New Broadband Supplier

[SgtFury]

Ok, lately things have been a bit strange with Eclipse broadband supply speed seems varying and even some discconects, plus there seems to be a lot better deals out there at the moment. So I am thinking of swapping supplier.

Anyone have any reccommendations?

I don't tend to do any downloading except patches and what happens during games. So what would be a good download limit in a month for me im not sure. Speed wise 1-2 is fine. But I would like to pay less than £20 a month if poss.

Any ideas?

 

[Piacular]

Oh, out of interest did you have disconnects last night? Mine dropped about 6 times .

I'm with Nildram and they seem to randomly give me a fast connection. Sometimes it's 8, or 5.6, right now it's 4.8. I'm only paying for 1 .

 

[SgtFury]

Yeah it was last night. Came home it was down. Had to pull the plug on my router 3 times to get it back.

Plus speeds seem.... slower. Need to check them really.
Plus there's a lot of talk about Eclipse's future that dosen't look good.

 

[DeZmond]

I *suppose* in my position I should be recommending ntl broadband, which is 2MB for £17.99 a month... and if I remember correctly in my work I've encountered accounts based in Wirral... no download limits, either. The thing to consider though is that it's based on a 12 month contract, but then so are a lot of broadband packages these days.

I say I *should* recommend it because I work in customer service... therefore I can see some of the problems which can occasionally occur, although the volumes of calls we get are only a small fraction (around 1.5%) of the whole ntl customer base. Like any company it has it's problems but then, that's why you have contacts like me .

As for other suppliers, I don't know too much beyond the names - BT, Sky, Bulldog et all, but since I've not used them I can't give an opinion for or against them.

 

[SgtFury]

No chance of NTL we can't get it where we are... even though they keep posting things through our letterbox asking us if we would like it.

We keep phoning them back too saying we would like it and they tell us we can't

 

[DeZmond]

Yeah they aren't laying many new cables so if you don't have it atm, that's pretty much it for the time being! One other broadband supplier to try is virgin.net, they also merged with ntl but they work over ADSL, and no 12 month contract if I remember correctly. I don't know much about their packages but from what I've heard they have a good reputation.

 

[HotStuff]

I recently got upgraded from 2Mb to 8Mb ADSL. It constantly disconnected every 30 mins or so for about a week. You won't have seen me online in the middle of August for this reason. It did eventually calm down and I now have a stable connection of about 6Mb. My provider told me that when lines are upgraded you can expect a bit of fluctuation of connection speed and random disconnections while the exchange server decides the optimal speed for your line. Apparently it is normal to have upto 2 weeks of this problem. I stuck with it and now I am fine. Hope this helps!

 

[thatbloke]

myself and thatbird are on BT broadband. This is the 8Mbps connection that works over DSL. It also gives you free calls using the BT broadband phone and home hub thingy that you receive with it... (though we still haven't got the phone due to supply issues).

We do have the occasional disconnection issue with it, but I think that is more with the router (the BT Home Hub thing you may have seen advertised on TV) or the phone socket than the service.

It is 26.99per month, but I believe that is also inclusive of your line rental, as we get it all on the same bill and at the moment we are also receiving it discounted too (our last bill was just over £12).

Connection speed is good... had a little trouble with wireless but I think that is more to do with my wireless card not liking WEP encryption (which it uses by default) more than anything else.

There are other (cheaper) BT broadband packages out there, so take a look on the BT website. Our service is capped at 40GB per month which BT see as "fair usage" so we'll see what happens with it from there really.

 

[elDiablo]

Bulldog Broadband are a good service, once you get connected. I was on their 8Meg connection last year, with no disconnects on their part. However, it took 2 months to install.

Moved to a new house this year, and thought I'd go for their 16Meg connection. It's been 2 months and still no activation... They will be getting a VERY rude phone call this afternoon.

BeThere internet looks good, and I've heard good things about it from the people who have it, however, they pushed the trail in the Southampton area back from Aug 1st to Oct 30th (or something), so I decided not to wait for them.