Help with isp choice? No throttling/shaping etc

thechief

thechief

thechief

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Joined
30 Nov 2006
Posts
8
Hi all,

I'm moving house in 4 weeks and I'm struggling to settle on a broadband provider. Just now I'm with AOL who started out ok but they are now diabolical, I can't even stream youtube/iplayer.

Cost is not so much of an issue, willing to pay up to £30 a month, maybe a bit more.

Main priorities are a good download limit (heavy itunes/appletv user), no traffic shaping/throttling, good customer service etc.

I've read the sticky and checked samknows, my new house is about 600m from the local exchange, here are the results it shows:

BT Wholesale ADSL
BT Wholesale ADSL Max
BT Wholesale WBC (21CN)
O2 / Be LLU
TalkTalk (CPW) LLU
Sky Broadband / Easynet LLU

Is there any out of that bunch that I should go straight to? Someone recommended BE but after a search they appear to be getting a lot of complaints recently. Any personal recommendations from simlar user profiles would be great!

Thanks!
 
I've been a fairly stalwart BE user for about 4 years now and while generally their service still exceeds most others it has shown some signs of unreliability recently. After 3 years of impeccable service, a string of minor outages and weird latency/DNS problems suggests to me that they aren't being run to the same high standards they used to uphold.

Based on the experience of a few friends, BT Infinity would be my prime choice right now, followed by Sky LLU and then perhaps BE LLU if there were no other unbundled options.
 
Should be able to get Virgin media 30mb connection for under £30 a month,I pay £37 here for 50mb...and they are doubling the speeds soon.

As far as i know,there isn't any ISPs that don't throttle your connection during peak hours,I suppose it really depends on how manys on the net around your area.
For me my downloads speeds don't slow all that much even in peak hours.
 
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Nevakonaza said:
As far as i know,there isn't any ISPs that don't throttle your connection during peak hours,I suppose it really depends on how manys on the net around your area.
For me my downloads speeds don't slow all that much even in peak hours.
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Be* have never throttled or shaped during any hours, and I don't believe Sky do either.

Virgin would be the worst for what you (OP) need it for so I'd say avoid them.

Been with Be* for 5 years and they have had congestion or some routing issues, I've never been limited in downloading or uploading.

What's the usage of a 'heavy itunes/appletv user'?
 
thechief said:
In all honesty I don't 100% know, I know that I'd easily gobble up a 10gb allowance though. I have the older appleTV hacked for iplayer etc so I know my usage will be quite high.
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A lot of people are hating on Be* mainly for not having any plans for fibre, apart from that I can't see the downsides.

Minimum I get through is 160-170GB download and about 10GB upload on my PC alone, and there are 2 other computers and a whole host of other devices using the net so on my Be connection we use a lot of bandwidth (even more because of the football this month) and I've never received a complaint from Be or be throttled.

One of the many reasons I've stuck with them for so long.
 
thechief said:
Any particular reason? Most info I'm finding suggests using Sky over BE, broadband is a total minefield now :(
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When i moved in to my new house i chose sky LLU due to price. circa £17pm inc line rental, appeared ok as i started just using it during the day, but when i properly moved in thats when the issues started.

between 2am and 4pm ish my pings would be at 30-70ms give or take, now soon as 5pm hits and everyone is home from work etc hammering their connections my pings ranged from 300ms-900ms with a throughput of 0.05mbp.

They let me terminate due to poor speeds and poor latency.

I have since moved to BE and get 7 down / 1.25 up with pings around 13-20ms at all times.

Upto you but id rather pay that little more for consistant service. Plus with BE you can have a good live chat to edit account/connection settings whereas with sky you cannot.
 
I'd go with Sky if you can get their fibre package. If not I would go on something like Pro 16 Home from Xilo. I was on that package until Sky Fibre came along and it was great.
 
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I was with BE before i went to fiber and was disappointed when i had to leave them to get fiber. BE are awesome. I have called their support line up at 2-3am on friday night and someone has been on the line and been very technically knowledgeable and fixed my problem. The guy was doing line checks at 2am lol. Try get that with bt or sky.
 
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