Starting from scratch - ISP recommendations

[Maverick]

Update:

BT OpenReacharound have just left the building and I've fired up the router.  Hurrah!  No more shonky mobile internets!

This is not just any old internets... This is Andrews and Arnold internets 

Look forward to reports of just how good this is. I've just placed an order with A&A to migrate from Demon after nearly 20 years with them. Going live in 10 days (hopefully).

[Biggsy]

Just a little update on my thread hijack:  PlusNet have done something to trigger my speed up to over 5 meg again.  So it was worth complaining after all.

[Dez]

Update:

BT OpenReacharound have just left the building and I've fired up the router.  Hurrah!  No more shonky mobile internets!

This is not just any old internets... This is Andrews and Arnold internets 

Look forward to reports of just how good this is. I've just placed an order with A&A to migrate from Demon after nearly 20 years with them. Going live in 10 days (hopefully).

What was it that made you decide to leave Demon? (In my case it was their decision - they sent my job to India…)

[Maverick]

Look forward to reports of just how good this is. I've just placed an order with A&A to migrate from Demon after nearly 20 years with them. Going live in 10 days (hopefully).

What was it that made you decide to leave Demon? (In my case it was their decision - they sent my job to India…)

Price mainly + it will be good to go back to the way things used to be and I like their attitude. All a bit scary having to re-configure mail server, dns, web server etc. - been a while since I've had to to do this.

When I spoke to Demon to cancel the service they offered to half the price??? Too late I had already made up my mind.

[Ham]

Update:

BT OpenReacharound have just left the building and I've fired up the router.  Hurrah!  No more shonky mobile internets!

This is not just any old internets... This is Andrews and Arnold internets 

Look forward to reports of just how good this is. I've just placed an order with A&A to migrate from Demon after nearly 20 years with them. Going live in 10 days (hopefully).

What was it that made you decide to leave Demon? (In my case it was their decision - they sent my job to India…)

I left after being with them for yearsandyearsandyears because they became sh1te.

I then went to Nildram (run by Adrian Mardlin, an excellent code hacker from the early days of the PC world) who ran a very tight shop, until he left and, well, they became sh1te.

I'm now with Virgin and, while they are still sh1te, I expect no better and it is stonkingly fast for a lot of the time.

[Dez]

I left after being with them for yearsandyearsandyears because they became sh1te.

I then went to Nildram (run by Adrian Mardlin, an excellent code hacker from the early days of the PC world) who ran a very tight shop, until he left and, well, they became sh1te.

I'm now with Virgin and, while they are still sh1te, I expect no better and it is stonkingly fast for a lot of the time.

I started working for Demon soon after Thus took them over. It was quite obvious even then that Thus didn't understand what made the product attractive to a lot of users. They failed to upgrade the mail servers in a timely manner (and that alone made a lot of people move elsewhere) and had a policy of not telling customers what was going on when things went wrong.

[Wowbagger]

Thread resurrection time.

I've been paying ludicrous amounts for a Virgin package which includes television. But we hardly ever watch television.

What we want to do is to cut back on the Virgin package, but also have another ISP lined up. Dez works form home and needs backup - Virgin has been pretty intermittent in the past few months.

The plan is, I think, to get the second ISP up and running before making any changes to our Virgin account. Then, at the appropriate juncture, we negotiate with Virgin and reduce our package with them to telephone and internet only.

What other good providers does the panel currently recommend?

[Charlotte]

The dream team would be Virgin on cable (for TV and streaming media) and AAISP via the copper phone line for lovely stable, secure, predictable IPv6 geek heaven.

They PGP sign all their customer emails, you know 

[Kim]

Seconded.  Or zerothed, as I'm fairly sure I put Charlotte on to them.

Not only are they xkcd:806 compliant, but on the odd occasion I've had issues (normally BT changing something subtle which has disagreed with our particular combination of equipment) they've managed to chase down the bug and sort it within hours.

One time our line actually lost sync on a Saturday morning, so I popped up on IRC from my phone to see if anyone was around (they only work business hours) and RevK himself took a few minutes from watching the Formula 1 to submit a fault to our-favourite-telco.  It was fixed that afternoon.

