The online racing simulator
Broadband in Italy
(4 posts, started )
#1 - Mr C
Broadband in Italy
Attention Italian racers! I have a English friend who is currently living in Italy and wants to get hooked up to the internet. He doesn't yet speak Italian that well and doesn't know that much about computers either so I am trying to help him find a suitable ISP. I see that Tiscali offer 8 Mega ADSL for €19.95 per month which seems okay, but cannot see what the minimum contract is, if any download limits apply and also if bittorrent etc is throttled in any way.

Can anyone help or suggest any cheaper alternatives?
I'm with NGI, which isn't cheap but there's no throttling and has extremely fast responses, although it's only 2Mbit in downstream. It's one of the best for gaming, though, and fairly reliable, and with excellent technical assistance (although I can't say the same about the same about administrative assistance). You must pay in advance, minimum contract 3 months.

The best offers are, in my opinion, those of Telecom Italia (www.187.it) since Telecom owns almost totally the phone lines in Italy. This means that every single tech assistance request on ADSL, if it involves the lines, has to be passed to their technicians. Telecom doesn't apply throttling and it's quite stable. Not the fastest response, anyway. Help phone lines are a disaster. The contract can last less than a year, but in that case you must pay €40 to end the contract (in case of the 7 Megabit offer at 19.95 a month plus €3 a month to rent a router from them).

These are the two ADSL providers I used at home, so I can only talk about them. There could be cheaper alternatives (such as Tele2), but I can't say if they're reliable or not since I have no personal experience with them, except for knowing that Tele2 applied throttling but had to give up because of angry customers. But things can change very quickly and tech assistance can be a nightmare with every provider, and that's why I went with a provider which has serious contractual guarantees.

Fastweb could be a nice alternative too, but it doesn't assign public IP addresses normally (only by request and it's not cheap), so you have to stick with all the limits of its architecture (no access to the PC's IP ports, except from the Fastweb network). Most people are fine, but I wouldn't be.
Quote from Albieg :Telecom Italia...Help phone lines are a disaster...

I can confirm that, was a real PITA once talking to them .
But it's fairly reliable, as Albieg said.
#4 - Mr C
Thanks for the replies, much appreciated. I'll probably suggest he goes with Telcom Italia/ 7 Mega. As I said, he speaks very little Italian anyway, so I will probably end up being his technical support line! As long as they're generally reliable, he should be ok I think.

Broadband in Italy
(4 posts, started )
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG