Help me choose an ISP (UK)

[turbulentfurball]

Not for me, my sister :)

The requirements are as follows


It can't be cable (NTL/Telewest) since it's rented accommodation and she's limited to BT
The contract should be no longer than 12 months, since that's as long as her lease. I don't want her to be tied into an 18 month contract since she may not be living there after that.
Speed is not particularly important, but obviously the faster the better.
Some ISPs offer integrated wireless solutions, that would be great, especially if it was installed by them. I don't plan to drive 150 miles to buy and install a router etc.
Preferably, no usage limits. It's not overly important, but if the connection is being shared between 2 people so, for example, a 1GB monthly limit wouldn't cut it.


I'm not being lazy, honest! I just wondered if anyone has had any particularly good or bad experiences with ISPs. I've stuck with Telewest from the beginning and I really haven't looked at anything else since I've not been in the market to change.

Muchos Thanks :D

[Dorian Gray]

Pipex (http://www.pipex.co.uk/) is almost certainly the best ISP in the UK, whether ADSL or cable. Fast (including upload), very reliable, great customer service and the prices are among the best. They offer 2 GB (£14.99), 15 GB (£19.99) and unlimited packages (£24.99), all at 8 Mb/s nominal speed. They also offer bundles including phone calls which appear very good value if you want that kind of thing.

Virgin (http://www.virgin.net/internetaccess/broadband/) also offer a very good service (i.e. reliable and good customer service) at good prices, with a unique selling point: no 12 month contract. Their 3 GB (£14.99), 6 GB (£17.99) and unlimited (£24.99) packages may suit your sister. Virgin has a wireless option for a one-off charge of £69.99 but as far as I know it's just posted to your door, no installation.

As far as I'm concerned ADSL broadband is a choice between those two providers (which have both won all kinds of ISP awards and customer satisfaction surveys). The rest are either more expensive (BT takes it to an extreme) and/or too unreliable for a serious internet junkie. Just so you know, I've had personal experience with Freeserve (later Wanadoo), Wanadoo (later Orange, and still rubbish as seen by this week's outage: Orange was stupid to sully their brand with this acquisition), BT (possibly the worst company of any kind I've ever had to deal with), Telewest, NTL (http://forums.ntlhell.co.uk/), Virgin and Pipex. The last two hammer the others silly.

Maybe one day we'll catch up with the Dutch and French, who today have cheap 24 Mb/s broadband across most of their countries. In the meantime, 8 Mb/s is as much as you can expect outside London, and you can expect to pay through the nose for it.

[turbulentfurball]

Thanks, Dorian.
Her original plan was to go with AOL Silver (http://info.aol.co.uk/broadband/broadband-silver.adp?promo=228937&promoCode=228937) It's not fast, but there's no usage limit, and a free wireless router is included. But it's AOL.

Virgin seems ideal. I would imagine a 3GB usage limit will be fine, and the lack of a 12 month contract should hopefully appeal. I guess I'll still have to drive to Aberdeen to set up her network though.

[Fahrenheit]

How about the old BT Home Hub thing? That looks good, and I've heard a number of good stories about it. :)

[Dorian Gray]

I've never used AOL, but 1 Mb/s is really slow: in fact, too slow for a lot of streaming content these days (especially after taking out network overhead, etc.). But the price is good and AOL have a reputation of actually meaning "unlimited" by unlimited download (i.e. no draconian "fair usage" policy).

3 GB a month is a fair bit between two people unless they are into downloading video content, listening to radio 24/7, etc. But 3 GB soon gets eaten up with YouTube and HD movie trailers. That said, one of my aunts uses a mere ~100 MB a month and she surfs every day. The internet revolution hasn't yet hit home with everyone! :lol: Virgin has no 12 month contract but there is a charge for quitting inside a few months (I think it was £50 if you cancel within 3 months, but check that if it's important).

[turbulentfurball]

How about the old BT Home Hub thing?

The rest are either more expensive (BT takes it to an extreme)

*snip*

BT (possibly the worst company of any kind I've ever had to deal with)

BT was actually one of the first that I ruled out. The fact that they market wireless internet as a feature seemingly brought about by BT's greatness rather than technology that doesn't even require internet access worries me.

Dorian, as an aside, what are your opinions on Telewest? I've never had a problem with them.

[Bryson]

I have BT and a Home Hub.

It's ok. Connection is fast, limits are sensible etc etc. The IP phone is nothing special. Softphone doesn't work on a Mac. iChat AV doesn't work (well, not without some serious box-hacking that I haven't got around to getting my head round yet.) It also doesn't work as a print server. (Yet, although digging in the Home Hub firmware reveals a hidden print server asking to be activated...). And the mac setup utility is rubbish. But just setting it up yourself works anyway.

In short, meh. No massive problems. The one thing I'll give them is (if you use the number given on Saynoto0870) the fault repair service is amazingly good.

