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Asking for the imposable...

Tags:
  • Broadband
  • Internet Service Providers
Last response: in General UK & Ireland Discussions
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October 2, 2009 5:12:03 PM

After the (latest) Virgin Media broadband fiasco of earlier this week :cry:  , I have finally had enough :kaola:  ; so I'm looking for an ADSL service provider that is reliable, doesn't block or otherwise play silly-bu**ers with access to torrents, Tor (etc, etc), and doesn't cost too much...

My phone line has been tested (by BT) and will max-out at 2-2.5 Meg, so paying for anything faster is probably a wast.

Anyone got any recomendations for ISP's to look at and ones to avoid?

More about : imposable

October 2, 2009 6:00:04 PM

Orange have served me well for the last 8 years plus - currently free if you have a mobile phone contract with them. I beleive 02 do a similar deal also.

Sky offer upto 8 meg.... depending on area.

Tiscali are cheap... though sometimes they are a little naughty with bandwidth shaping (preventing peer to peer)

at the end of the day aloo baring the able providers use BT's landlines to run their broadband down. The only difference being who has installed their equipment at the exchange.
October 6, 2009 6:20:43 AM

At the moment I'm leaning towards trying O2, I just wish I could try the service for a month or two before agreeing to a 12 month contract.
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October 6, 2009 3:58:32 PM

I'm with O2 at the moment. I had the same doubts about settling for a 12 month contract when I looked at them, but they were recommended to me by somebody else and so far they haven't put a foot wrong. I'm syncing at about 8500kbps stable. Customer service should you ever need to use them has been great. Can't fault them so far!

Also if your a BitTorrent user as you said above, the generous upload speed and lack of download limitations will probably swing it for you ;) 
October 6, 2009 4:08:42 PM

Placed the order with O2 today, I currently have a Pay-G mobile with them so I can get land-line BroadBand for only £7.34 a month (with the first 3 months free!).

I'll make a point of posting back when I get connected...
October 6, 2009 6:40:37 PM

Sounds good to me! And you should get the speed your line is capable of with them. Good luck!
October 14, 2009 6:57:12 PM

Got connected today, so far it's syncing at 7.7 Meg download and 1.2 Meg upload (so much for BT's line test), won't get a chance to give it a good hammering till the weekend, so far it's all been pretty painless...
October 14, 2009 7:40:23 PM

if ure exchange is llu enabled then you can switch to upto 24mb adsl, its a shame cable didnt work out im on there 50mb line and its awesome no throttling what so ever :D 
October 14, 2009 7:49:43 PM

I recommend Virgin Media, I've getting 10MB/S speed full, no problems except STM (Traffic management). If you DL too much you get capped/throttled.
Btw, Virgin Media is behind of my house ;) 
You shouldn't have problems with them, I never had problems with them, ever.
October 14, 2009 9:30:06 PM

You could try using an iplate - depending on the phone sockets installedi n your home. designed to give you a more stable line and in 8 out of 10 cases increased speeds (according to BT)
October 14, 2009 11:57:52 PM

core i7 ownage said:
I recommend Virgin Media, I've getting 10MB/S speed full, no problems except STM (Traffic management). If you DL too much you get capped/throttled.
Btw, Virgin Media is behind of my house ;) 
You shouldn't have problems with them, I never had problems with them, ever.

same here except i get
October 19, 2009 6:23:36 PM

core i7 ownage said:
I recommend Virgin Media, I've getting 10MB/S speed full, no problems except STM (Traffic management). If you DL too much you get capped/throttled.
Btw, Virgin Media is behind of my house ;) 
You shouldn't have problems with them, I never had problems with them, ever.


Wythenshaw? You have my symapthy.

BTW they do perform traffic shaping even if you don't push the limits.
October 20, 2009 6:40:09 PM

ONLY 75%?? Business users used to get more throughput on a 2Mb link than the domestic users did on a 10Mb due to the contention rates.
October 20, 2009 10:26:56 PM

contention only effects you if your neighbors are raping the net at the same time i can always hit 6200kb/s only if there end can keep up which is the problem most of the time
October 21, 2009 11:02:16 AM

core i7 ownage said:
I recommend Virgin Media.


Why are you recommending the very same provider that the OP is having problems with?
October 21, 2009 2:31:00 PM

Virgin Media varies from one part of the country to another, where I live (south coast) the service is rubbish, in the middle of the country (arround Birmingham) or around London the system is a lot more up-to-date, they have the luxury of servers that arn't steam powered.

My only grumble with O2 (so far) is a modem that needs to be power-cycled if I don't use it for an hour, power-cycling seems to be the only way I can get it to re-connect a dropped connection, currently waiting for a reply from tech support...
October 21, 2009 2:51:27 PM

MrLinux said:
My only grumble with O2 (so far) is a modem that needs to be power-cycled if I don't use it for an hour, power-cycling seems to be the only way I can get it to re-connect a dropped connection


Sounds like O2 have a problem with stale sessions - they're dropping the data link at their end after a period of inactivity but not dropping the whole connection. You then try and reconnect and it bombs because the exchange thinks you're already connected. The only way then to fix it is a full power off for a couple of minutes as you've evidently seen.

Do you have any keep-alive settings in your router?
October 21, 2009 4:54:41 PM

That makes sense, the Modem settings are pretty dumbed down, the only control I have (in the Modem) is a standard or extended firewall, being paranoid I have it set to extended; on the PC end (currently running XP) I normaly have everything other than TCP/IP disabled, if I enable QoS the connection does seem to be more reliable...
October 21, 2009 5:27:00 PM

QoS is Quality of Service and (I think) it's just about proper packet management to stop huge continuous streams of data (like downloading) interrupting tiny bursts (like network discovery, IM, web browsing).

Under my PPPoE settings, I have an option for "always on" which, in turn, disables the Idle Timeout box. See if you have something similar, maybe set idle timeout to -1 or 3600 seconds (10 hours).

Basically you want your modem to keep requesting data once in a while to stop the server thinking you've fecked oof.
October 24, 2009 12:52:14 PM

Here's my test:


And For ping test:



And tell me what do you think?
October 27, 2009 12:57:40 PM

My broadband speed is similar to that
December 8, 2009 4:35:36 PM

core i7 ownage said:
Omg you live in Birmingham, I do too!



Did you think you were the only one then !!!
!