Leaving Demon... but where to?

sharpy

sharpy

sharpy

Associate
Joined
21 Mar 2003
Posts
136
Location
Portsmouth
I am currently on Demon 8mb ADSL and my 12 month contract is about to expire. I have been genrally happy with the service but the 50 gig monthly limit is a bit restrictive and this is the reason for me moving to a different provider.
One thing i don't want is Virgin Media!
I see that UKOnline and UKFSN get some constant recomendations here and its a reliable, unlimited service i am after. I currently pay £24.99/month and would not want to exceed that.
One thing i am interested in is the BT unlimited. I download from newsgroups and i have seen on here that they do free giganews in there unlimited package? I can't seem to find details of this online and the BT website suggests that there unlimited service is subject to FUP. The FUP mentions peak/off peak times but again i cant find info on this
Can someone give some advise here as i currently subscribe to newsdemon and the free giganews from BT sounds like a good option.
Cheers
 
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sign with bt at your peril. of course it's not unlimited. no provider can do umlimited for 20-30 pounds a month. not only that, they throttle http during peak hours regardless of your usage. now this doesn't apply to everyone. and this is the problem, it's a complete lottery. plenty heavy users will say they can download at full whack all day everyday. then you get some people who download 10-20gb a month or even less, and they get throttled to 50-100kb/s during peaktimes even when they have solid 8128kbps sync with the exchange and the profiles set to the max 7150kbps according to the speedtester. even normal web browsing feels like you're on dialup. this why i left.... :p

check out a few forums such as dslzoneuk and thinkbroaband. you might be lucky but it's hell of a gamble when signing up for a 12 month contract. and of course support is in india and absolutely useless.

i must admit i'd been a BT customer and never knew about the free news servers. i only found out after i left. but i checked it out and they do supply it. but you're limited to 3 x 512k connections. i think most people get the full speed on these even when you're being throttled on your normal browsing.

i'd say avoid but the choice is yours. :)

i'm with ukfsn paying 19.99 for 30gb peak and 300gb off peak transfers. if that's not enough, you can pay 29.99 for 60gb peak and 330gb off peak. and if you really do need true unlimited (can't imagine why but that's none of my business ), then they do it for £80. another enta supplier (adsl24) will do 8mb unlimited for £67.99. or you can get unlimited 2mb for 34.99. also plenty of other tariffs including office packages with double the upload. check them out.

now i'd definitely recommend pretty much any enta reseller as they run on 30 days notice. don't like the service? then you leave without penalty.

i don't know if you've researched them at all so i will mention the anti loss tool they use. the peak time runs from 8am to 10pm. now when 10pm rolls around, everyone goes a bit mad with their downloading and their centrals tend to get overloaded. but to counter this and avoid packet loss, they automate a speed reduction on everyone on the affected central to balance things out. you'll find most evenings for an hour or 2, that speeds will go down to 4-5mb, sometimes as low as 2mb but never lower than that. the speeds soon rise backup once things balance out. it's a good system and it works well. and the best thing of all is you can monitor it live on their website or even by downloading a little application someone has wrote. sometimes this will kick in on the afternoons/evenings on the weekend - all weekend is off peak so again it can get busy. what i like about this system is that even though speeds are reduced for a short while, you can always max out your connection with whatever protocol you like and are not punished for using p2p like most other isps.

phew, that's enough waffling. :D

edit: i forgot about be*. definitely worth checking out if they are enabled at your exchange. :)
 
I wouldn't touch BT again with a 3204ft barge pole.
I just left them. Basically, if you like Indian call centers where they all read from a script and they are hard to understand, 12-18 month contracts, and you like you're connection being crippled between 4pm and 12am, then they are great.
BT are NOT unlimited - loads of us were capped to dial up speeds for downloading over 30GB in one month... It's all in their FUP.

If you want true unlimited, you will need to pay £60+ a month, otherwise it will cost the ISP more to keep you as a customer.
Entanet resellers like ADSL24, UKFSN, etc will be you're best bet if you need high download caps.
They can do 30GB on-peak and 300GB off peak for £19.99 a month.
On-peak is between 8am and 10pm Mon-fri, and off-peak is between 10pm and 8am mon-fri and all weekends if off peak.

If you can get Be, then definitely go for them, otherwise I would recommend Entanet.
 
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Shop around, write down comparisons. Judge by cost, area, reliability and performance.

Good luck.
 
thanks for the replies guys and for the detailed post marc2003. I think you have done enough to convince me away from BT :) UKFSN looks good to me, the 1 month contract and 300gig off peak is more than i would ever need so i think i will go with them.

To all those who suggested BE, well i can get it but not the 24meg service just 8.
 
i'm with ukfsn and it's a fine choice. :)

just a working example of this anti loss tool at work right now. one of the central was overloaded this afernoon.....

upload


edit: since i posted that 10 minutes ago, it's backup to 6.4mb on central4. of course it may fluctuate all day and go down again. but it's just nice to see it works so quickly. :)
 
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I've never had any problems in games on my connection with Be. I believe that they did have a few problems with the routing to america but I believe that has been resolved now.
 
Well i've had be for 3 days now and i'm not impressed get constant disconnects in wow upto 5 second lag spikes, pvp is impossible as i'm always out of range yet they right in front of me. css and day of defeat i get disconnected after a couple of minutes.
judging by the member forums i'm not alone :( .
It seems only good for downloading.
 
I'm currently with Be at my parents address, i think the problem people talk about is down to the line itself and its how they manage ADSL2+. You can get Fast Path enabled on your account if the connection is ok and that would drop any ping issues.

Also, while playing CS:S i find that i often get better ping on french servers unless its a good quality UK server, strange but somehow true for me.

Edit: Maddog, are you using the speedtouch router? If you are, stop using it now. Its the main problem for all Be customers, i got rid of mine as i had the same issues.
 
Yeah i'm using the speedtouch after trawling through the member forums it seems most have ditched it.
Any advice on what router to replace it with?
only a select few are compatible.

cheers
 
Well anything thats ADSL2+ compatable will do, i'm currently using the netgear DG834GT (the same as the sky one) and although i don't really like the menu system there are a few things you can do with it.

Look for "be forum" on the interweb and there is a handy little place about all the routers etc (don't know if we're allowed to link or not, so google is your friend) :)
 
The SpeedTouch router Be* provide is very reliable.

A friend on Be* always pings sub 20ms on a London based server.

If you're unable to get Be* check out ADSL24 :)
 
Lol, is it? I've got a few friends on Be and they instantly started complaining of disconnections after putting any load on the router, either by Wireless or Ethernet. It wasn't down to the line at all either, some were right next to the exchange and some were 3km away.

Maybe we were just all unlucky but i've generally found if you're going to do a lot of downloading, gaming and have multiple people on at the same time it starts to die.
 
The strange thing is if i get low pings on wow usually around 40ms i still get lag spikes and i'm not in range in pvp and steam games just keep resetting the speedtouch lol.
 
maddog said:
Steam games just keep resetting the speedtouch lol.
Click to expand...

I know exactly what you mean, that was the main problem i had. As much as i don't like the netgear i've already got it does do the job well, i just wish it had a bit more functionality.

But hey, i like my Linksys models too much and DD-WRT firmware :p
 
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