New ISP?

[Haly]

Originally Posted by Mark

NTL are a bit hit and miss. Some people rave about them, others get crap service.

You mean like all ISPs?

[Mark]

NTL more than most Jen. Most ISPs are usually just good or bad. NTL vary an awful lot area by area.

If you're a light user, there's plenty of choice out there.

I'm not sure how high regard Zen are held these days. They used to be the daddy, but you'd pay for that. Eclipse used to be up there too but they've gone downhill rather rapidly.

I'll await replies from others, as I'd certainly like some options myself.

[Haly]

Fair enough, just always hear so many different ISPs have so many varying reports from their users.
Wasn't strictly defending NTL (not that I've ever had a serious problem in 2 different areas of the country), just hear the term hit and miss a lot about so many different things that it always makes me slightly unsure.

[Mark]

Nicking stuff from a certain other forum...

http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php

Like all such surveys, I'd take that with a very large pinch of salt, though it's a good enough starting point. ADSLguide is also worth a look of course.

[Mark]

Oh, btw, for the Entanet stuff, look at UKFSN. People 'over there' seem to rave about them. Just looked at their site and had a major Meh moment. That site looks like some part-time web trainee created it.

PS - no insults intended - I'm just as much a web hobbyist as anyone here.

[Garp]

Originally Posted by Mark

NTL more than most Jen. Most ISPs are usually just good or bad. NTL vary an awful lot area by area.

To be fair, so are we and a lot of that is down to Telco engineers in the area. I feel sorry for certain customers who are forever appearing in our line faults system, as you know without looking at the ticket its the same old faults and the same old excuses from the Telco. Its frustrating for us as we always end up having arguments with the Telco operators over the general state of those lines too. We often seem to be able to pull up more details of when faults have occurred than they do, and we have to beat them with statistics to prove to them there really is something dodgy with the line in general.

[Mark]

Yeah, true, but that's not really an ISP issue - that's down to either the BTW engineers or congested exchanges. In NTL's case, the buck stops with them.

Water under the bridge to most customers of course.

[CliffyG]

I recently moved from F2s to http://www.ukfsn.org/. They don't have traffic shaping, speeds are generaly high and you get generous off-peak allowance (22:00 - 08:00). I'm using their Office MAX 45 product which gives 45 GB peak, 300 GB off-peak for £25.00 +VAT. Upload is 832kbps and apparently Office products get priority during congested times although i'm not 100% about that. They are an entanet reseller but one of the cheaper ones and because of this you get 24 hour support with them. Had 1 blip in a couple of months and they sorted it out quickly on a sunday evening.

EDIT
Just realised your bandwidth allowance, i only went with these because of my torrent downloading so not sure how useful they'll be for you .

[Daz]

Originally Posted by CliffyG

They don't have traffic shaping,

...

Office products get priority during congested times

Erm...

Just out of curiosity, would you consider NTL if it was in your area Jim?

[Zirax]

I'm not sure if this would work, but what about Easynet and their new encrypted service? Unless they are throttling everything now :/