Well, as of 1/6/2005 my local exchange will be dragged (kicking and screaming) in to the 21st century and will be upgraded for adsl.

So I'm looking at providers and the pros and cons. Anybody care to name their provider, connection rate, download limit etc and pass comment on their service?

I often work from home, but i've never really looked at what my download traffic may be. Anyone comment of this? (to give an idea, my ost file is at ~450Mb for this year, and i use terminal services etc to office machines and pull files from severs etc). I'm tempted to look for a no download limit isp, but these seem to be getting harder to find.

Definately need to support VPN (cisco) and i have to fund this myself so looking for good value.

TIA

Steve

Is static IP important to you?

Personally I use Zen.

For the "value" providors eg BT, wanadoo, AOL you have longer contracts typically 12 months and perhaps less network quality.

Zen, Nildram are or were (www.adslguide.org - very good) leaders in performance. Now for my part, Zen have a higher monthly cost but only a monthly contract. Also I have 8 static IP's so I can use home hosting and / or set firewall rules on ip, handy

Also I have had one afternoon (was a home worker for 12months) of unplanned downtime, that in my book is pretty dam good in over 3 years of service.

Alot of us use plus.net, you get a static IP, 200mb worth of webspace and from this month for

Is static IP important to you?

Probabley not. It's more a case of me dialing in to the office rather than hosting stuff. I'd not come accross zen, but my boss uses nildram. They seem to be setting a limit of 50Gb a month. I can't believe I'd use that much, but i have no idea on how to check. My wireless connection says I've received 20,000 packets in the last 17hrs (although i guess that's only really this morning - it didn't hibernate for some reason so got left on over night). How do i find the packet size?

Thanks for the info - i'll look in to zen

Look at packages like NETSTAT for useage. This will monitor throughout and speed etc so you can built up a picture of how much you use.

It's free from here http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/nsl.htm

Alot of us use plus.net, you get a static IP, 200mb worth of webspace and from this month for

Look at packages like NETSTAT for useage. This will monitor throughout and speed etc so you can built up a picture of how much you use.

It's free from here http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/nsl.htm

Thanks for that.

BTW - what's this BBCi Broadband Access i keep seeing referenced?

Probabley not. It's more a case of me dialing in to the office rather than hosting stuff. I'd not come accross zen, but my boss uses nildram. They seem to be setting a limit of 50Gb a month. I can't believe I'd use that much, but i have no idea on how to check. My wireless connection says I've received 20,000 packets in the last 17hrs (although i guess that's only really this morning - it didn't hibernate for some reason so got left on over night). How do i find the packet size?

You won't hit anywhere near 50Gb unless you're downloading large files. I have a machine running as a P2P box and I'm downloading about 1-2Gb a day. When I work at home, unless I'm pulling down system dumps, etc, it's usually in the hundreds of megs. All in, I'm currently totalling a little over 30Gb a month..... (2 machines for internet/MSN and 1 for downloading, all left on 24/7)

Chris

You won't hit anywhere near 50Gb unless you're downloading large files. I have a machine running as a P2P box and I'm downloading about 1-2Gb a day. When I work at home' date=' unless I'm pulling down system dumps, etc, it's usually in the hundreds of megs. All in, I'm currently totalling a little over 30Gb a month..... (2 machines for internet/MSN and 1 for downloading, all left on 24/7)

Chris[/quote']

Fair enough - that's a good ball park to go with. I get the occasionally email with 10Mb attachment, and may download the occassionally 50mb file (anything over that is extremely painfull on isdn!!) but the rest is general surfing or emailing, with occassional TS to remote machines (but i guess that's not to heavy either) and msn.

Thanks for the info

occassional TS to remote machines (but i guess that's not to heavy either)

TS Can be pretty light if you set up the cacheing and that - I use it on a 9.6k connection via mobile phone, and while it's not exactly fluid it is suprisingly usable...

Oh, and VPN should work over pretty much any mainstream ISP (it's more to do with the router, I believe) - I use it over NTL.

Rob.

Is this still going ahead? I thought fair usage had been abandoned so we're currently uncapped and my line has recently been upgraded to 2Mbit! Not to mention a contention ratio of 1:30 now too All for

Probabley not. It's more a case of me dialing in to the office rather than hosting stuff. I'd not come accross zen' date=' but my boss uses nildram. They seem to be setting a limit of 50Gb a month. I can't believe I'd use that much, but i have no idea on how to check. My wireless connection says I've received 20,000 packets in the last 17hrs (although i guess that's only really this morning - it didn't hibernate for some reason so got left on over night). How do i find the packet size?

Thanks for the info - i'll look in to zen[/quote']

Packetyser will provide that info to you www.packetyser.com, install it and start a capture session when you are ready stop the session then choose the stats tab and it will tell you how many packets and total bytes.

Fair enough - that's a good ball park to go with. I get the occasionally email with 10Mb attachment' date=' and may download the occassionally 50mb file (anything over that is extremely painfull on isdn!!) but the rest is general surfing or emailing, with occassional TS to remote machines (but i guess that's not to heavy either) and msn.

Thanks for the info[/quote']

Another question:

I've currently got ISDN (home highway). My understanding is that the isdn has to go, then the adsl can be activated. Does this involve a BT visit, or do they just get you to unplug the faceplate from the linebox and send the isdn box back in the post?

Is this still going ahead? I thought fair usage had been abandoned so we're currently uncapped and my line has recently been upgraded to 2Mbit! Not to mention a contention ratio of 1:30 now too All for

Alot of us use plus.net, you get a static IP, 200mb worth of webspace and from this month for

New customers may get a 2mb line if they're close enough to the exchange - anything faster relies on BT upgrading the exchanges... which is coming soon' date=' but they're only trialing it right now...

Existing customers will go up to 2mb (conditions permitting) once BT get round to upgrading your line. Process has started already, but could take a while...

Would take the 30gb cap with a grain of salt - as they've just dumped the fair usage program, they seem a little uncertain about what people will be able to download - they're now talking about contention ratios rather than bandwidth...

Overall a bloody good ISP, but they spent too long listening to their customers and seem to be in a muddle. Worth going with them for a cheap 2mb line with a decent bandwidth allowance though...[/quote']

Yep sorry condition permitting for 2mb. They think that we should all have the fastest speed mid July once BT have finish. The capped limit has been dumped for contention as you said.

I can't fault them considering I only went with them initally cause they where cheap and got good reviews from the onset.

Another question:

I've currently got ISDN (home highway). My understanding is that the isdn has to go' date=' then the adsl can be activated. Does this involve a BT visit, or do they just get you to unplug the faceplate from the linebox and send the isdn box back in the post?[/quote']

I moved from Home Highway to ADSL about 18 months ago - it did need a BT visit to remove the ISDN first and IIRC it cost about

Checkout http://www.e7even.com - they do very competitive pricing, although you do have to pay upfront rather than monthly. Uncapped downloads, unlimited email addresses, etc.

Yep sorry condition permitting for 2mb. They think that we should all have the fastest speed mid July once BT have finish. The capped limit has been dumped for contention as you said.

I can't fault them considering I only went with them initally cause they where cheap and got good reviews from the onset.

Hope it didn't sound like I was having a go at you mate Plusnet are trying to sell a unique package (i.e. a 30:1 rather than 50:1 contention, etc), it just seems they can't quite make their minds up yet... The upgrade to the max speed your line supports is very welcome though!