone got anything else to recommend?

You probably will need a phoneline - if you don't already have a BT line installed it's a lot cheaper to go with Virgin or Sky. You can get phone-free packages but iirc they're just as expensive as the ones with a phoneline. You can always unplug it.

I'm in a similar situation in that we have a 2nd phoneline on the landlady's Virgin account, but she won't let us ground-floor occupants share her broadband, and we couldn't get broadband over our phoneline, so I'm using a 3G dongle, I wouldn't recommend it.

I already have a 3G dongle, it's nowhere near fast enough to use for work purposes.

Someone recommended BE - people were talking about it upthread, is it OK? Who is it owned by?

(If I feel discomfort at dealing with Virgin, I feel outright revulsion at giving money to Sky.)

maybe get 4G? You'll need to be with everydickeveryhole though

Be and O2 Broadband are now owned by Sky.

Which means I'll be looking for another provider. Any tips?

are u renouncing for moral reasons or is there something i should be aware of

i did enjoy the many emails and letters all like "nothing's changing we just wanted to say hi"

Virgin has been great for us - very fast, no technical problems (well, offline for maybe 2 hours in 18 months), definitely no caps.

Is BT broadband any cop at the moment? Since I'm paying for a phoneline from them anyway I might as well roll the whole thing together.

I've had no complaints at all from 2yrs of O2 but the idea of giving money to Sky on a monthly basis is kind of grim.

I'm in the O2 boat, and the news that BT Broadband customers will get the new BT Sport channels for free is very very interesting.

OMG really?

Yeah, just announced this afternoon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/may/09/bt-premier-league-broadband

the idea of giving money to Sky on a monthly basis is kind of grim

Yes, this. I'm a Be customer in the same boat. Plus Sky Broadband don't have the best reputation, and also, I might need my tinfoil hat for this one, but I can't say it particularly delights me to have the logs of everything I do on the internet sitting on a Murdoch Empire computer.

Does anyone get BT Infinity/fibre-to-the-kerb? Shame it's so expensive. It's annoying because my area has an unusually bad line to the exchange and so quite slow speeds via the non-fibre line, but there's no in-between option.

I went with virgin because they're currently the only company who'll give you an Internet line without a telephone landline. I'd had enough of automated ppi claim phone calls 5 or 6 times a day and the only real person phoning my landline was my mum.

just contemplating making that move myself. saving £15 a month seems like a no-brainer (although it's more like only £8 with their pricing structures).

Basically what I'm getting at is "do BT throttle Bittorrent?"

that is a good question, that i'd like to see answered

T-Mobile have just sent me an offer for 6 months of free "unlimited" broadband, which sounds tempting enough to actually open the envelope

sort of cringe at the prospect of having to phone BT support for anything

I'm in this boat too. V disappointed as o2 have been consistently great after awful experiences way back when with orange and tiscali. Been thinking about going to plusnet fibre. Friend on virgin gets traffic shaped to fuck when I leech off his connection pop round for a cup of tea during peak hours, fwiw.

xxpost It depends on the package

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10495/~/broadband-usage-policy

i had bt broadband, which was shit, for several years. the thing was that i cancelled it because i was going to move to another provider (it was called bt openworld at that point) but after i cancelled it they never actually switched it off. for three years i had free broadband because they are idiots. I'd call them three glorious years of free broadband but it was frustratingly slow even though it was free to me. I have excellent virgin broadband now only because i moved house. and no landline because who wants that?

I've joined Plusnet

srsly i must be missing something here, if the service is going to be the same then why go to the trouble of jumping ship

Having to have a landline I never use to have ADSL is bad enough, but can anyone give a reason why the force bundling of landline plans with Fibre hasn’t been outlawed?

srsly i must be missing something here, if the service is going to be the same then why go to the trouble of jumping ship

O2's customer service was really the only reason I stayed with them. Speeds were not great, and the price was not great, but if anything went wrong I could get on the phone with someone who actually listened. It will eventually be Sky's customer service people dealing with these accounts, I'd imagine. So there's that. Plus I'm American and the idea of any bit of my money making its way into Fox News programme-making gives me the crepes

I've just followed you and shifted to plusnet Tracer. Has yours actually moved over yet?

Yes! The wireless is more effective - it reaches up to the little aerie where my wife has her desk, whereas the O2 wireless box was sporadic at best - and it feels faster as well.