ADSL with an L2TP tunnel over Virgin cable isn't an uncommon arrangement amongst the A&A redundancy fiends.

You do of course pay for what you get...

[Wombat]

ADSL with an L2TP tunnel over Virgin cable isn't an uncommon arrangement amongst the A&A redundancy fiends.

You do of course pay for what you get...

Kim, I love it when you talk dirty like that        I have no idea what you were saying, but it sounded impressive....

[Wowbagger]

The dream team would be Virgin on cable (for TV and streaming media) and AAISP via the copper phone line for lovely stable, secure, predictable IPv6 geek heaven.

They PGP sign all their customer emails, you know 

Is there not a problem with A&A bandwidth caps?

[Feanor]

ADSL with an L2TP tunnel over Virgin cable isn't an uncommon arrangement amongst the A&A redundancy fiends.

You do of course pay for what you get...

Kim, I love it when you talk dirty like that        I have no idea what you were saying, but it sounded impressive....

It menas you can use your AAISP internet connection via another ISP.
You can tunnel to AAISP from your home network via a 3rd party ISP, and it will behave exactly as if you connected over the ADSL.

Because at the underlying level, it is the same.
An ADSL connection is tunneling over BT's ( or Be's ) core network.
An L2TP tunnel via another ISP is just the same.
It lands up on AAISPs LNS ( Layer2 Tunneling Protocol Network Server ) the same, whichever way it arrived.

It's a seriously cool thing to be able to do.

[ian]

The dream team would be Virgin on cable (for TV and streaming media) and AAISP via the copper phone line for lovely stable, secure, predictable IPv6 geek heaven.

They PGP sign all their customer emails, you know 

Is there not a problem with A&A bandwidth caps?

When I looked they were quite (well, very) expensive, especially if used during peak time (so unsuitable for me, as I work mostly from home during the day). Since I very rarely have ISP problems other than a very slow connection which is hardware and BT-related, the level of service while nice, wasn't ultimately worth paying for. If you have special needs, they certainly seem to care.

I've just received the shocking email telling me that I can now have Infinity, so I'll brave BT to try out the promised wonderland of a 60Mbps connection. This will entail faff, I'm sure, and the horror of a BT engineer visit. Well, actually, the horror of a non-visit, based on past experience.

[hellymedic]

The dream team would be Virgin on cable (for TV and streaming media) and AAISP via the copper phone line for lovely stable, secure, predictable IPv6 geek heaven.

They PGP sign all their customer emails, you know 

Is there not a problem with A&A bandwidth caps?

When I looked they were quite (well, very) expensive, especially if used during peak time (so unsuitable for me, as I work mostly from home during the day). Since I very rarely have ISP problems other than a very slow connection which is hardware and BT-related, the level of service while nice, wasn't ultimately worth paying for. If you have special needs, they certainly seem to care.

I've just received the shocking email telling me that I can now have Infinity, so I'll brave BT to try out the promised wonderland of a 60Mbps connection. This will entail faff, I'm sure, and the horror of a BT engineer visit. Well, actually, the horror of a non-visit, based on past experience.

BT Engineer turned up at alloted time to install Infinity. 
BT engineer installed modem on extension.
BT engineer chopped landline extension cabling for no good reason.   
BT engineer booked to repair phone cabling never turned up.   
BT bills have not increased.   
BB speeds are much faster.   

[Kim]

Is there not a problem with A&A bandwidth caps?

Not at all.  A&A have no bandwidth caps, save for the optional limiting of download rate to 95% of your line speed so that VOIP packets don't get unreasonably delayed.

Unfortunately, they charge you for what you use, so there may be a consequential problem with your bank account caps...

[Kim]

Since I very rarely have ISP problems other than a very slow connection which is hardware and BT-related, the level of service while nice, wasn't ultimately worth paying for. If you have special needs, they certainly seem to care.

I've just received the shocking email telling me that I can now have Infinity, so I'll brave BT to try out the promised wonderland of a 60Mbps connection. This will entail faff, I'm sure, and the horror of a BT engineer visit. Well, actually, the horror of a non-visit, based on past experience.

