Most reliable, heavy use broadband?

Hey.  I'm trying to set up internet at our home in Lancaster and am feeling totally overwhelmed.   It works so differently from at home!  I hadn't realized I'd be dealing with speedcaps, line rentals from BT, metered phone calls, contracts and more.   Lordy.

My husband and I both earn our livings doing web development from home, so it's of the utmost importance that we get a fast, reliable connection that's not going to limit our activity.  I mean, if we had to choose between heat and internet, we'd probably go with internet.  We're THAT kind of family, online 24 hours a day.

I hear bad things about Talk Talk and Tiscali (especially regarding service and long waits for hookups.)   I hear Sky is pretty good but that they force your mail to go through their servers, making it impossible to use imap/pop with a mail client.  (Is that right?  That seems insane to me.)

Can you recommend anyone else in our area that will be awesome and reliable?  Even if they cost us more?   Cable isn't available on our street yet, so it has to be broadband.  I'm looking at uswitch now but any advice is sincerely appreciated.  Thanks!

I have BT and can't complain, but then we live really close to the exchange in our area.   

PlusNet's good as well and you don't have to have phone through them, but you will have to have a phone provider.

We had Tiscali in the past - supposedly unlimited download, but then they kept sending us threatening letters & emails saying we were near / over our limit and that we were going to be charged, so we ditched them.

One word of advice if you did ever decide you wanted cable (ie Virgin in particular), they do monitor your downloads, so if you did download anything not legit (ie through iTunes, etc) they have a 3 strikes you're out policy.

If you haven't already, you may want to check out Broadband Checker to see what line speed and what providers are available (and cheapest) in your area.

Good luck!   

In terms of reliability on a day to day basis i'd say BT.  God help you if you do encounter a problem though.  Not that I think any other Broadband provider has good customer service.

Hi ya Thaumata

I'm kind of the same - require a good reliable fast large bandwidth pipe to help run my own micro business. You've got to make a choice which which is not to be looking at residential broadband. You need a business service - all those caps and limits etc etc whilst still there are pretty much comfortably high that you'd probably not hit them

Look at thinkbroadband.com which is a fully comprehensive website with forums and special areas for home business's along with each service providers offerings. These deals/connections sit in between residential broadband and the lower end of full business ISP services and I'd say provide an excellent compromise with the two in terms of outlay per month and potential service levels.

As a recommendation, I'm with Be broadband, the 24MB/s "Be Pro" service (actual is around 11-13 d/l and 1.3 u/l) with a fixed IP for £24/month inclusive of VAT ( I think now it's £22p/month!). I switched last November and have been completely satisfied in every respect of the service - reliable and no issues at all so far.

There are a couple of other similar comparison websites ..  "sam knows"  i think - can't quite remember as I don't have it in my favourites - a quick yahooy or googly will find it...

As you're a small business, there are other elements such as equipment you might want to look at, i've recently found some kit which will now 'bond' multiple internet enabled lines together for a bigger bandwidth pipe for what is relatively much cheaper than it used to be a few years ago for small businesses (circa £800 inc) which depending on the type of traffic you have might be useful.

Drop me a PM if you'd like to talk some more about this and small business financial & strategic  IT as that's what I specialise in - and I also have a couple websites that need some work as well!

cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!

My wife and I are in the same boat (I'm a software engineer, she's a technology consultant, we both work out of our homes for our US teams) and we're going with O2 broadband. Of all the services I checked, they had by far the best theoretical speeds (20mbit down/1.6mbit up) and the best measured speeds (as provided by some of the users at sites listed above). I couldn't find a single other service that advertised an upload speed higher than 768mbit (admittedly, it's not a critical metric for most, but I transfer a lot of data in both directions and thus it's key for me).

Also, O2 seemed to have the least draconian 'fair use' policy - it sounds like they don't throttle at all, or only in very rare circumstances. Most of the other providers (especially BT, Sky, and Virgin) had horrible and unacceptable throttling policies. (e.g. they'd cut your bandwidth by 25%-75% for hours/days/etc.) Personally, I'm morally opposed to throttling at all - if they're advertising a line at a given speed, then it's their duty to provide that service. If they share the physical line with other customers such that my usage can impact them, then they need to fix their service or advertise their product differently.

Anyway, that's just my 1p opinion from another geek who'd choose Internet over heat. =)

(Just noticed DtM's post and thought I should clarify that I only really evaluated other consumer-oriented offerings - I didn't need many of the 'extras' (support engineers who actually speak English, 5-10+ static IPs, etc.) the biz plans included and didn't really want to pay for them. The O2 plan I'm getting is about £20/month, which seems a good deal to me.)

