Broadband Question

In the US your access to various Broadband Companies by where you live.  For example, you may be able to get company A, but the person a few block away may only be able to get company B.

Is it like this in London?  Can you get any company no matter where you live?  Also when I rent a flat is there any questions I need to ask in order to make sure my flat can access broadband?  Also, are the phone lines to old in some flats to access the net?

Thank you everyone for all your help!
This board is great!  

Services do differ in different parts of the country but in London you should be able to get good broadband covreage from all the compnaies. 

If you want to check coverage, get the full postcode of the house/flat you want to move to and you can do a check on the broadband provider's website.   I've never heard of a phone line being too old but the compnay the phone is with may make a difference to which broadband provider you can get.

You won't have any problem at all in London, as Britwife says.  In fact, despite the general opinion that things are old and behind the times here, I've generally found the UK to be much more technolgically advanced than the US. 

Go to http://www.broadbandchecker.co.uk/ and put in both postcode and phone number (I find it works best if you have both pieces of information but just having postcode should give you results, I believe).

London is perhaps the best place in the country to not only get the best selection of providers but you can often get the fastest speeds in parts of London, I suppose because of the high population and, therefore, the greater desire for investment.

You should be eligible for virtually any broadband company, there's not really any monopolies on these things such as like phone service or cable in the US.

The speed of your connection is mostly down to the capabilities of the Local Exchange in your area.  I believe that site I gave you will tell you what the Local Exchange is and the maximum capable speed.

Matt

Just be a little careful about relying on the results from these online checkers, as they're rough guides only and not to be relied upon as a definite answer.   You'll also find that some of them contradict each other, depending upon how much information has been fed into their databases.

For anyone who already has a BT line, the BT website has a checker which has the advantage of being pre-programmed with line characteristics for many areas.  Even so, it's still not to be taken as 100% certain:

http://www.bt.com/broadband/bb_info.jsp

The speed of your connection is mostly down to the capabilities of the Local Exchange in your area.

In densely populated urban areas where nobody is far from a central office, that's true to a large degree, but it's not necessarily so in more rural areas, or even in towns which are fairly spread out.   The line between the C.O. and your house can have a big effect.  For example, on my local exchange -- Stalham -- folks right in town can get speeds up to 2M or so, but out here at the far end of 5 miles of wire we're down to about 0.5M. 

In some areas there is also the problem of pair-gain units (BT calls them DACS).  Without getting too technical, where demand for phones has outstripped the installed capacity of the cables, the phone company has used a technique which allows more than one phone line to operate over a single physical pair of wires.   (It's a much cheaper short-term solution than running new cables for miles.)

While this system works fine for normal voice communications, broadband won't operate over a DACS/pair-gain unit; you must be on your own dedicated pair back to the central office.   

So even though the lines themselves might support DSL, there might be logistical problems if lines are in short supply.  Sometimes BT (or whoever) can transfer somebody else without DSL onto a DACS line to free up a pair of wires for your new broadband connection, but if there are no spare pairs available to be able to assign a a dedicated line to your house, there might be a wait.