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[LUG] Entanet [was Re: IPCop with 3G modem as a backup connection]

 

On Thu, 26 Feb 2009, Rob Beard wrote:

That's a good letter, are you registered on the Think Broadband forums?

I think the folks on there in the Enta sub forum would love to read it.

Both Jason (UKFSN) and the chap from ADSL24 (another Enta reseller) seem active on the Entanet forum there. You might get some more information about what's going on...

As an Entanet reseller myself, I wish I could offer some insight, but I'm so far down their pecking order with just a tiny number of clients relative to the few big players, I might as well be an end-user, however the saving grace for me (and my customers) seems to be that we're all "business" customers - using the Internet mostly through the day with their elevated service levels over the BT Wholesaler network (similar to the old 20:1 ration before they changed the metrics)

However I had a fault myself recently - ADSL would sync, but no PPP - happened for 2-3 hours on 2 consecutive days. I found out it affected all customers on my exchange and was due to BT buggering about with something, but I never did get to the bottom of it all. Even so, it was a frustrating time, but as there is no service level agreement, there is little that could have been done. (The standard BT one for fixing lines is 3 days IIRC) Entanet do offer their own elevated service for fixing faults, but it's £12.75 a month on top of the usual bill, and in this instance they told me it wouldn't have helped as they were at the mercy of BT.

So we're a bit stuck right now - The "quality" ISPs are few and far between, so it's go with one of the big boys (BT retail, Virgin, TalkTalk, Tiscalli, etc, you know the usual bunch), or one of the smaller ones who care such as Zen, A&A, and a few others. I used to include plusnet in that lot, but not anymore.

My own thoughts are that Enta will recover, but it's going to take some time - it's a shame that just over a year ago, they were seen as the one to go for if you were a heavy p2p user, so I suspect they got overloaded somewhat as although they were a little more expensive than the bulk players, they weren't enough more expensive to keep a lot of the serious p2p users away (unlike Zen, etc. who are just a little bit more expensive again)

I don't know of any other wholesalers right now that have a good network - one of my VoIP customers had their line installed by their support company who seemed to be using someone called Murphx - http://www.murphx.com/ so I'm looking at them, but even changing over a few dozen people is something not to be taken lightly for me...

If anyone knows any other wholesalers, do let me know!

Cheers,

Gordon
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