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On Fri, 1 Nov 2013, Neil Winchurst wrote:
On 01/11/13 12:09, Neil Stone wrote:Yes, I have heard of them and in fact have looked at their site previously. However, from what I can see, they provide broadband and phone as a package. I just want broadband, not phone as well. That does not seem to be on offer.There is only one ISP I recommend, and not just for the reason of me being an authorized distributor for them. http://www.smallerbills.info/ UK based customer service, UK based friendly technical support, and well priced.
This is the Utility Warehouse. There are at least 2 other resellers of their wares (that I know of) on the DCGLUG and/or the Exeter LUG lists...
I recommend several ISPs - depending on your needs - one is Entanet - who I resell - support is via their Telford based call centre. They have uncapped and capped data packages, details and prices on request. Contracts from 1 month to 24 months and I get a small monthly commission out of them (about 80p for a typical home connection - I'm not going to retire on that any day soon!) Entanet have many resellers.
Note that if you take a "fibre" product (FTTC - Fibre to the cabinet or FTTP - To the Premises) then there is a mandatory 1-year contract as that's what BT Wholesale impose on all the resellers.
My experience here is that you really do get what you pay for. AAISP is probably the best ISP in the UK - they sell direct to the end user and are good at tracking down issues in the BT network. They have recently introduced a new package: Home::1 which has a monthly cap of 100GB and costs £25 inc .VAT. They also have other usage based tariffs which may work out cheaper, depending on your usage.
One thing to remember when looking at sites which allow user reviews - e.g. http://thinkbroadband.com/ is that most of the time people will only complain when there is something wrong. Rarely will praise be given, so it pays to take your time when reading them and bear that in-mind.
And if you haven't done-so, it's still worth while getting in-touch with your current ISP and asking them if they know reasons for the slow-downs. They may make you go through the soul-destroying process of eliminating the internal wiring, but be inisitent that the sync. speed never drops, just the data throughput and you might get someone with a client if you're lucky - it may be that they just need to upgrade their own internal network (not that they'd admit to it, but you never know) and be in the process of doing just that... I've seen it with other ISPs in the past.
And finally, be aware that there are 2 qualitys of service of data over the BT wholesale network - standard and elevated - in the early days there were refered to the 50:1 and 20:1 contention ratios - the metrics are different these days. I use the elevated services, so get a guaranteed higher throughput, especially at busy times, but I also pay a bit more for it. Not every ISP offers elevated services as it costs them more - e.g. AAISP charge an extra £10 a month (IIRC) for it.
AAISP, Entanet and Goscombe (and their resellers) offer IPv6 in the UK right now (there may be 1 or 2 more though, I've not checked recently)
Gordon
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