Can anyone recommend me a good one?

 

We've been with O2 for years due to a good deal for having mobile contracts with them.

However they have sold their broadband business to Sky who have promptly shafted us by doubling the price and seemingly reducing our speed (which has halved from 3MB to 1.5MB on a very good day)

 

I'd ideally like the maximum speed from a phoneline based service (no cable coverage in our area), with unlimited downloads (for utorrent and such) and a given the utorrent usage a pretty relaxed attitude to that kind of usage, all at the cheapest possible price (of course).

 

any recommendations?

 

TalkTalk, BT and Sky come up cheapest and are i guess the biggest but are their unlimited truly unlimited?

are they ok with utorrent or are they likely to throttle my d/l speeds?

 

 

We've got BT Infinity it outperforms their claims, I can get 56 as can bro in law 25 miles away compared with their max claim of 48, is unlimited in its downloads and the service has been first rate. We've had a few replacement routers, we're on BT router type 4 at present. I'd love it to fail as version 5 the current one is supposed to be as good as you can get - regardless of cost.

Despite being in a new build estate fibre optic is not an option, and while my parents BT cable is brilliant, my inlaws standard phoneline BT broadband is woeful, so i'm not convinced by BTs offering.

Fibre doesn't come to your door anyway Cliff. It's only fibre from the exchange to the cabinet at the end of the road.

 

all you need to bear in mind with broadband companies is that you will get a maximum of half what their "up to xxmb" speed is, and half that again if you use wifi.

 

TalkTalk sold me 76mb. I get 35mb connected via cable to the router, and about 15mb over wifi. To get higher than 35, towards the 76mb, they want me to agree to a visit from a BT engineer which "might result in a charge of £50". The system was installed by a BT engineer!

 

To recap - they're all shysters and liars. Your service will be unreliable and slower than you expected, whilst service will be rubbish - whoever you choose.

We were with BT and were getting nailed by price and poor limits.

 

We switched to Plusnet (also BT) because we don't have many unbundled suppliers being quite rural and we guessed (rightly) that a switch within the BT umbrella would be quite straightforward.

 

Last week our 12 month deal was up and our discounted phone/broadband deal went up £8.50 a month. I phoned them up and asked for a deal to stay. I was offered a 2yr contract at £12 below the standard rate so £3.50 less than our previous discount. The service has been fine so I took that. If we get bandwidth capped I've never noticed it. We're totally unlimited now and I'd never go back to a limit. We hit 60Gb a month and most of that is streaming. Pretty much all my TV watching now is via catchup apps and Lovefilm.

 

I'd phone sky and ask to negotiate a new deal. Sky claim not to limit bandwidth don't they?

There is possibly just more contention on the lines now.

Edited 27 February, 201412 yr by Aspman

There was a brief day and a half last week when the phone and internet were down completely and it's only really since then that i've noticed the dip in speeds.

Could as you say be a botched repair/poor line since.

 

still need to speak to Sky though - £20 a month for 1.5MB unlimited seems to be a little harsh

BT'll offer the same service for £13

We are with Sky and have never had a problem. If you have Sky tv then you will get a discount

Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk 2

Don't forget if your not with a cable company your going through BT lines anyway so the speeds are limited by the line involved.

 

Unless of course the 3rd party provider is throttling your connection  

Panic over

Sky aren't doubling our costs. The £20 they quoted via text to Ms Pasty was to cover the period from when they took over the account to their first official bill date - a period of around 2 months.

After that they will be maintaining the £12 a month we paid with O2.

 

However they, and BT, are sure we should be getting between 2 and 5MB though - which is in line with the 3MB we were getting but over and above the 1MB i'm struggling to get at the moment.

Shall call them and run some "diagnostic checks on the line" once home and see what we come up with.

Some community based social networking says that the phone outage wasn't estate wide so may well be down to just us so it may be just us getting slowed down do to some fault somewhere along the line

Glad you have got at least half your problems sorted, but for future reference NONE of the big ISPs would have been any good for you as they ALL block the majority of BitTorrent sites due to various court orders.

Expect your access to be cut off once Sky have fully integrated O2 into their system.

For torrent access you need to sign up with one of the many smaller ISP's as they do not have to comply with the website blocking orders.

The smaller ISPs usually give better tech support when you have issues as well.

Thats not the end of it though. A quick google shows the workaround which is as easy as searching via another web page.

Or switch to newsgroups. Torrents are 2005 anyway lol

Its a minefield out there!

I am with Plus Net. I have not had any downtime. We use things like various catch up tv channels and have never had any issues, but I suspect that is the same as much of the competition. The bottom line is I have found the support staff very knowledable, helpful and patient, but then the only time I needed to talk to them was during the inital set up 18 months ago. Not needed them since.

I'm been with SKY for a few years and also have their TV package. My Router has slowly been dying for the last couple of months (the Power supply blew up yesterday ) and after I rang them to see how much a new one was, I was told I could have one for free. No questions or quibbles, just a straight forward "we see you are a loyal customer, so I'm sure we can do you a free new Router". It should be their new Hub style jobbie too

 

Much better service than my previous ISP, BT. They were rather unpleasant to deal with.

