Broadband Internet Access (in the UK)

they know about people like you

Ask them what the contract cancellation fee will be at six months. Shouldn't be much more than about £50, right?

line rental for six months would be little over £60

I'll go without

What about NTL?

Or explaining the situation to your company and asking them if they could see fit to add administration of the phone line to the package?

Has anyone used the 3 mobile broadband dongle? It's on special if you order through quidco at a fiver a month for 1gb and I'm tempted by it but it's an 18 month contract and the pricing's quite steep if you go over the limit.

GAH

I am moving to a flat five minutes away from my current flat and Be tells me they don't provide service to my new flat - it's on a different "exchange"

I have been so happy with Be, and I have no idea who to turn to now. Any suggestions?

can i also just add - ARSEGRAPES

OK I have just discovered that the phone exchange my new flat is part of "hasn't been opened to competition" by BT - it's still on ADSL rather than ADSL2+, so speeds are 8meg rather than 21meg.

O2 says they'll provide service but for 17.50 a month! Ugh.

that's about what i'm paying iirc but i'm some kind of stooge who's been on the same plan for the last umpteen years due to laziness.

I wondered this yesterday - I've been on the same plan for 3 years and am probably paying way over the odds nowadays.

Hmmm, 02 = Be Network. Might be worth making a support ticket with Be if you haven't already.

I was on the middle Be package for £18 a month, I asked if they could make o2's pricing and they knocked it down to £12 and gave me a couple of months free.

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!

who is the best provider now. MSE is recommending plusnet

I doubt that! Zen have always been rock solid for me.

I've been very happy with Plusnet for a few years now. Connection is solid and speeds are great. I'm probably paying over the odds nowadays, as I've never looked around for other deals after my initial one ended, precisely because nothing's ever gone wrong (yet).

Also on PlusNet, since a February house move. Apart from their sales dept being a bunch of lying snakes, the service has been pretty good, I'm in a pretty rural area too and I see our village FB group complaining about BT and Sky or whoever dropping out/slowing down a lot and it rarely happens to me.

how much are you all paying, inc. line rental? I'm with virgin, since they're the only ones who do broadband with no line rental required, but over the last six years the price has gone from £25 pm to £37.50.

I pay £40 p/m for unlimited fibre extra (~70 Mbps down, ~20 Mbps up) inc. line rental with plusnet, which is the non-deal price. Their current deal looks to be £27 p/m for the same for 18 months, which is around what I paid for the first 18 months too. I should probably shop around and then try to get some kind of reduction from them.

Looks like Zen are £35 p/m for similar speeds.

XP - for PlusNet I'm paying about £26 pm including line rental, the phone works in different tiers too, depending on usage.

plusnet are pish

to this day the best service I've had was from virgin fibre. doesn't come to our house unfortunately : /

problems w plusnet: frequent drops on laptop (which is a 2020 model so has a decent wireless card); iOS devices unusably slow on it (tested on work wifi network where they're blazing fast so again it's not their chips); it's... not all that fast. streaming on my smart TV is pish too but I'm putting that down to the fact my TV is at the back of the house, and down a level from the router

also when I signed up you could talk to an advisor live on their website. they've since removed that functionality (was pre-rona) which is super annoying. fuck a phone

It’s on the expensive side, but I find Zen’s service to be excellent.

Just switched from Virgin to BT. Virgin were fine I guess, the odd outage but less than once a month, but the price had skyrocketed - I probably could have called and renegotiated but BT had an offer on and good feedback in the neighbourhood whatsapp so fuckit I switched. Virgin really didn't want to see me go. If the new router takes less than ten minutes to start up after it has to be reset for any reason then it's a win.

I keep going through this cycle with Virgin where my bb package is about to go up in price and they offer me a faster more expensive package on a *special rate* 18 month contract. Even though I have absolutely no requirement for even faster broadband. I'm just utterly guileless and am like go for it, that sounds fab!

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.