[Dorian Gray]

Dorian, as an aside, what are your opinions on Telewest? I've never had a problem with them.
Very, very slow upload speed (less than 80 Kb/s (i.e. 10 KB/s) sometimes, which is almost as slow as an old 56 K telephone modem). Upload speed is important to me because I use Skype a lot, and often send very large files (photos, videos, recorded BBC radio broadcasts) to friends in other countries. All cable internet services suffer from poor upload speeds because of their highly contested nature, but it shouldn't be anywhere near as bad as 10 KB/s. I should probably mention that the house next door to ours held five geeky Asian students who probably sucked up half the bandwidth in South East England, so maybe that's why our service was so poor. :p In any case, with ADSL you're less affected by other people's usage on your street.

[Fahrenheit]

Manga!!! LOLZZ!!

[Is it 1981?]

She could perhaps give Plus.net (http://www.plus.net/residential/broadband/) a try. They offer a couple of subscription options: PAYG, 12-month contract, or a rolling pay-monthly option (no minimum term - that's what I'm on).

Sadly they do have traffic shaping and usage limits (on the contract and pay-monthly options), but I've found their restrictions to be fairly reasonable:

Gradual speed throttling, depending on how much you've used at peak times (starting from 3.5GB+)
Restrictions only apply during peak hours (4pm-midnight)


I've heard some bad press about them, but luckily I've never really had cause to deal with their customer service so I couldn't comment on that. They do offer wireless solutions, but I couldn't tell you anything about that either. But I will say I'm happy with the speeds I'm getting (no outages so far), and at the fairly reasonable price:restrictions ratio. I've been with them for abotu a year (at two different addresses) and I've not really had any major problems with them so far. Hope that's of some help!

[mattf]

If you're looking to compare price, features, speed and customer service, try looking at http://adslguide.org . The details they hold are very good.

I use www.zen.co.uk. They're not the cheapest, £24.99 for 8Mbps (I believe - the area I live in can get 512 Kbps tops), but they have the features I require (fixed IP, 20GB cap (used to be no cap, before they offered their ADSL Max solution) and no minimum contract).

They also have EXTREMELY knowledgeable support people. These people are not your standard script readers. They seem able to pitch their response to your technical ability, almost flawlessly.

What's more, they support Macs. Obviously, that's not normally necessary, but it puts them a cut above other ISPs, in my opinion.

So, in short: They aren't the cheapest and it shows.

Edit: As with beardedmacuser, my house moves have always been free, except when I moved twice within 6 months (which they were very upfront about when I first spoke to them about the possibility of it happening). AFAIK, BT charges ISPs ~£40 to setup the ADSL line per phoneline. Some ISPs swallow this charge, others don't.

[beardedmacuser]

I've been using Freenetname which is now Madasafish (http://www.madasafish.com/) for many years. I wouldn't say they're particularly great but I've had no problems and no downtime at all in all the 8 years I've been with them (guess I've just been lucky and not been online when they're down (as surely all ISPs are down every now and then?)). I pay 24 quid a month for unlimited usage with no contract (just a month's notice required to cancel). And at the bottom of their website they have this...

http://www.madasafish.com/images/mac_support.gif

which isn't of much use to the kind of geeks hanging-out on this forum, but hopefully it'll have been of use to some Mac users out there. Maybe I could get a better deal if I shopped around, but to be honest I can't be arsed.

Oh, and both times I've moved house recently they've relocated my broadband for free! (I think some ISPs charge you if you move house?)

[Is it 1981?]

Not entirely relevant, but have been with Freenetname Madasafish webhosting for the past six years - no complaints there.

Beardedmacuser, I'm assuming the subscription you're on is from the pre-Freenetname days; the only two subscriptions I can see on the Madasafish site are the same (IIRC) as Freenetname's; £19.99/ £25.99 (after six months) with a 20GB monthly limit.

You got me all excited for second. :(

[beardedmacuser]

Beardedmacuser, I'm assuming the subscription you're on is from the pre-Freenetname days; the only two subscriptions I can see on the Madasafish site are the same (IIRC) as Freenetname's; £19.99/ £25.99 (after six months) with a 20GB monthly limit.

Yeh, they keep offering to "upgrade" my Broadband package but I like my unlimited usage! It's just nice not to have to watch my usage. They don't offer unlimited options anymore to new customers. [which means more bandwidth for me!!! :D ]

[v.noir]

I vote for PlusNet as well - they've been marvelous for me. Always nice and fast, and no downtime that I can remember. Heard good stories about Zen, Demon and Pipex also. PlusNet give you an 8mb connection as standard now, but then so do most others I guess.

I don't know if this is the case with ADSL in other countries, but the 8mb speeds advertised are rather sneaky. With 1 & 2mb connections, the provided speed would be a bit higher to swallow the overheads, so you actually got 1 or 2mbps to play with. '8mb' ADSL provides 8mbps (at least to my house!), not accounting for the overheads, so we get about 7.15mb (?) instead. But then, I might have read somewhere that 8128kbps is the theoretical limit for current ADSL technology, which I suppose would explain it.