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[Paul G]

After months of stress with tiscali, I've decided to jump ship. Can anybody recommend a reliable ISP? I'm looking for 2mb speed, around 30gb monthly usage and hopefully under £20 a month. At the moment my most likely choice is NewNet (the Home S package). Any ideas folks?

[Chris]

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ (formerly adslguide.org.uk)

That's a good site to compare services and prices.

Avoid all the too good to be true deals (unlimited broadband, free broadband, combined phone line and broadband offers etc.) and maybe do a search for their name on The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/) first see if they've had any bad press recently.

I'm with Freedom2Surf and never had any problems with them (even though they had a service blip recently, my connection didn't seem to be affected). Other people I know are on PlusNet and are pretty happy.

Demon

www.demon.co.uk

Wouldn't use freedom to surf or Plusnet as both have had serious problems recently (Plusnet lost users emails F2S don't have a helpdesk to speak off and lose calls - they still email me regarding callls I logged and I've not been with them for over a year)

Over the years I have been with
BT
Plusnet
Freedom 2 surf
Ace internet
UKFSN.org
Zen Internet.

Zen was definitley the best, they have proper technical support who can help you and will answer the phone.

Typically you get what you pay for, you need to decide how much you are going to be using it and how much you are willing to pay, bear in mind that the cheaper connections can limit your speed (traffic shaping) or limit your download capacity.

[Chris]

Originally Posted by onlynik

Wouldn't use freedom to surf or Plusnet as both have had serious problems recently (Plusnet lost users emails F2S don't have a helpdesk to speak off and lose calls - they still email me regarding callls I logged and I've not been with them for over a year)

I've phoned F2S' tech support before and thought they were great. I know 4 other people on F2S who have never had any problems with them either, and we're all heavy users.

Different people have different experiences I guess.

This Chris echoes that Chris

Plusnet outright lied to me, and even after rasing a ticket regarding packet shaping and why it wasn't mentioned in the FUP or the T&Cs replied, "If we told customers about this they wouldn't sign up" which I though was kind of cheeky.

The F2S problems were all associated with speed, disconnections, and latency. I could only play BF2 for about 10 minutes max before being disconnected, and shocking download speeds.

there are details of their shocking service here

http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showflat...sb=5&o=&fpart=

not to mention the unoffical help http://www.freedom2support.co.uk

[Frosty Jack]

Originally Posted by onlynik

Plusnet outright lied to me, and even after rasing a ticket regarding packet shaping and why it wasn't mentioned in the FUP or the T&Cs replied, "If we told customers about this they wouldn't sign up" which I though was kind of cheeky.

The only problem with Plusnet was with users trying to get the cheap deals but still use huge amounts of bandwidth, which I don't think they were ready for. They're not really designed for serious gamers/P2Pers. In a way the fact that their customer service is good also worked against them, as they have good support forums which were flooded with complaints by the bitter bandwidth hogging geeks. (no offence, obv.) They're still a fairly small local operation but they've expanded a hell of a lot in the past couple of years because they are so popular, and maybe overstretched themselves a bit so can't always keep up with demand.
I use them and have never had any problems, other than a slight slow down for a week with all the LLU malarkey which wasn't their fault anyway. And I like the fact that they have the message boards where you can find out if there are any current issues being looked at, or get help from other users as well as the experts. And you can phone them up and see the actual office you're talking to on webcam. If you're a heavy user you're probably better going somewhere else, but for the average surfer I'd say they're pretty good value.

Originally Posted by Frosty Jack

bitter bandwidth hogging geeks. (no offence, obv.)

Unfortunately the threshold was 15 gig thats not really alot, and it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the T&Cs or FUP, which was my point. I used them a few years ago and they were great, however, they have gone seriously downhill ( deleting user emails, then later in the month deleting customer info and tehn a major outage in August with no internet access) anyway they are likely to be bought by BT soon.

I've heard from many people that Pipex is good, (even though they own Nildram and F2S)

[Stripey]

I've been with bt since adsl was launched, in the early days there were a few problems now and again but in the past 3 years or so the service has been great, it costs a bit more but you can cain it at full speed 24/7 and they don't give a shit. As far as tech support goes, you should only be calling up your ISP if there is a service outage, which in this day and age is rare. Anyone who can't get their head around the basics deserves to be charged through the eyeballs for advice.