# Broadband ?



## ETCHY (Aug 3, 2004)

Hello

I'm thinking of getting Broadband internet access (currently got dial up) any thoughts as to who's best / who to avoid ?

Cheers

Dave


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## Silver Hawk (Dec 2, 2003)

Dave,

There was a discussion around this a few weeks (?months) back. General consensus was that BT was probably one of the best on reliability grounds. And if you have a reliable service, then having good or poor support is immaterial.

I'm with BT...my company pays for it. But if I needed to pay for it, I would still go with BT. I have had no downtime since taking it up in Aug 2005.

Cheers

Paul


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## MIKE (Feb 23, 2003)

Had no problems with Tiscali in the year I have had it.

The pages in the help section of their web site sorted out the few minor problems I had in getting started.

Don't know what the current offers are but I pay Â£20 for the internet and all standard phone calls a month.

Mike


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## Jonmurgie (Feb 11, 2007)

You pay your money and make your choice... everyone I know who has every had or tired BT Broadband has had rubbish service and poor levels of bandwidth etc. so IMO they are one to avoid









For me, I've used Telewest/NTL at home for over 6 years and although they are regarded as expensive they level of service and the consistent supply of decent boadband. Though it's not available everywhere so for a few of my mates/family they use Tiscalli which does seem to be pretty good and fairly cheap. They also do deals with phone calls too etc.

I've had varying luck with Business Broadband at my office... it seems to be a completely different level of service for that!


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## PhilM (Nov 5, 2004)

I'm not going to recommend BT (see ISP thread )







Question for you Dave, have you got Sky as I know they are offering Broadband now with the basic Sky package for Â£26.99 a month


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## Who. Me? (Jan 12, 2007)

JonMurgie and PhilM are right, BT are cr*p. I'm on '8MB' (predicted 6MB) Option 3 and I generally get 1.5MB or less (and I'm only half a mile from a major exchange and only normally use the interweb at weekends and after 8pm).

When I upgraded from 4MB the speed didn't increase at all despite loads of calls. After two months, I threatened to cancel citing breach of contract. 24 hours later it suddenly went up to 6MB, stayed like that for a couple of months and then dropped right down to 150KB(!) and stayed like that for a fortnight. I threatened to cancel again, and lo and behold, it went back up to 6MB 24 hours later.

It now floats around 1 - 1.5MB and I reckon it's a rip-off. If I'm going to get cr*p service, I might as well be with Sky. At least that way I'd only be paying Â£10.00/month extra for cr*p service.

I don't know anyone who gets their predicted speed out of BT, at any time.

Ahem. Rant over









<Edit: Funky speed-tester here: http://www.speedtest.net/index.php>


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## Boxbrownie (Aug 11, 2005)

Thats a really cool speed test.......I got AOL, have had for years now and I must say even though everyone seems to slate it, I have had great service and virtually no offliners ever!

Best regards David


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## murph (Aug 14, 2006)

Zen are supposedly quite good and Andrews & Arnold or Clara used to be good when I used them but none of these are cheap if you are a prolific downloader.

Entanet resellers are the latest thing for people who don't wan to tie themselves down to more than a 1 month contract.


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## MarkF (Jul 5, 2003)

Whatever you do don't use Orange.

Orange Probs

They are a bloody nightmare, I have been trying to get my mac code for over a week, they will lie easily to try and stop you leaving them. It is a shame because I never had a problem with Freeserve and neither with Wanadoo but since Orange took over the service has been dire.


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## murph (Aug 14, 2006)

MarkF said:


> Whatever you do don't use Orange.
> 
> Orange Probs
> 
> They are a bloody nightmare, I have been trying to get my mac code for over a week, they will lie easily to try and stop you leaving them. It is a shame because I never had a problem with Freeserve and neither with Wanadoo but since Orange took over the service has been dire.


They'll give you it backdated after a couple of weeks so you haven't got time left to pick an contact a new isp. That's what happened to me with pipex so I had to phone them back once I had the email to cancel the MAC code. The 30 days was up over a week ago and everything was still working but just yesterday/today they decide to cease my service anyway.

Then they come away with stories like their computers aren't working properly (every time I've phoned they have said that except this evening) and I have to wait until after 6pm, probably so they can all slip off home by then time you're sure it isn't going to come back on.

