I apologise, but..........which ISP?

ScarySquirrel

ScarySquirrel

ScarySquirrel

Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2004
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Location
South East
Hi all,

I'm moving house soon and this is going to be our nearest exchange - http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/NDRGR

As you can see, not many options for us.

Gaming is incredibly important to me. I am currently on O2 Broadband and have no problems whatsoever. O2 can only offer us their 'O2 Home Broadband Access' package. Which seems decent, it's unlimited, but I am slightly confused as to what the difference is between this and the 'Standard' package - http://broadband.o2.co.uk/home/packages.jsp

All I can see is that the upload speed is slower and it costs more :(

Other than O2, what are my options? Or am I destined to have a crap connection because I am living in the countryside!!
 
O2 Access is BT resale. I.e it uses cabling and routers owned by BT to get from you to the O2 Core Network. What you refer to as the standard package is what we call LLU meaning O2 have their own cables and kit to your exchange and don't need to use anyone elses, hence paying no one to carry the traffic.
It's slower and more expensive because they have to pay BT to carry the traffic to their nearest point of presence for offload and speeds are restricted by the hardware and standard configurations of BTs end user access equipment.
 
Oh right I see.

Is using O2 through BT Wholesale better than going with BT direct?
Obviously there is the price advantage (about £1 a month for 3 months then about £8 a month after), but will the connection itself be exactly the same?

Is O2 my best option?
 
The connection itself will vary on what you have now depending on the kit in the exchange and your new local loop length. BT resale BT re-branded. It's often cheaper but the service itself is much the same, the only noticeable difference is the billing and customer support isn't run by BT. This can be good as some resellers have better support than BT themselves but when there's a BT infrastructure fault it can be worse as you can only report the fault to your ISP, who in turn report it to BT to be fixed. This often delays things.
If LLU providers are available in your exchange then go with them. If not as good as o2 they'll probably still be better than BT resellers.

edit: Just checked the samknows and you have bugger all choice. Non LLU excahnge and not yet updated to 21CN so I'd probably go with o2 for the sake of simplicity. At least that way you can keep your current gear and they'll probably be able to migrate your service quicker than signing up with someone else from scratch. Do be ware they don't try and re-new your minimum contract term though.
 
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actually i would avoid o2 access. they have capacity problems which can affect the service quite badly during the evenings. it really doesn't deserve to have the o2 name attached to it.

and FFS don't sign with BT. they are truly the worst of the worst. really you should be looking at people like adsl24, zen, idnet to name a few.
 
Well the capacity issues are mostly geographically significant. Looking at the location of that exchange it's not exactly densely populated so I doubt it'd be too bad. BT is the same, living in london there's always engineers bumbling about in the exchange accidentally breaking things etc. Out in the sticks this isn't such an issue.
Plus chances are the speeds won't be good anyway so it probably won't notice.
For gaming it doesn't need to be so much fast as it does reliable.

This is all neglecting an obvious solution - go cable if it's available.
 
Cable is available, but as I am moving into this house with my Mum (don't ask!) she has already gone and had a BT line activated, otherwise had I looked into this sooner I would have said go with Virgin as we could have got Unlimited phone and unlimited 20mb internet for about £25 a month :(

I wonder how easy it is to cancel the BT line. We move in 12 days and she needs to be up and running online straight away as she works from home.
 
Has the line been activated? If the line hasn't yet been installed it should be easy to cancel the order. Did she go for BT business or BT residential? BT Business Centre will probably be able to cancel the order. Residential services are as a rule staffed by apes and will be more effort to bend to you needs.
 
Residential and it has been activated. I think we'll just go with the O2 Access thing for ease.

I don't download a huge amount but it will be a bit of a pain when I do want to, but hey ho!

Reliability is the main thing.
 
Well, we're in, and O2 had it all up and running for us when we got here :) (O2 Access that is)

Speed seems OK:



At first it was only doing about 1.5 Mbit, am I right in thinking it takes a few days to settle to a consistent speed?

Yeah, seems to be fluctuating

 
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This is a personal view, and others might have positive counter.

O2 Access at the start of the year was rubbish for weekday evenings and weekends. So I got out within the 30 day cooling off period.

That was on a rural exchange that sync'ed at 8128kbps. Connection speeds would drop to 0.5Mb or less when performing speed tests, that were only run to find out why browsing was falling over. If this has been remedied since then well done to O2 to stumping up some extra funding. Just check O2 still offer a money back clause should this affect you.

If you don't need the larger download cap that O2 provide I go with any of the other highly rated smaller ISP's that keep getting mentioned, e.g. Fast.co.uk, Newnet, Zen, etc.

Some personal observations of Fast.co.uk
No idea if they support interleaving being turned off.

User account area is very minimal. You can check up on the current month usage limit, but no historical records kept. So if you forget to check-up just before new billing month you need to request previous usage limits from support department.
Only time I've contacted support by telephone I was impressed by the response. Emails are answered quickly, even during strange non-working hours (within reason).
 
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