Broadband Service

What are the recommendations out there on Broadband/Cable for internet connections?  I MISS my cable!  I can't take this dial up crap much longer!
My flatmate found something that's only £15.99 per month, but when comparing, it advertised at 5x faster, versus 10x faster for the services that are £25.99 and more.
Thoughts?
Experiences?
Advice?
Thank you :-\

Hey Elizabeth,

We use NTL cable, which we got with a whole cable package, including tv. I think we pay about 38 pounds a month.  There is another discussion about this down in the 'techy' forum, and I posted a coupld links to my husband's website, where they discuss the different broadband options, the good the bad, and the ugly, so to speak. I will advise you against Tiscali. There have been problems with their customer service and billing. 

Godo Luck and I hope you are loving it in  London

You've got two possibilities:

a) Cable, if you've got cable TV (NTL or TeleWest) or if it's available to you
b) ADSL if you're within 5 km of a BT exchange that's ADSL enabled

First thing to do ... find out which (if either) is available for you; you can put in your postcode on the relevant sites and they will tell you (they may say "subject to line test").

I did some tests about 6 months ago.  Download of 1 Mbyte via a modem - about 4 minutes. Via 512k ADSL - about 30 seconds. Via 512k Cable Modem - about 20 seconds (the difference being due to line sharing and contension with ADSL).

Tiscali offer a SLOWER ADSL service (150k) as well as the standard service and they're adverising it as high speed, and there are a number of higher speed services.  We use a 2Mb cable service here and can download a Megabyte in 4 seconds ... but then we need it for work, and it costs us a bit more.

I wrote an article on this in our company newsletter - downloadable from http://www.wellho.net/downloads/index.html and you want the Autumn 2003 edition, page 9.  We have a further article on wireless in the Spring 2004 issue.

P.S. If neither of the above is available, you may want to look at ISDN - though I would NOT recommend it for new installations normally - or Satellite Broadband if you need it in spite of the high cost and hassle.  Please feel free to p.m. or email me.

Hi there,
Curious about your experiences with broadband and digital/cable providers. I have had Telewest for several years for phone, cable, broadband but sadly am moving flats and won't be in a telewest area. We were considering Sky for tv and BT for broadband, but have heard some negatives about BT, which left us with Sky option and no broadband supplier. Then, we received some info on Homechoice, which looks good, but we don't know anyone who has used it (newish tv, digital, broadband supplier). From their website the prices seem reasonable and the offer a fast broadband.

Interested in your feedback on suppliers/suggestions other than Telewest-

Thanks and Happy New Year,
Elizabeth

Hi Elizabeth,

there's a quite good website about UK ADSL services out there, www.adslguide.org.uk. You'll see that there are loads of different ADSL providers and it also contains ratings from customers. Funny thing is that although all of those providers buy their bandwidth through BT, most of them offer cheaper rates than BT itself!

If you decide to go with the rather slow 512kb/s option, you have to keep in mind that most providers offer this service at a 50:1 ratio (which means you have to share your line with 49 other users, guess what will happen to your connection during peak hours ...). I've been with plus.net since 2 years using their home business option, 2MB/s and only 20:1 ratio. This of course comes for a hefty price and is therefore only recommended for the really desparate ones, like me 

Latest info on NTL (cable) is that they have increased their broadband speeds at no additional surcharge, up to then their highest speed was 1MB/s, it's now 1.5MB/s (like I used to get with Comcast in PA) and ... according to some insider info, NTL will even further increase their speeds to 3MB/s in the first quarter of 2005. They also offer a half price promotion for 3 months, so if you are in their area, you might want to try them out?

Greetings,
t.

We've been using BT for a few months.  The connection is almost always very fast. Their customer service isn't up to much though. They ended up giving us 3 months free broadband because they cut us off and then couldn't explain why for over a week (it turned out we had a virus).

We have been using BT Broadband in Cardiff for almost a year.  Very fast.  It has never failed.  Expensive at £27 per month, but we are not techies and we don't want any hassle (which is why we switched from PC to iMac).

Note that BT Broadband is a connection, not an ISP.  E-mail is just the BT Yahoo web site, no newsgroup access, no web pages.

Jim

I'm using Homechoice as it was one of the few cable/broadband packages that existed where I live (darn it)...I've also heard that NTL is great!  With Homehoice I get 1 MB broadband (which is quite fast) and a bunch of cable channels (though not as many as Sky)...for 40 pounds or so a month.  Decently happy so far...

I believe  the dsitance from the excnage for which yiu can get ADSL is now 6km. I have BT broadband, but I work for them so it's chepaer. Never had problems with them though.

Thanks for all of the great info! I use yahoo mail and b/f uses hotmail, and I've heard that with NTL there can be problems accessing yahoo mail (a friend had trouble for months--couldn't get her email). Suppose either BT or Homechoice will work for us, and I'll check out the website listed.

Will review your suggestions and make a decision this week.

Many thanks,
E.

I'm using NTL cable and have no problems accessing Yahoo email.  Granted it's not my primary email address, but I've never been unable to access it.

We use Pipex on a BT phone line and they have been brilliant and without any outages in the past 6 months.

I am an NTL customer, I get the whole package and the BBand part costs me £17.99 per mth ( including the free speed upgrade), but as a new customer you can get very good deals where the first 3-6 mths are £9.99 as I think someone mentioned above.

I had a few problems at the beginning of the contract (May 04), mainly regarding slow speeds and logging on problems, but I kept a detailed log of all my phone calls to customer service.  I then hit a snag with a conflict between NTL software and my NAV (this is a common conflict and can involve un & re-installing a few times) and in the end I decided to upgrade). After a week of not being able to log on again, I called the engineers out who found there was something wrong with the cable at the exchange, so I wrote them a long letter and included a "bill" for £280 to cover my time, the expense and to re-imburse me for my upgraded hard drive.

The customer services manager called me to apologise and refunded the whole amount, plus a further 3 mths half price broadband back to my account (so technically speaking I haven't paid any bills for about 6 mths now!) and I have not had any problems since.

All in all, I would say NTL have improved their service ( and upgraded their own software etc) in the meantime enough to offer a very competitive service, but keep a note of any problems and insist on action, because they are willing to listen and negotiate.

Sheril

PS) Stand alone cable modem are less trouble than integrated cable box modems.

Oh I forgot to add ( should I put this in techie - mods??) that for those with NTL a really good resource is

www.chetnet.co.uk

A techie/broadband website run by the developers/programmers at NTL- they are supremely helpful in the event of any problems and can save any time on customer services.

S

Thanks for the suggestions--will see if we'll be in an NTL area. I am very non-techie and Telewest was perfect for me--in 2 years I've had only one outage (this past weekend in fact) and it's been so simple that I have never had to do anyting. There are so many choices now that it's a bit overwhelming!

We use the internet mainly for email checking, travel planning and general surfing so don't need anything too fancy...but I like the speed of broadband and get impatient if I can't log on when I want (I do work from home now and again so need something reliable).