They send you the router and say not to connect it until you get an email or a text saying that it's ready. My router came last Saturday, and on Wednesday my O2 connection vanished. I phoned up Plusnet and they said "oh, it's actually ready now" and by the time I hung up I had my email telling me it was ready. So, er. But anyway, it was all fine after that. It took about two minutes to get through to a support person at Plusnet at 8pm which seems like pretty good going. Anyway, no complaints whatsoever as yet.

Ah, cheers- that's really good to hear! My flat has concrete walls and there's a spot in the living room where the connection crawls along. Would be good if it fixed that!

sktsh!!!! Alert!! There is an UPLOAD SPEED CAP on Plusnet's bone-simple residential broadband accounts, for god knows what reason, it's asynchronous DSL right so who cares but anyway, it is a fact. You can call them up and they'll uncap it with no change to your tariff. (!!!??)

bt infinity has been flawless for me w/ pretty heavy usage, fwiw

Thanks for letting me know, Tracer! (Wonder why they put it in if they're happy to remove though..)

Yeah I know!

ogmor, Infinity isn't available in my part of town but if it ever does become available plusnet will offer it, because they run entirely on BT's services from what I can gather

What's the feeling a couple of more months on?

I'm on BE and thinking of switching motivated by the Sky takeover and the now relatively high price. Plusnet at £4.99 p/m for unlimited (reduced from £9.99) beats the socks off the £18 I pay now!

Have you noticed be getting throttled? Moved into a house with Sky from somewhere with Be before. Massive issues with videos buffering and other slow issues in the evenings.

£4.99 p/m for unlimited (reduced from £9.99)

:o

i am going to call them up and have a go at them for this

Chewshabadoo, it has seemed a bit slower than normal the last few weeks, but that could be the power of suggestion!

Tracer, they cut it since you signed up? Bah! How are you finding plusnet?

I'm perhaps silly to still pay over £18 p/m when prices have tumbled in the years since I signed up to that deal, but it never really occurred to me to check when everything was working fine.

We have plusnet and tbh getting a bit fed up with it, we have to restart our router all the time cos it keeps dropping connection.

oh no! when i had O2 ours was like that (with wifi) but with plusnet it's been rock solid.

When I was with be, A few years back I told them I was thinking of moving and they gave me a third off the regular price.

I've loved plusnet so far. I went with fibre so it's pricier on its own, but I took phone too and it's ended up more or less the same I was paying for o2+bt.

The connection's been rock solid (and about 20Mb/s faster than what they told me it'd be) - before I turned it off recently to swap routers I was at 18 days uptime. I've replaced their router with a netgear job I got on ebay as the wifi in the router they supply doesn't get anywhere near full speed, but tbf my flat has concrete walls so that probably doesn't help. It didn't seem any worse than the o2 one.

Anyway, wd recommend. If you're going to go for it, you'll get money back through quidco/topcashback too.

who is the best provider now. MSE is recommending plusnet

why didn't they offer that to me, the fucks, I've been paying over the odds for years.

oh wait, more expensive... hmm nope!

my last package was 60 odd quid and it was supposed to be 80 odd quid but it was on an 18 month special deal. So now I have one that is 75 a month on an 18 month contract that will go up to 90 when the contract expires. Fair to to say I'm a pretty easy mark. Could start a money losing website.

i have found having your own router as opposed to the one supplied makes things a lot more stable, and configurable.

i have been with BT forever, so, they never ever offered me a Hub, and have always had my own.
then a few years back problems started to occur.
rang BT explained they had never ever sent me a Hub,
and the cheeky b^stards said it would cost me for them to send one (£60!).
f*ck that.
(also, i believe that to reconfigure anything, you have to call the supplier and get them to do it ? )
went to pc world, bought a new belkin (for more than £60 - but still), as mine was clearly obsolete.

however, all of this is minor in comparision to the fact our road is a little snicket road off a main road.
so, there is no way we will ever get fibre up here.
good old copper for us with max speeds = 12Mb.
(fine for me + one other most of the time)
after a couple of years of realising that i was paying more than folks in my town who were getting 35Mb+
i rang and kinda gave BT grief about the situation.
15 mins later, they gave me a 2 year deal for £30 per month.
when it came to recently renew the price they actually dropped to £28.

which for 12Mb and extras i.e my daily call to my mum,
i am ok with.

as i said, fuck their toys : if you can, get your own.
a lot more options especially if you run an internal network.
DHCP (i.e. the default) for Sonos can become a proper pain.
with your own router, you can define the IP address of your Sonos devices,
which i found to make things a lot more stable.