On further inspection, the Be offering does look pretty sexy (cough)... maybe I'll go with that instead. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/isp/compare.html?commit=Compare&isp_4=1&isp_86=1

I also use Be like Dennis.  I love it!  Friendly, fast, and if you have a problem, they work well with you to fix it quickly.  I am on the mid-range one and pay £18/month.  Although, for your use, I would suggest going with the Pro service that Dennis uses.

Thanks so much you guys!

I'm in Chicago still but my husband is in our new house, trying to get things straight and I knew someone here would have the answer.   We used to have a flat in Morley (just outside of Leeds) and used Virgin there.  They were AWFUL about throttling our speed during "peak times," which seemed to be just about any time that wasn't 2am.  We also had to reset the connection frequently to get it to work at all.

Coming from the land of Yahoo and Comcast (who aren't great but are generally reliable and cap-free) it was really annoying and disruptive.

I am looking at thinkbroadband now and will certainly check out Be.  Thanks so much.  I love UKY so much.  Everyone here has been completely amazing with me!

In terms of reliability on a day to day basis i'd say BT. 

If you are getting DSL from an exchange which doesn't yet have LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) then you are using BT by default anyway, at least for the last part of the journey from wherever your chosen provider has a point of presence to your local C.O.   There can still be different contention and "throttling" issues, of course, since your chosen provider will have a different deal with BT Wholesale than you would get on a regular BT contract. 

One other point to bear in mind with BT is that they now use Yahoo! for e-mail, with a few of the problems that can entail.  Most of the time it works reasonably well, but every so often Yahoo! can throw one of its fits and mail doesn't get forwarded to a POP account for hours.  If you have e-mail accounts elsewhere, that's not going to be a problem though.

Unfortunately, BT customer service has become confusing, convoluted, and downright infuriating.  But that can be said for many.  My experience with Sky trying to help somebody solve a problem a few months ago was not a happy one.

Please forgive my ignorance.  According to broadbandchecker.co.uk:

- ADSL Broadband is available
- Cable Broadband is not available from the service providers we checked
- Satellite TV + Broadband is available

Exchange
- Your local BT Exchange (Stevenage) is ADSL enabled
 
Line 
- Your line should be capable of supporting download speeds up to 512kbps
- Unbundled broadband services up to 24Mb are available in your area

I just did the speed test on thinkbroadband.com, and got these results:

Speed down: 188.01 Kbps ( 0.2 Mbps )
Speed up: 318.15 Kbps ( 0.3 Mbps )

So if I'm reading all that correctly, the line in my area is capable of 512kbps, and I'm getting about half of that down and a bit more than half up, which I suppose is due to my distance from the exchange (I'm about 5 miles from Stevenage) or Sky intentionally slowing me down.

The thing that's making me wonder is the sentence about unbundled broadband up to 24Mb being available in my area.  Is this just marketing BS that doesn't actually apply to me because I'm limited to 512kbps, or is there some better way of getting broadband I'm missing out on?

I appreciate anybody's input.

My experience with Sky trying to help somebody solve a problem a few months ago was not a happy one.

I couldn't agree more with this.  I can say without fear of hyperbole Sky's customer service is the worst I've experienced in my entire life.  Words to express how bad they are haven't been invented yet.

Carl

One word of advice if you did ever decide you wanted cable (ie Virgin in particular), they do monitor your downloads, so if you did download anything not legit (ie through iTunes, etc) they have a 3 strikes you're out policy.

Virgin do not monitor your downloads. No UK ISP does. As in the US, ISPs have legally what is known as "common carrier" status. That is, they don't know or care what you download, and are careful to keep it that way. Just like BT are not responsible for the contents of phone conversations, and the Royal Mail is not responsible for the contents of letters. If they did monitor what they carry they could lose that immunity. It is sometimes called "Net Neutrality".

What has happened is that the British Phonographic Industry, (BPI) the equivalent of the American RIAA, is running an anti file sharing campaign. They employ people to search for and share "sting" files on popular networks like Emule, Kazaa, Limewire, etc, and they are able to see the IP addresses of all the other people sharing that file. The IP address leads to the ISP, but not to the individual account holder's address, because the ISPs cannot legally divulge that. So the BPI notifies the IP addresses to the ISPs that have signed up to the scheme, and they write to the account holder telling them to stop it.

So far Virginmedia have only said they are "educating" users and will not actually cut anybody off, and the whole thing seems to be a bit of a damp squib. Also, the BPI seems to be going for the low hanging fruit by targeting the most popular songs and artists, I saw a report that somebody got a letter because they downloaded an Amy Winehouse (yuk!) song. So, if your tastes are further away from the 14-25 age group mainstream, you might stand a better chance.

