:-) Good luck. Shit could happen with any company.

It's a shame it happened during race.

I've been using Sky BB for a few months now, and had no problems with them at all. No problems with P2P/torrents or any online games. Was a bit of a drama switching from cable back to BT, but that was BT's fault, not Sky.

Before that we were with NTL (pre-Virgin) and we were always suffering from periods of no connection or slow connection or bleh. And their customer service sucked major ass. Sky's is a pleasure by comparison.

That said, a good friend of ours had a lot of problems getting his Sky connection set up, but then he wanted to set his router up manually and that led to all kinds of confusion with the non-tech plebs

Quote from Nick A :

No, AOL isn't that bad compared to the other big name ISPs I think. Torrents run OK, LFS runs well too and the service is fairly reliable but it conked out during my league race at the weekend

Yea, AOL is good, but you really gotta do your research on how far you are away from the exchange, and what the recommended distance for the speed is, because at the end of the day, they will sell you the package if your over the recommended distance, but you will probably have a poor/slow connection. I had it for a few years, worked fine at 512kbps, but when AOL auto upgraded it to 1mb it wouldnt work at all, so I had to switch to NTL/Virgin cable (which has been cheap and seamless, customer service has been excellent since virgin took over imo).

When I lived in Southampton I had a 2meg line with Bulldog. It was very good, always max speed and good latency. They didn't do more than 2meg to my new pad in So'ton so I changed to an 8meg line by Virgin and it was absolute rubbish. Latencies were 200ms++ from 5pm-1am on weekdays and all day weekends.

Eclipse Ftw!!!!

Quote from danowat :

Eclipse Ftw!!!!

Heh, don't tell my Dad that, had no end of problems after he switched to them (on my recommendation too :shy.

Been with em for donkeys years, and even though I am on the cheapest package, I have never had any problems, top pings, and I am a torrent whore aswell, probably about 1TB a year I reckon (although I do schedule it to only run "out of hours" 11pm-6pm)

I’ve looked into 20 or so ISPs now and narrowed it down to:

Talktalk – read bad things about severe throttling after using only 5 or 10GB/month. Not keen on 18 month contract.
Virgin – looks OK but would need to buy a new cable router with wireless access point. Also can’t migrate after contract is over.
Newnet – Look good, 12GB limit Ok for now, but in a year’s time I may need more. £16.50/month a little pricey.
Entanet retailers (eg UKFSN.ADSL24) – look fantastic, no port blocking, excellent pings, but £20/month
BE: Look good, but 4GB limit not enough for me and next package up is £24/month
Demon: bad customer service, but big allowance but would probably rather go for Newnet.
And finally…
Staying with AOL, looking increasingly likely, as it seems I may be able to get it for £10/month and get a speed upgrade.

Danowat – are you on their Home or Evolution package? If you’re torrenting I assume it’s Evolution but they give that only 2* for performance so surprised to hear that it’s OK.

Evo, the lowest one, I get bloody good torrent perfomance, at least outside their peak hours (6pm-11pm)

Good luck trying to tell AOL that you wish to cancel your broadband with them. They are natoriously bad for allowing you to disconnect in peace.

Took my dad half an hour to get it over and done with...

Yeah, I heard they have a habit of continuing to charge you once you leave too. But I am coming round to the idea of staying anyway. It seems to me that it's pot luck whether you'll have connection/customer service problems wherever you go unless you're prepared to go for Newnet or an Entanet reseller, so I'd rather avoid the hassle and stay with AOL. It's not perfect, but for £10 a month it does what i need and i don't want a load of hassle when I switch.

I havent read all of this thread, but to throw a spanner in the works, I am withh Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange - Damn name changes and I have no problems in the past 3 years.

I am with Pipex, they are an absolute shambles at the moment, between 5pm and 11pm and all the way through the weekends i get nothing but problems.

I was looking to change a few months back, but my dad kept moaning at me that he had no problems and that he didn't want to change his email address... so in the end I gave in just to keep him happy, he is the bill payer afterall. (Annoying thing is, he said 'tell me a good ISP and we'll change' - I gave him all sorts of options only for him to moan at me about changing email addresses)

When I get a job I'm going to get my own phone line put in so I can choose what ISP I want

I've just left Pipex for Be. I was having exactly the same problems as mr_x, and Pipex kept denying there was a problem. Pipex were charging £24 a month for 1MB, so we kept at that price. Too early to tell if it's an improvement, but first impressions are good.

Losing the email/webspace isn't really a problem - just moved the emails to Gmail, and there's a few free web hosts that I'm looking at to host the websites we had.

The cheap packages may be cheap, but you get what you pay for. If it's less than about £25 a month then there'll be some form of limit, shaping, blocking or other such cost-cutting measure somewhere.

Quote from Christofire :

I've just left Pipex for Be. I was having exactly the same problems as mr_x, and Pipex kept denying there was a problem. Pipex were charging £24 a month for 1MB, so we kept at that price. Too early to tell if it's an improvement, but first impressions are good.

Losing the email/webspace isn't really a problem - just moved the emails to Gmail, and there's a few free web hosts that I'm looking at to host the websites we had.

The cheap packages may be cheap, but you get what you pay for. If it's less than about £25 a month then there'll be some form of limit, shaping, blocking or other such cost-cutting measure somewhere.

I'd be interested to see how you get on with Be, as we're most likely getting that in our student house in a month or so. I need a good service for VPNing into the Uni too so trying to get the fastest connection we can really.

At the moment at home we have Metronet, which when we first got it 2 years ago or so were excellent, then they got taken over by several million companies and now they are awful.

Going to change to Eclipse in the next week or so.

Quote from Bean0 :

You need to go through a reseller...UKFSN, ADSL24, Vivaciti.

I'm on the £19.99/month package with UKFSN, it's a residential service.
You get 30gb/month peak and 300gb/month off peak. Off peak is 2200-0800 and all weekends. It's an 'up to 8mb' line, I get about 600kb/sec speed down, and about 40kb/sec up.

http://www.ukfsn.org/home/internet/adsl/maxallowance.html

I signed onto UKFSN. Great service and cheap. I connect at the max rate any time of the day and never have had a problem with LFS or any online gaming since!!!

I have to agree with Danowat here...
I swapped from Poopex earlier this year to a BUSINESS package with Eclipse..£24 per month for an 'up to' 8Mb/448kb connection, totally unlimited downloads.. Bandwidth NEVER throttled, static IP, and more free phone calls (to 01 or 02 numbers) per month than I can possibly use!

Might be a bit more expensive at first glance than a 'home' package, but the benefits far outweigh the extra cost!

PS.. Anybody thinking of swapping, drop me a PM so I can 'recommend' you and get some freebies!