O2 already block piratebay, isohunt (when it existed), RRS feed suppliers for tv shows (to put straight into utorrent) etc but that's what proxys were made for though.

I did dabble with newsgroups but the thought of paying for something which I can get (albeit much slower) for free irked me.

especially when my allocation was wasted when i downloaded a duff file...

 

Shall plod on with 1MB at the moment and hope something can be done to improve the speed

I have the SKY unlimited package and it is unlimited. It also doesn't throttle bandwidth if you stream stuff (BBC iPlayer streams HD beautifully) whereas BT used to cut my 10mb line down to 700kb when I streamed (they denied it even though I ran several tests). SKY have steadily improved my speed too and I now get 16mb/s on WiFi and in theory could get up to 19mb/s hardwired to the router. 

 

Plus you get to speak to someone in Ireland or Scotland when you ring up.

I have the SKY unlimited package and it is unlimited. It also doesn't throttle bandwidth if you stream stuff (BBC iPlayer streams HD beautifully) whereas BT used to cut my 10mb line down to 700kb when I streamed (they denied it even though I ran several tests). SKY have steadily improved my speed too and I now get 16mb/s on WiFi and in theory could get up to 19mb/s hardwired to the router. 

 

Plus you get to speak to someone in Ireland or Scotland when you ring up.

Just left Sky for broadband as I couldn't get anything over 4.5Mb/s (hardwired to the router with a theoretical max of 8Mb/s) - now on Virgin and loving the 30+Mb/s speed (advertised as 30 actually 32!).

I'm with Plus Net and gave been for a long time now with no issues.

I pay £10 a month for unlimited,

Im with plusnet and no problems at all with them.

I've just moved from o2 to sky and managed to save a quid a month, now paying £15.40ish for free evening and weekend calls, unlimited broadband and line rental. According to BT ads BT charges £15.99 just for line rental, so how am I paying less than that??

I know not relevant to OP, but for anyone else thinking of switching; I'm with Virgin Media and currently getting about 49mb in the old part of the house; 2 foot thick sandstone walls between my mobile and the router. On the laptop upstairs I've had an indicated 72mb.

Our Tivo box has its own internet line so you can watch catch up TV without interruption.

At times we've had 2 x laptops, 2 x mobiles, an XBox and our printer connected to the Wi-Fi with no obvious drop off in performance.

Received a letter from VM last week stating we are due an upgrade from 60mb to 100mb free of charge. And it's unlimited. Plus unlimited free repairs including remote and router.

Fin

O2 already block piratebay, isohunt (when it existed), RRS feed suppliers for tv shows (to put straight into utorrent) etc but that's what proxys were made for though.

I did dabble with newsgroups but the thought of paying for something which I can get (albeit much slower) for free irked me.

especially when my allocation was wasted when i downloaded a duff file...

Shall plod on with 1MB at the moment and hope something can be done to improve the speed

Get them to reset your DSLAM. You can simulate something similar by unplugging your router and all line filters for a minimum of 24 hours. This should force a DSLAM reset at the exchange, but isn't always successful if the ISP is using their own equipment.

As for proxies, not sure how it works but as all your traffic goes through your ISP first, it shouldn't work if they configure their systems correctly

 

TalkTalk sold me 76mb. I get 35mb connected via cable to the router, and about 15mb over wifi. To get higher than 35, towards the 76mb, they want me to agree to a visit from a BT engineer which "might result in a charge of £50". The system was installed by a BT engineer!

 

 

You need the engineer, as long as the fault is the otherside of the master socket then there will be no charge. BT are using a lot of subcontractors to do the installs, so chances are very hight that it was one of those who completed the install. I also needed an engineer visit after installation due to a line fault after I transferred from Sky to BT.

 

There is a fault on your line, I pay for and receive 78meg direct from BT. I have had a number of engineer visits recently but not paid a thing.

You need the engineer, as long as the fault is the otherside of the master socket then there will be no charge. BT are using a lot of subcontractors to do the installs, so chances are very hight that it was one of those who completed the install. I also needed an engineer visit after installation due to a line fault after I transferred from Sky to BT.

 

There is a fault on your line, I pay for and receive 78meg direct from BT. I have had a number of engineer visits recently but not paid a thing.

The router is not connected to the master socket. As with a lot of newer houses (about 20 years old) the master socket is in the worst place possible for a router. No power near the master socket.

 

There is some of the B&Q style phone extension cable going from the master socket into the living room which is where the BT guy (sub contractor) put the modem. As that cable isn't screened, it's possible that is the cause of the problem. I might replace that with screened cable first to see if that fixes it. No point paying someone £50 for a job like that which I can do myself.

Before changing any internal wiring, check the speed by directly connected to the test socket of your master socket. This removes all internal wiring from the equation.

 

If you haven't got a power socket next to it, temporarily run a long power extension cable so you can at least run one test to prove the theory.

 

http://support.zen.co.uk/kb/Knowledgebase/Testing-connection-from-the-BT-Master-test-telephone-socket

What happens if you dont have a master socket like me?