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UK Broadband provider

timmyb said:
What do you do on the web? I (and my sister) will mainly be browsing, emailling and downloading some songs.
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I use Bittorrent, listen to web radio, download music quite a lot and general web browsing. I would say I use slightly more than the average user, but I'm certainly not a heavy user.

It's really hard to say how much you will need in your circumstances. 'downloading some songs' could mean an album a day, which might make up 1-3gb a month. 'some' could also mean 10 albums a day. Programs like bittorrent where you are uploading mean that if you are a good seeder, a big disk image might use 10gb of bandwidth.

My advice is that if it is a bandwidth limited service you make sure its on a monthly contract and not a yearly one.
 
By some I mean 2 or 3 songs a week, (I prefer to buy my albums as CDs.)

I have been reading the FAQ on Tiscali and they say they don't support Macs. As I understand it, this just means that the drivers for the USB modem only work on windows but if I have an ethernet modem, I won't have any problems. Could any Tiscali users confirm this for me.
 
Most ISP's say they don't work with or support the Mac platform. As you stated, it's largely down to the USB modem drivers being flakey (at best!) under OS X. USB modems are a horrible invention in general on Mac or PC.

They also say this to get out of providing help and support to Mac users.

I'm not a Tiscali user, but I'm confident that any ADSL product will work with a mac as long as you have the correct hardware and the knowledge to set it up yourself.
 
It hasn't been posted in this thread yet, but http://www.adslguide.org is a great resource for choosing an ISP. Every ISP has a discussion forum on there and you can see customers opinions and any issues they might currently be having. I should have mentioned it earlier, my apologies!
 
TMA said:
The reason is that whilst they are cheap, they are introducing bandwidth shaping on ALL products (basic or premier) This affects P2P speeds (e.g Bittorrent)
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I don't use P2P so will it affect me?
 
raggedjimmi said:
I'm with Pipex, so are a bunch of people i know. seem to be very popular and from my end of things; have been great. not sure exactly what we're paying but its the 512kbps unlimited bandwidth service. we're getting a free upgrade to 1mbps soon, but alas, us folk in the hills have to wait :D
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I have been on this Pipex service too, and have been patiently awaiting my upgrade to 1 megabit since the beginning of June. It didn't come.

Instead at the weekend they upgraded us to 2 megabits. :D :D No idea why, and I have no intention of asking.
 
Just about to order the new Ibook (as soon as John Lewis get them in) and then get broadband installed at home.

Looking at Demon and you get a usb modem but what equipment would I need to purchase to get my internet connection working wirelessly at home??? Im just don't know my airports express from my aiport base station from my wireless routers!!!! :(

any advice is greatly appreciated.
 
I'm with Pipex and they are pretty good. Constant max rates of download, no slowdown during the evening when most people are on. It's very reliable. I've only known to get disconnected for about 5 minutes at around midnight on Sundays. This has only happened maybe five times in my last three years of usage but I guess they do some quick maintenance then.

I tried switching to Bulldog but it just took too long and they weren't very helpful. I cancelled and was thoroughly annoyed. Pipex have been in my bad books recently too! They have the rollout of the network-wide upgrades. My block of flats was built in 1997 and I live around 800 metres, as the crow flies, from the telephone exchange. Pipex insist my line can not handle anything more than 512kbps. I've sent two emails calling BS on this and they haven't replied to either.

I'm off to uni in a couple of months which'll make 512 kbps sound pitiful so I'm not that concerned.
 
I have BT, but I am getting evermore frustrated with them.
Firstly because I purchased broadband two years ago before it was limited and now they've slipped a 30GB limit on my broadband without telling me.
Secondly, they keep saying they've tried to upgrade mt 1mb service to 2mb, but say I'm too far from the exchange evn though every other UK service provider can provide 2mb to my area, and even some of my neighbours have 2mb from service providers such as Bulldog and UK Online, I would like to change my ISP, but I cannot afford to have a weeks woth of downtime and possibly an unreliable ISP.
 
gangst said:
...Secondly, they keep saying they've tried to upgrade mt 1mb service to 2mb, but say I'm too far from the exchange evn though every other UK service provider can provide 2mb to my area...
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It's not about distance from your exchange, although that is often a good indicator. The quality of signal is what matters, and this can be different from house to house. You could be 20 meters away from a house that is capable of 8mbit ADSL but you might only have a good enough phone line for 512kbit. This could be because of decaying or damaged lines, being on a different line to your local exchange (you could be geologically 1 mile from your exchange but the line to it might run 3 or 4 miles, for example) or it might be that your signal strength is borderline.

It's also worth bearing in mind that in most areas, whichever ISP you choose goes through a BT product anyway. In these cases (99% of the time) BT decide what the maximum speed your line will take is. Switching to a different ISP would therefor make no difference.

Since it is BT though, it is entirely possible they've made a mistake.
 
damned if you do, damned if you don't

Looking at these posts one thing is clear. Whoever you go with, it's pretty much luck of the draw.

I think researching the actual capabilities of your line and maybe even what your neighbours run could be more beneficial than a particular ISP. After all, if the area you live in has screwed cables, then it won't matter if its 512kb or 10MB, your connection will probably be terrible.

BT is a reasonable bet, seeing as they sort out the majoirty of phone lines in the UK, but their domestic packages suck for a heavy user and as we can see from this thread, plenty of people have bad views of them.

Still would never (try to) go with Bulldog again though, despite the rec in a recent post in this thread!
 
Bulldog Broadband

Hi....i noticed earlier in the threads that people ripped bulldog for their customer service. I work in the First Line Technical Support department of the Hartlepool call center and i have found that BT are the reasoning behind all the problems at bulldog and at the minute customer service calls are being passed to a different department, i know this because i have to do another full day of training just to be able to do it..........the training team i was on where only trained for a week but they are currently changing it to two weeks as one week is not enough.

So its not completely bulldogs fault and lets be honest who else offers 8meg broadband even if it is quite expensive.
I am currently with NTL and have never had any problems for about three years now maybe more and im looking forward to being upgraded to ten meg at the end of this or next year :D

Scott
 
The matter of switching the phone lines correctly, from a BT line to a Bulldog line, has been primarily down to BT.

However, from personal experience, the customer service was non-existant. Massive call waiting times, 1/10 response to emails, poor knowldege of staff, both technical and basic and even an excuse that they could not call back as they did not have phones. Even if that's true it's still a joke. communications between sales staff and CS staff was also non-existant with each telling us different things

That for me is why I cannot recommend them. I know a lot of the problems were due to lack of actual staff, but no company should do a huge advertising campaign and then be caught short when it works.

Smacks of poor management and corporate structure with the rot starting right at the top. Once all the cr*p reaches the ground level staff, they are in no position to deal with it.

we never even got connected with Bulldog. Two months and they couldn't do it. Pipex sorted it from scratch in 6 days. The difference in all-round service was unbelievable.
 
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