UK ISP recommendations needed

[Harrison]

I'm looking to switch my ISP within the next month and wondered what recommendations all of the UK members here would give me to look at?

Requirements are a static IP and uncapped (unlimited) data. A free ADSL router would also be useful.

Our phoneline is also not that great and only supports 3-5Mbit/s ADSL at the most (when the wind is blowing in the right direction) so I don't need any 24Mbit ADSL2+ packages as they wouldn't provide any advantage over a cheaper 8MB max package.

I had been considering Be but their basic ADSL broadband has gone up to £17 when I just checked. I seem to remember it used to be cheaper than that... about £13 I think.

Is anyone using Be? And would you recommend them? Also is it worth taking their line rental at the same time for £10 a month?

What others would you all recommend?

 

[StrontiumDog]

www.bethere.co.uk - Be Value package is what you seek as it has both unlimited upload and download's

Used since 2009, highly recommended - only one outage to present day and you get a free Thompson v585 ADSL router with wireless

Keep BT line if possible - better engineer's

Bonus: If you get a present Be user to recommend you, you can get 1 month rental free - PM for deets

 

[Chinners]

Are you looking for cheap or quality?

Ignoring the "unlimited" bit of your clause, I would certainly check IDNet.

I was in a similar situation to what you seem to be in (no LLU or cable providers), and after messing around with a few cheaper ISP's (Freedom2Surf, o2) I paid a bit extra and went with these people.

Depending on how you use your bandwidth, IDNet have truly unlimited upload at any time, but limited downloads (40gig peak, 120gig offpeak from memory), which was brilliant for ratio torrent sites. Clever use of the scheduler in uTorrent, and a bit of patience meant I never went over the limits set out.

You can also have choose priority traffic, which gives you faster upload speeds and priority over the rest of your village / exchange. Static IP is free. Support is UK based, and email support questions usually answered within the hour.

It does come at a premium price, but I certainly considered it to be worth the extra.

The only reason I am not with these guys now is my surfing habits have changed, house move etc. I can get a slightly better deal with PlusNet with my surfing habits.

 

[Harrison]

Thanks guys. I will have a look tomorrow at these recommendations.

And cheers Blankstare. I might indeed take you up on that. So you would recommend getting the Be Value Package but not getting their line rental and instead sticking with BT for that?

I am looking for quality, as I do use the connection for freelance work, and need a big cap or unlimited cap for server backups as these can sometimes total 2GB per download so can quickly eat into a monthly quota (actual time to download isn't as important), but equally I am on a budget (with a baby on the way) so don't want to be spending more than I need each month.

@Chinners. What happens if you go over their limits? Throttling or charges for over use? With my current ISP I get charged 50p per GB if I go over the caps and would like to find one that doesn't do that.

 

[fitzsteve]

BE are awesome - nuff said

 

[D.B]

Actually, if you have ADSL2 (up to 24Mb) your overhead loss of connection speed will be slightly more, making your actual connection speed faster slightly. It's the way ADSL2 works over ADSL.

Also, if you want cheapness, go for Sky Broadband. It's free for the first 3 months atm, even unlimited. Chuck your phone calls at them & U/L BB is 7.50 a month.

 

[StrontiumDog]

@ Harrison

Indeed, take the value package but keep your BT line. BeThere engineers are hired direct from BT anyway so it makes no difference who fixes any line problems.

BT call centre is in the UK but BeThere's is in Bulgaria ... make of that what you will lol!

BeThere also have a comprehensive forum and a specialised user group on call 24/7 - If they can't fix a problem with your broadband then nobody can.

 

[D.B]

Afaik, all ISP representatives are BT Openreach Employees. It's one of the ways we all get screwed as Users. :|

 

[Chinners]

@Chinners. What happens if you go over their limits? Throttling or charges for over use? With my current ISP I get charged 50p per GB if I go over the caps and would like to find one that doesn't do that.