My previous ISP, clara, used to have support staff available 24 hours and even when you phoned in the middle of the night they usually had the problem sorted while you waited on the phone.


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## Mrcrowley (Apr 23, 2003)

I typed elsewhere but..................

Yesterday Sky offered me their choose your own channels for 15 quid. I quizzed re BB For extra tenner I get 16MB! Didnt know it existed.


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## mattjg01 (Jul 3, 2006)

I used Freedom 2 Surf for a while. It was great while it worked, fairly cheap and good speeds. However, when I started having connection problems it was nigh on impossible to speak to someone and I never got the issue resolved. Instead switched to NewNet and so far have had no problems. Hoping not to have any problems but at least if I do NewNet have longer customer service hours.


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## Who. Me? (Jan 12, 2007)

Remember this post?

Well my '8MB MaxDSL' BT Total Broadband connection is currently running at a whopping 130kbps (yes 130kilo_bits_ per second). This morning it was down to 86kbps!

BT Broadband 'help'? No help at all (again). Have you cleared your cookies? Can you turn your firewall off? Is your hub plugged into the master socket behind the face plate? Have you tried changing the microfilter? etc etc etc.

Their last excuse was genius ...'there must be lots of people using the network at the moment can you test the speed again every hour and call us back?'

Yes, 'cause I have all weekend to sit here waiting for my connection speed _not_ to improve









Even at a worst case 50:1 contention on the old 2MB ADSL service, BT set 400kBps as the minimum acceptable 'peak time' speed.

I am sick to death of their excuses. BT = :*****: s.

Rant 2 over.


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## pg tips (May 16, 2003)

I just did speed test and got 1942 kb/s dowload and 193 kb/s upload.

Thankfully I have no idea what that means









ps I am on ntl digital cable and this was on wifi on the laptop but I think my desktop had very similar results when I tried it last week.


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## pg tips (May 16, 2003)

OK I knew I shouldn't have looked at that speedtest site.

what is the difference between a kilobit and a kilobyte and a megabit and a megabyte









All I know is I remember those days on dial up when the Friday thread sometimes took until saturday to load


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## Who. Me? (Jan 12, 2007)

pg tips said:


> All I know is I remember those days on dial up when the Friday thread sometimes took until saturday to load


I know, it's taking ages to download all the posted pictures











pg tips said:


> what is the difference between a kilobit and a kilobyte and a megabit and a megabyte


If they're using the correct notation, a kilobit is 1000bits (it's different if you're talking about storage e.g. hard disk space), so 1942k_b_ps = 1.942M_b_ps (which is what connection speeds are usuall quoted in).

(I've miss-posted above, BT should be providing me with >6.5Mbps on an 8Mbps line, I'm getting <135kbps (0.135Mbps). Still unacceptable, even by their (poor) standards!)

Strange how this problem only happens when there is someone occupying next door. The flat next door is a rental, and it's on a retainer by a big insurance company, so it's empty most of the time. The moment someone moves in, the connection speed goes to pot, but BT reckon there aren't any problems with the line


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## jasonm (Nov 22, 2003)

Cut and pasted... ( Also known as 'doing a Griff')







( just kidding mate  )

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. Bits, Bytes, Gigs and Megs; wossitallabout?

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. one bit

a binary 1 or 0.

Literally, either positive or negative.

The smallest unit of storage.

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1B (Byte)

1 ASCII character

a single letter, number, punctuation mark, etc.

made from 8 bits,

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1KB (Kilobyte)

1000 bytes or 1000 characters

roughly a 200 word essay (assuming a 5 char/word average) probably less than this in fact, due to spaces and punctuation.

the old 5.25 inch floppies held 512k

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1MB (Megabyte)

1,000,000 (million) bytes

the Bible is about 4.5 meg, in raw text form

1.44 Megabytes is a floppy disk

30 seconds of mp3 is about a meg (depends heavily on bitrate and other factors)

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1GB (Gigabyte)

1,000,000,000 (billion) bytes

a CD is 3/4 of a Gb (or sometimes 4/5, at 800Mb)

Around 260 mp3's of varied qualities and lengths will total a gig

My first PC in 1996ish had a 0.9Gb Harddrive. (FYI, it cost Â£1500, and had a 75Mhz processor, 8Mb of RAM, later upgraded to 24.)

