Which Internet Provider ?

[Evans Electric]

Any advice would be appreciated on which Provider to swop to.

I started with Wanadoo ,who were swallowed up by Orange, but sometimes it is that slow reacting I give up. I know its them but they say its my PC , if it was it be like it all the time .

There is a Virgin network in our road , I was thinking of their Phone and Broadband offer. ( not interested in TV really)

Then I get a call from BT to say their new super-duper, speed of light broadband is now available and am I interested in that.

There,s not much difference in cost per month other than I only pay

 

[Sidewinder]

I have Virgin at home and the slowest version, sometimes we have 6 pc's connected and it is fine.

Last time we had a problem it was the router which they replaced. Many years ago.

Mind front line call centre is (was) in a far away continent!

I find it fine, just like being on a work network for us.

Only thing is no vat no on bills.

 

[rmc86uk]

Agree with above, been with Plusnet myself for about 7 years and not got a bad word to say about them apart from they used to sponsor Sheffield Wednesday!

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

 

[ianmacd]

Cable beats the a$$ off of dodgy tech like dsl. Go with Virgin.

 

[SPECIAL LOCATION]

Always been with Virgin since the days of Dial-up....

Probably 11 or 12 years now?????

Now obviously Broad bandifiaction has superseded dialing-ups...

But overall good and does the job as they say!!!?

 

[rmc86uk]

Yes cable is much faster than ADSL but we can't get it round our end.

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

 

[Evans Electric]

I also asked the IT Guys at the Law Centre I look after , BT was a big no-no, but Virgin was a unanimous YES .

Thanks everyone.

 

[revjames]

opinions are like armpits - everyone has em and some of them stink...

I was with talk talk (or whoever they were before that) for the last 8 years. Now I have moved I went to BT.

 

[revjames]

Never had an issue with talk talk which is just as well because | am told their call centres are useless and expensive to call! Early days wwith BT but they are so big they have more resources to deal with problems (hopefully)

 

[Apache]

Plus net speak to a real person (albeit yorkie) who is technicalAnd plus net are an owned subsidiary of BT, just better and cheaper!

Where did the 'groan' button go? I was going to point out they are owned by BT

https://www.youtube.com/embed/l_l5ETBRqFU?feature=oembedThe tags have changed to embed Youtube - I typed them manually!

 

[philbas]

OK, not going to go into to much discussion on the providers, I'm with Talk Talk (it used to be Tiscali, untill TalkTalk took them over), to be honest not really had any problems with them. however i do generaly know what I'm doing haveing spent the last 20 years in IT support, the one time I did have to phone the helpline I found then hopeless, I ended up telling them what they needed to do to sort it out

But the cable v ADSL is more interesting

Cable can potentialy run much faster than ADSL, however what you need to realise is your sharing the cable bandwidth with everyone else on the same cable, with ADSL your not shareing.

So if your cable provider says upto 50mb and there are 50 households on that cable, your share will be 1mb, that suddenly doesnt compare very well with the ADSL that gives you 4mb all to yourself, on the other hand if there are only four households on that cable your going to get 12.5mb, thats why cables dont get run to rural areas it's not cost effective for the provider. I took up cable early when NTL introduced it into Kirklees and it was very good, but as other households along the street adopted it i could see my bandwidth drop of almost daily.

The other thing to consider is how much bandwidth do you really need, to be honest if all you use the internet for is email, forums and web browsing you dont need that much, if your useing it for downloading films and music 24 hours a day you need a lot more, so look at what you actually use it for before you pay out for the ultra fast stuff, unless you really need that bandwidth it's a waste of money.

 

[M107]

Started off with AOL Had nothing but trouble & call centre/staff were pants.

moved to BT .... started off nice & cheap but once the 3 months was up the price rocketed & they kept moving the package to the expensive option with out us knowing & the speed dropped off the BB.....cancelled that (not an easy thing to do & BT were sooooooooooooooooo unhelpful)

As a sky subscriber I looked at their BB & upgrading to the HD system, but they wanted (& wouldnt budge) to charge full price for the HD, where as a new subscriber could get it F.O.C

Virgin sent through their promo stuff....looked good so binned sky & moved to Virgin for phone/tv & BB......... no problems to date.......apart from me chopping the cable in the front garden........virgin sent an engineers & fixed it free of charge.