Like I say, they are not the cheapest. I was on the home pro which hits in at £35/month. It is expensive yes, but I have just checked, you get 60gb peak download and 300gb off peak download. Truely unlimited uploads at a higher speed (I often got 46-50kb/s upload and I was about 3 miles from the exchange). Also there is no pesky traffic shaping. It all depends on exactly how you are using / abusing the service, and if you can fit your downloads to their off-peak times.

Yeah, it was a bit messy, but I had FAR more traffic going out of my house than in. Not being tied in to a 12 month contract was great too, just a rolling 1 month contract.

Going over your download limit, you get charged around a quid/gig:

http://www.idnet.net/solutions/home/broadband/

(deffo expensive, but I managed to avoid it)

If you can get a LLU ISP, you certainly will get better deals. From my experience (particular o2), on LLU they were rated highly, on NON-LLU, they were dreadful.

Again, with LLU - Sky will offer unlimited traffic, but if you are not on one of their exchanges, they add the clause "unlimited = 40gb/month". I don't know if be are like that.

---------- Post added at 17:39 ---------- Previous post was at 17:35 ----------

I think basically I am trying to say, read all the small print, work out what each ISP considers unlimited. I did my initial research about 2 years ago, so the landscape may have changed slightly. Certainly prioritised traffic and no traffic shaping are a deffo for professional use & vpns

Now, as I do not need the bandwidth allocation, I don't need the plan offered.

 

[Zetr0]

I have had a bit of a flakey start to my BT business broadband here.

At the moment I pay just under £30 a month (inc. VAT) and this is for an "unlimited" and "unmetered" serivce (up and down) without any FUP (Fair User Policy) at the moment "they" are upgrading the exchange, from that point I am instantly upto 24MBit (stuck on 8MBit atm)

My package includes an extra support package so my call center for problems isn't in another country and their is the promise of all issues resolved within 24 hours.

I also have 5 static IP address with a contention ratio of (and you wont believe this) 1:1 =)

theres also some other stuff in the package that I have forgotten... the product is good, but costly, I have preferential treatment at peak times and if it wans't for them upgrading the old wind-up / clock-work exchanges up here, then I wouldn't of had that nearly two week nightmare of no interenet... I got a re-embursement and a free month out of it though - so not to bad...

 

[StrontiumDog]

For the record ... BeThere are unlimited on both downloads and uploads (subject to fair usage). I've done over 70GB a month in the past and never got a letter or a nice request to slow down

These days, I'm more of a mere 35-40GB per month d/l now

 

[morcar]

dont go to talk talk its the biggest mistake i have done moving from aol. i get drop outs and all kinds of ****e from them

 

[Witcher1979]

BT 300gb usage each month I average just over 200gb a month, damn Steam and other game downloading services.

EDIT:

Even better they got rid of it.

'Hi everyone

Yes, this is true! and BT Infinity customers will benefit from the removal of Fair Usage Policy (FUP) controls when they begin to be removed from April 2011. Once removed, heavy user customers will be able to download/stream as much as they wish without having their speeds restricted.

BT will remove the FUP controls currently applied to customers with ‘atypical’ usage. Today atypical users are restricted at 300GB usage and account for less than 0.5% of the BT customer base. BT will not target any individuals with restrictions based on usage levels. However, we still have traffic management policies that will restrict certain applications / protocols, such as P2P, when the network is busy.

As BT continues to invest in the network and network bandwidth we can now remove these restrictions and ensure the experience of the wider customer base.

(Note that charges will still apply for going over limits on BT Total Broadband Options 1&2 and BT Infinity Option 1 but traffic will not be managed.)

Thx
Kerry
BTCare Community Manager'

Also includes total broadband

 

[User1301]

I had Eclipse for quite some time and thought they were brilliant (before I went BT Infinity). Have a lok at them too.

