LOL the one saving grace is that you may get a decent talktalk connection as they have their equipment in your exchange.

Check out Ispreview.co.uk

Plusnet have mixed reviews, their support tends to be good, but their packages and through put often seem to be a lot slower than other ISP's on the same exchange.

02 and Fast seem to get a lot of good reviews, even Sky if you can get the LLU service.

I use Vispa, they are pretty good, but there are issues that crop up. Tech support is very good though.

Oh dear thats not good then so no ADSL 2 or FTTC for you! Do you live in the middle of nowhere?!

Ours doesn't have llu or sky! So no broadband for free as I have sky :(

The free sky broadband package is very limited in bandwidth. My sister is on the free one, all she does is browse the web, use online email and facebook games. She gets regular letters from Sky saying she has exceeded her monthly limit and should consider upgrading. I think the free sky is limited to 2GB per month, I downloaded that in 35 mins on my virgin cable connection last night.

Most belkin routers are simply other manufacturers routers rebranded and placed into a dfferent case. My previous router was one such case, it was actually a Linksys WRT54GX router. I dumpled the belkin firmware and it run far better with linksys firmware installed.

Aye, I'd have to pay to top it up.

From previous experience Ive found the data on 'Samknows' website not to be fully up to date.

ie:- some providers mentioned as having no service there when on further investigation this isnt the case!

Best to phone them just to check.

Contrary to the common consensus Ive had Belkin routers albeit through cable and had none of the issues other people have experienced.

I do make sure they have the latest firmware and I tend to use mac access control as the only basic security.

One thing that is often missed is the WIFI settings on your pc/laptop. There are quite a few things you can do to improve signal tenacity etc

Found InSSIDer utility tool to be of great help scanning what's about http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider as prefer its GUI to netstumbler.

We use Ubiquity and Lancom at work for WIFI side of things and there products never cease to amaze me on broadcast ability and cost.

Chap Ive come across Geof @ http://www.msdist.co.uk/ has WIFI running through his veins and is a good source of info!

Good luck!

At this moment I'm sitting in a hotel room in Istanbul (working here for a couple of days) and I'm connected to an unsecured hotel wireless system, and it still keeps dropping out every 5 mins! Maybe my router at home isn't so bad!!!

I updated the wireless driver for my laptop last week.....

Is it a dell by chance?

oh yes. Latitude D630

Whats up with Dell. I'm sitting on a D620 at the moment. They usually either have broadcom or intel drivers which are the most popular.

I have a Belkin n mimo wireless router which has a brilliant signal I am on the third floor! but I have it sett to the windows xp to search for wireless as it connects then loses signal and you have to refresh with it on belkin if that makes sense, perfect now with 3mb wirelessly

Wireless performance by my Dell laptop in this hotel room is STILL EFFING USELESS> come back dial up all is forgiven.

Dial up really was much worse than you ever remember it.

It wasnt worse than this. This is ONLY just usable. And only then because all the TV channels are Turkish and I'm THAT bored otherwise

Buy a dongle or pcmcia card if you have the slot; I found my "own brand" laptop card was Ok if there were only a few networks about, but take it into Paris and it would throw a paddy. Stuck a Trendnet" card in it and it was fine.

Whats up with Dell. I'm sitting on a D620 at the moment. They usually either have broadcom or intel drivers which are the most popular.

Did I say there was anything wrong with Dell?

Father had the same thing with his dell when prompted to install new drivers via windows update. He lost all wifi. So he went to the intel site, and downloaded the drivers. Wifi up again, but kept dropping.

Load the ones on the Dell site, and everythings fine again. So what do Dell do with their drivers?

Understand where your coming from but i think this would only apply in a commercial multiple AP environment. You could put your router on any channel at home and still get issues as your ap could be just metres away from next door or the flat above or below. At home its a matter of trial and error in getting one to suit. I know as it took me ages to get a decent 'signal' on mine as i can see about 7 or 8 AP's around the house.

The secondary school im at at the minute i can see 10 AP's from around the area! The school are having 78 AP's installed next week so should screw up everyone's wireless in view!

What solution are you putting in with 78 AP's?

Just curious

I'd of thought a school would want WiFi and GSM jammers. not coverage.

I had problems with my wireless when switching to WPA encryption on my Linksys WRT54GS. Updated the firmware and it worked reliably.

A year or so later the signal was rubbish, until I changed the channel (as my neighbour had set up a wireless router)

There are 13 wireless channels now isnt there?

If memory serves me correctly (which it does less often with each passing year) I didn't get as many problems when I was using WEP at home. I changed to WPA2-PSK as it's supposedly better than WEP and now I've nothing but problems. I was beginning to think that I should change back to WEP or even run open.

However, my experiences this week running on an unsecured wireless network in the hotel are no better. It still drops out every other page, or even if the connection doesn't drop, I get "Internet Exploder was unable to display the page" and have to refresh. Anything on the page before that (like a new post) is lost.

Will try looking for a new wireless driver on the Dell website.

Ahh if it's WPA2 issues, make sure you have applied the hotfixes to windows.

I installed the driver from the Dell website and I've now got an Intel wireless configuration app I didn't have before. We'll see tonight if that's any better. It's an unsecured network at the hotel so WPA shouldn't come into it?

There is an XP hotfix for WPA2 and you need to make sure that is there either via SP3 or the hotfix otherwise you can have problems.

I have SP3 on the laptop already but will check the desktops at home when I get back there.

Useful tip, thanks!

As Clarkson once said "I can describe this with one 4-letter word; begins with 's', ends in 't' and it's not 'soot'.

Drivers updated, still drops the connection 5 times in 10 minutes before finally reaching a stage where I have to reboot to get a connection back.

Someone, earlier in this thread, said that dialup was so much worse than I remember it. No it really wasn't. I could get a more reliable connection than this with a bit of wet string stuck into COM1 going to an acoustic coupler sellotaped to a bakealite handset. And at least with dialup, when I was tugging away at the porn no one could call me to disturb me just when it was getting interesting! GRRRR!!!!