 

[Badger]

Started off with AOL Had nothing but trouble & call centre/staff were pants.moved to BT .... started off nice & cheap but once the 3 months was up the price rocketed & they kept moving the package to the expensive option with out us knowing & the speed dropped off the BB.....cancelled that (not an easy thing to do & BT were sooooooooooooooooo unhelpful)

As a sky subscriber I looked at their BB & upgrading to the HD system, but they wanted (& wouldnt budge) to charge full price for the HD, where as a new subscriber could get it F.O.C

Virgin sent through their promo stuff....looked good so binned sky & moved to Virgin for phone/tv & BB......... no problems to date.......apart from me chopping the cable in the front garden........virgin sent an engineers & fixed it free of charge.

i hope it was rcd protected :slap

 

[ianmacd]

OK, not going to go into to much discussion on the providers, I'm with Talk Talk (it used to be Tiscali, untill TalkTalk took them over), to be honest not really had any problems with them. however i do generaly know what I'm doing haveing spent the last 20 years in IT support, the one time I did have to phone the helpline I found then hopeless, I ended up telling them what they needed to do to sort it out But the cable v ADSL is more interesting

Cable can potentialy run much faster than ADSL, however what you need to realise is your sharing the cable bandwidth with everyone else on the same cable, with ADSL your not shareing.

So if your cable provider says upto 50mb and there are 50 households on that cable, your share will be 1mb, that suddenly doesnt compare very well with the ADSL that gives you 4mb all to yourself, on the other hand if there are only four households on that cable your going to get 12.5mb, thats why cables dont get run to rural areas it's not cost effective for the provider. I took up cable early when NTL introduced it into Kirklees and it was very good, but as other households along the street adopted it i could see my bandwidth drop of almost daily.

The other thing to consider is how much bandwidth do you really need, to be honest if all you use the internet for is email, forums and web browsing you dont need that much, if your useing it for downloading films and music 24 hours a day you need a lot more, so look at what you actually use it for before you pay out for the ultra fast stuff, unless you really need that bandwidth it's a waste of money.

Well you obviously have bad experiences of Virgin. I used to work for NTL and we use to segregate the loops all the time onto new ports on the UBR's. ADSL is a dodgy hack on a 64Kb/s cable where coax can easily run at 100Mb/s.

And FYI:

Thats 50Mb/s from Virgin. Never had a speed issue on Virgin, EVER, and I have had their cable modem for 10+ years. I also have ADSL and that is sooo random.

 

[Sidewinder]

Never tried this before!

These were our Virgin size L results just a few minutes ago.

This is via a Win7 pc running over our WiFi, with a couple of other pc's surfing over the WiFi at the same time with a couple of other devices also connected (Wii & TV)

D/L seems OK, U/L seems a bit slow!





Added Pingtest!

 

[Manator]

Speed tests are all very good but only as an indication, there are more things going on than just the speed. You have line quality " chatter" which can bring down the constant "ping", then there is the connections through various servers which effects your speed and ping.For normal internet use everything appears to be ok, but if you do play on line games for instance you will notice some very weird things. All signals sent and received are often determined by the server you connect to, so having a greater bandwidth is better than having a super fast connection, interpolation is effected by your computers ability to process the information being sent and received. speedtest.net do have a ping test as well as the download speed tests, have a look at that and see what quality line you have, it should be A for the best quality.

 

[Badger]

---------- Post Auto-Merged at 14:17 ---------- Previous post was made at 14:12 ----------

 

[ianmacd]

Speed tests are all very good but only as an indication, there are more things going on than just the speed. You have line quality " chatter" which can bring down the constant "ping", then there is the connections through various servers which effects your speed and ping.For normal internet use everything appears to be ok, but if you do play on line games for instance you will notice some very weird things. All signals sent and received are often determined by the server you connect to, so having a greater bandwidth is better than having a super fast connection, interpolation is effected by your computers ability to process the information being sent and received. speedtest.net do have a ping test as well as the download speed tests, have a look at that and see what quality line you have, it should be A for the best quality.

True for DSL tech but not so true of cable. Because the cable is less affected by environmental factors (induced emf, crosstalk, datagram jitter, etc..), when implemented well is a better tech for consistency. Virgin, however, can over subscribe the loops so can lead to contention but that is no different to every dsl provider anyway at the exchange contended onto one tunnel to the ISP. Best way to pick a dsl provider is one that has not many customers in your exchange so its not over contended.

Retested:

And thats with emule running too which means my connection gets packet shaped.