Oh - and if your phone line isn't brilliant - grab yourself an iPlate. They work very well for everyone I know who has tried one. Myself included at the time (don't work with Infinity).

http://www.shop.bt.com/products/bt-iplate---bt-broadband-accelerator-58LT.html

Cheers

John

 

[D.B]

BT 300gb usage each month I average just over 200gb a month, damn Steam and other game downloading services.

EDIT:

Even better they got rid of it.

'Hi everyone

Yes, this is true! and BT Infinity customers will benefit from the removal of Fair Usage Policy (FUP) controls when they begin to be removed from April 2011. Once removed, heavy user customers will be able to download/stream as much as they wish without having their speeds restricted.

BT will remove the FUP controls currently applied to customers with ‘atypical’ usage. Today atypical users are restricted at 300GB usage and account for less than 0.5% of the BT customer base. BT will not target any individuals with restrictions based on usage levels. However, we still have traffic management policies that will restrict certain applications / protocols, such as P2P, when the network is busy.

As BT continues to invest in the network and network bandwidth we can now remove these restrictions and ensure the experience of the wider customer base.

(Note that charges will still apply for going over limits on BT Total Broadband Options 1&2 and BT Infinity Option 1 but traffic will not be managed.)

Thx
Kerry
BTCare Community Manager'

Also includes total broadband

Btw:

"BT reserve the right to change policy at any time of your contract....

Be'Cos: We are De Luer......"

 

[fitzsteve]

I had a painful 18 month contract with BT, no more than 30k a second between 5pm and midnight every day, even HTTP traffic. Torrents were lucky to be 5-7k a sec

Of course after midnight it went to full speeds (about 4mb on my line)

And I was on their £30 a month top end option pack, there was nothing I could do but sit out the 18 months, complaints fell on deaf ears, I couldn't even watch IPlayer in the evening due to their traffic shaping.

As soon as we switched to BE (which was just £14 at the time) we had the full 4mb all the time, 24/7 and 1mb up, again 24/7!

No peak time throttling, no drama! And I remember with BE we has an outage, about 10hrs IIRC. We didn't even need to contact them, they refunded us the whole month automatically

I really can't rate BE highly enough and BT low enough

 

[Witcher1979]

They only traffic shape peer to peer (5pm till 12pm), I get full speed 24/7 as I don't use anything peer to peer wise. Steam and FTP will download full speed all the time for me. Maybe different when you were on it Mr Steve, but now they are fine. But this is like everything, everyone will have issues with an isp and slag/rate it. Just luck of the draw I think.

 

[thecellartroll]

I used to be with o2 who are the same company as Be. Very cool. Fast as hell all the time, no throttling and no nasty letters, regardless of how much I downloaded.

I would go with them again, but there is no standard landline to this house and I'm too tight to pay for one

 

[Witcher1979]

I understand SKY are also meant to be awesome if you can get a sky line. If you have to use a BT line then SKY are rubbish. You get a cap each month and they set you so much per day you can use. But SKY direct with a SKY line is meant to be pretty good. All unlimited as well I think.


SKY did this to me but I was able to get out of the contract as the cap per day was not in writing. Only find out via tech support when you get 5kbs all the time I also got 6 months free TV to say sorry to me as well

http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Sky-Bro...ownloads-amp-Sky-Easynet-BT-Traffic/td-p/8629

"As with Sky Broadband Connect, they do supply their own Sky ADSL routers, & Sky only allow a monthly usage policy of 40GB, with a one point three (1.3 ) GB daily download usage allowance limit, for doing any downloads due to a BT Wholesale policy from BT."

It may have changed now, this was a good 7 months ago, at the time it was a big issue with lots of people on forums moaning about it.

I mean you should be able to use the 40gb when you like, but hey this is only using SKY with a BT line. Using a SKY line is A++++ my family all use SKY direct, lucky gits, I can only use a BT line.

 

[Harrison]

How can I find out about sky line availability?

And thanks everyone for you recommendations. I'm thinking Be will be the way to go.