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On 13/02/2009 07:45, Dave Berkeley wrote: > Well, the connection came back up yesterday morning. A total of 55h outage > spread over 4 days. That was for a scheduled 10m downtime on Monday. UkFsn > tells me that asking for a reduction in the bill is "unreasonable". Judging by > the comments I've heard here, service from all providers is pretty much > random, and tech support all poor. It is just pot luck. None of the providers > seem interested in having happy customers. With little to distinguish between > the services you are left with price. I'm paying around £25 /month for a > landline I hardly use (except to call ISPs when the net is down!) and another > £20 /month for my EntaNet account. > > I don't think it's unreasonable to get compensation. Are you on the business or home service? Even if it's just a couple of quid back, if it was down to no fault of your own they should refund you what you wasn't able to use. > To be fair, EntaNet did eventually start taking the matter seriously, and from > Wednesday kept me informed of the progress. > > That's something I guess. > It seems that I can knock around 40% off my monthly bill by moving to Virgin > cable (or fibre as they call it), and hopefully get a faster connection too. > > The only issue is that you're stuck on a 12/18 months contract although at the moment I think they are doing 3 months free or something like that (might be 3 months of 10 Meg for a fiver). BUT you have to bear in mind that if you download more than a certain amount a day they WILL throttle your speeds down to about 25% of what they should be. If you don't download much then it probably wouldn't be a problem, but if say you're on the 10 Meg connection and you download more than 1200MB between 4pm and 9pm you'd be throttled to 25% of the speeed (so about 2.5 Meg) for 5 hours. During the day the throttling is a bit different, if you download more then 2400MB between 10am and 3pm you'd again be throttled down. Just something worth bearing in mind, if you're not likely to download that much then fair enough, but with a 10 Meg connection you'd be able to download 1200MB within 30 to 40 minutes easily. > For back-up I am thinking of putting a mobile broadband dongle up in the roof > space, where I hope I can get a better signal. I could control it from a spare > gumstix, with power over ethernet. I can PXE boot the gumstix, and NFS mount > the rootfs, to control the whole system from my server. > > Gumstix? This sounds interesting, is it some sort of small network bootable Linux box? > I would prefer a fixed IP address, which Virgin won't do. But I can always use > DynDNS, which would also cope with the occasional use of a mobile backup > connection. > > I found what when I was on Telewest DynDNS did the job well, I still use it now even though I have a static IP (can't be bothered to try and remember the IP). > What could possibly go wrong? > Um... well anything really. Having a backup connection isn't a bad idea actually. I must admit I never had any issues with Telewest and a friend of mine who is currently on Virgin hasn't had any issues, but that isn't to say things don't go wrong from time to time (but the same could be said for any ISP in fairness). > Better would be connection sharing between neighbours. Has anyone tried this? > Not tried it personally, if you get on with your neighbours maybe you could share wireless network keys or something for if each of your connections goes down, or isn't that what you mean? Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html