My combined harddrive space today is 180Gb, and that's fairly big by today's standards.

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1TB (Terabyte)

1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) bytes

a small research library 1

while it -is- possible to have a Tb of storage by using, say, four 250Gb drives, AFAIK it's not yet possible to buy a single harddrive holding 1Tb, but we should be seeing harddrives this size in about 2006.

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1PB (Petabyte)

1,000,000,000,000,000 (thousand trillion) bytes

1/2 of all U.S. research libraries 1

one thousand terabytes.

Or around 3500 of the highest spec harddrives availiable today.

If my maths is correct (which it very likely isn't), Moore's law would have us beleive that we won't see this kind of power until around the year 2500. However, I'd predict that with nanotech and possibly some other technologies, we could be seeing these kind of numbers being talked about a lot sooner that that.

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1EB (Exabyte)

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (million trillion) bytes

5x all printed material, (ever)1

uh.. whoa.

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1ZB (Zettabyte)

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (billion trillion) bytes

all the grains of sand (maybe?)1

ah. whoa.

bytes, megs, gigs etc explained. 1YB (Yottabyte)

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (trillion trillion) bytes

number of AOL CDs produced since 1997

(that's a joke, by the way)

I mean, honestly, at today's prices (250Gb~Â£70), 1Yb of harddrive storage would cost Â£280,000,000,000,000. (280 TRILLION pounds).

I couldn't even get that kind of money by helping those poor politicians in Nigeria.

Q: How long would it take someone to download a one- yottabyte file using a 28.8 baud modem?

A: 11 trillion years.


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## pg tips (May 16, 2003)

Ah so a byte is 8 bits









does my 1942kb/s and aparently that's in bits not bytes mean I'm anywhere near what ntl says is a 2 meg connection?









Life was so much easier on a 1K ZX81, I remember the problems I had tring to get the 16K "wobble" memory to stay in place long enough to actually load a game fron the cassette tape!


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## Who. Me? (Jan 12, 2007)

From here:- http://www.speedguide.net/conversion.php

"Notes: Keep in mind in data communication 1 kilobit = 1000 bits, while in data storage 1 Kilobyte = 1024 Bytes."

Check what NTL quote, that's where I cocked-up above, BT quote 8Mbit not 8MByte, I'm guessing that NTL do the same. Your upload speed makes sense for a 2Mb download speed, from what I've seen.

I still can't believe that, as end-users, we have to educate ourselves in broadband communication, to avoid getting ripped off.

The definitive speedtester for non-cable, non LLU broadband customers is www.speedtester.bt.com (it's BT wholesale's speed tester and most ISPs that aren't Local Loop Unbundled (LLU) will buy from BT Wholesale).

Non BT customers might need to google to find out how to work it, as you have to log-out from your ISP and log in with a different account for it to work properly (or something







).


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## Who. Me? (Jan 12, 2007)

BT's own HomeHub (think it's a modified Speedtouch modem). (Edit, connected wirelessly, but no improvement if I hook up the ethernet cable)

The stats look OK, as far as I can tell (pasted below in case anyone knows better).

Surprise, surprise, BT's Broadband Helpdesk claim to be having technical difficulties









Stats (have reset the modem again this morning, hence the short uptime)...

Uptime: 0 days, 2:24:24

Modulation: G.992.1 annex A

Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]: 448 / 6,816

Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [MB/MB]: 8.44 / 42.42

Output Power (Up/Down) [dBm]: 12.0 / 19.5

Line Attenuation (Up/Down) [dB]: 18.0 / 36.0

SN Margin (Up/Down) [dB]: 20.0 / 13.5

Vendor ID (Local/Remote): TMMB / TSTC

Loss of Framing (Local/Remote): 0 / 0

Loss of Signal (Local/Remote): 0 / 0

Loss of Power (Local/Remote): 0 / 0

Loss of Link (Remote): 0

Error Seconds (Local/Remote): 0 / 0

FEC Errors (Up/Down): 0 / 3,406

CRC Errors (Up/Down): 0 / 8

HEC Errors (Up/Down): 0 / 6


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