Alternatively, if you got your FTTC connection via AAISP, you'd have Shaun The Slayer on hand to help deal with the sort of issues hellymedic describes...

(If their pricing's not for you, there are still plenty of other alternatives to BT Retail for FTTC.)

[ian]

Since I very rarely have ISP problems other than a very slow connection which is hardware and BT-related, the level of service while nice, wasn't ultimately worth paying for. If you have special needs, they certainly seem to care.

I've just received the shocking email telling me that I can now have Infinity, so I'll brave BT to try out the promised wonderland of a 60Mbps connection. This will entail faff, I'm sure, and the horror of a BT engineer visit. Well, actually, the horror of a non-visit, based on past experience.

Alternatively, if you got your FTTC connection via AAISP, you'd have Shaun The Slayer on hand to help deal with the sort of issues hellymedic describes...

Yes, but maybe it will go smoothly.

<manic_laughter/>

Need a MAC code anyway to extricate myself from TalkTalk first.

[Charlotte]

Is there not a problem with A&A bandwidth caps?

Not at all.  A&A have no bandwidth caps, save for the optional limiting of download rate to 95% of your line speed so that VOIP packets don't get unreasonably delayed.

Unfortunately, they charge you for what you use, so there may be a consequential problem with your bank account caps...

Although in fairness, unless you're hammering the streaming video, VOIP or P2P, it's hardly a major issue.  Email and a bit of forumming costs peanuts.

[Kim]

Agreed.  I've got squid set to throttle the connection so that streaming video and big downloads are annoying at peak hours, but normal web browsing is unaffected.  We rarely use much more than 3gig of peak-rate download a month, and that's with someone at home low-level spodding most days.

[Feanor]

Right.

Unless you're a P2P whore, sucking up every byte of every movie and app that released ( and some people do want to do this ), then the pre-paid units you choose will be fine.   Switching to Be backhaul gives you more GB per unit, where available.

P2P addicts will not find AAISP  cost-effective.

For normal domestic use, it's fine.

R

[Kim]

P2P addicts will not find AAISP  cost-effective.

For normal domestic use, it's fine.

Exactly.

I do a perfectly reasonably amount of P2P, mostly during the unmetered 2am-6am period.  Having a permanently on linux box and rtorrent^[1]-fu helps, admittedly.

Also, more than a little bit of off-peak iPlayer.  It's fine.


_{[1] One of the worst pieces of user interface design since sendmail.cf - it has the substantial redeeming feature of being a fully-featured torrent client that runs from the console (and therefore in screen).}

[MattH]

Online gaming can be a problem though - some of the ones my son plays were chewing through a couple of hundred MB an hour.

A&A are very nice in allowing over and under-usage to be carried forwards, and not charging for over-usage until you've used double your allowance - so if you have one particularly heavy month you aren't penalised, and you can build up a buffer (up to the amount that you pay for) in quieter months. For me that evened out things like school holidays when our usage would be 50% higher than term time.

Sadly I'm no longer with A&A though. When I moved house I went for a BT Business connection - so unlike BT residential it is unfiltered (no traffic shaping or blocked ports), has static IPs, no problem running servers on it, UK based tech support and truly unlimited usage (no fair use policy). I know that when it breaks I'll be in for a world of pain compared to when Shaun would just sort it out, but on a daily basis I no longer have to be monitoring what we are doing and reminding the kids not to do video chats with their friends before 6pm etc.

[Dez]

I've come to the conclusion that AAISP aren't suitable on the basis of cost and that they would force me to think about when to use the Internet. As everyone is in the house during the day, their pricing structure sucks for us.

TalkTalk looks promising though. Now I need to decide how to switch between the connections.

[Valiant]

TalkTalk customer services is crap and the speeds seems to fluctuate. I have 4 broadband lines with them. I'm tempted to go Be as that works nicely at Lyns.

Also looking into FTTC or FTTP for the town hall. I guess BT are the only real ones doing it? Do I have any other options?

[StuAff]

After having a terrible experience with TalkTalk after they took over Pipex (downgrading my connection, doing nothing about it when I complained, then trying to charge me for two months' service after I left, leading to months of grief) I couldn't recommend them to anyone except my worst enemy.