So if I'm reading all that correctly, the line in my area is capable of 512kbps, and I'm getting about half of that down and a bit more than half up, which I suppose is due to my distance from the exchange (I'm about 5 miles from Stevenage) or Sky intentionally slowing me down.

Those figures are the reverse of what would normally be expected.  The "A" part of ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) refers to the fact that the design provides for different transfer speeds in each direction, but it is the downlink speed which is the higher (on the assumption that most domestic users will have far greater quantities of downlink data than uplink).   

The fact that your downlink speed is reading so low, especially compared to your uplink, does suggest that Sky might well be "throttling" your speed.  Those online speed checkers will just calculate the average speed based upon the rate at which you receive packets of data.   You want to access your router's configuration pages to find out the actual data rate at which you are connected to your local exchange.  That will give you an indication of what your line is capable of, free of any other restrictions.

The thing that's making me wonder is the sentence about unbundled broadband up to 24Mb being available in my area.  Is this just marketing BS that doesn't actually apply to me because I'm limited to 512kbps, or is there some better way of getting broadband I'm missing out on?

If you're 5 miles from your serving central office, then there is no way you will ever get 24Mbps -- or even anything remotely close to it -- over DSL.   I'm in a similar position here, about 5 miles from the C.O. as the wire runs.   Quotes will generally be for the minimum 0.5Mbps service, although we can sometimes stretch it to 1Mbps or so, depending upon the particular line.   

Here's some current information about Stevenage exchange, which includes the LLU operators currently present there:

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/SMSX

It also notes that Virgin Media provides cable service, but as your results indicate it is not an option I assume that the boundaries do not extend much beyond Stevenage itself and the immediately surrounding neighborhoods.

So there's no way you'd achieve those multi-megabit speeds over DSL, and if you can't get cable, the only other way to get higher speeds would be via one of the satellite services. 

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply.

You want to access your router's configuration pages to find out the actual data rate at which you are connected to your local exchange.  That will give you an indication of what your line is capable of, free of any other restrictions.

According to my router configuration page, it's 224kbps downstream and 384kbps upstream.  As you say, that's the reverse of what you'd think it would be, so I assume Sky is throttling it.

If you're 5 miles from your serving central office, then there is no way you will ever get 24Mbps -- or even anything remotely close to it -- over DSL.   I'm in a similar position here, about 5 miles from the C.O. as the wire runs.   Quotes will generally be for the minimum 0.5Mbps service, although we can sometimes stretch it to 1Mbps or so, depending upon the particular line.   

When Sky originally quoted me, they said 0.5Mbps, so at least they weren't lying.

So there's no way you'd achieve those multi-megabit speeds over DSL, and if you can't get cable, the only other way to get higher speeds would be via one of the satellite services. 

I thought that was probably the case, but the 24Mbps thing on broadbandchecker.co.uk made me wonder if I might be missing something important.  Thanks again for the help.

Carl

We use Zen and they are GREAT. We pay for the amount we want to use per month, and if we go over that there is a sensible charge per GB. They email us when we use 50%, 75% etc of our bandwidth for the month, and we've had no problems downgrading or upgrading our account needs.

Also, d/l speeds are very good!

According to my router configuration page, it's 224kbps downstream and 384kbps upstream.  As you say, that's the reverse of what you'd think it would be, so I assume Sky is throttling it.

Something sounds screwy there, unless Sky is restricting your speed in a very round about way.

The "throttling" action is normally done by just delaying packets of data which are sent to you, thus bringing the average transfer rate down.  The actual hardware link speed over the DSL from the C.O. to your home stays the same.  That connection speed is determined when you switch the router on and it does some electronic handshaking with the DSLAM at the exchange to establish the highest usable speed. 

I'm trying to think of an analogy, and the best I can come up with would be driving along a freeway at 60 mph on a journey which normally takes you an hour.  If you wanted to slow yourself down so that the journey took 2 hours, you could do it by driving at 30 mph all the way.  That would be the equivalent of cutting the actual DSL link speed in half.  But you could also make your journey last 2 hours by driving at 60 mph for 5 minutes, then stopping on the shoulder for 5 minutes, then driving at 60 mph again for 5 minutes, and so on.  That would be the equivalent of the usual ISP throttling system, where the actual packets of data are still traveling to you over the DSL at the same rate, but there are much longer pauses between them so that the average transfer speed is greatly reduced.

The 224kbps downlink speed sounds very low.  Can you see other line parameters on your router's configuration, such as the downstream attenuation and noise margin figures?  They might give a clue.  Have you also tried rebooting the router to see if it re-synchronizes at a higher speed?

I use O2 and its been great thus far.  I am on the cheap 8mb plan, but I have a 9mb d/l according to several speed tests.  It is worth noting that O2 uses Be and IP addresses are listed as BeUnlimited.