Broadband Help

[bbp07]

Hiya,

I am moving into a flat on south street and i need to set up internet/tv/phone services. I've been living in student accommodation so i haven't had to deal with this yet. I want a fast connection with unlimited downloads, i was going to go with virgin but now it seems like they don't have a fast connection in this area. but i'm not sure i bt is any better. any advice?

cheers

[777]

BT is 5.4 Mb here, it's fast enough.

[orudge]

Very few of the popular commercial ISPs will give you truly "unlimited" downloads these days. Some may throttle speeds at peak times (or of certain kinds of traffic, typically BitTorrent), others may slow you down/bill you/cut you off if you use more than an unspecified amount of traffic per month.

[RandomMusings]

We're with Tiscali this year in my flat and it's serving us very well. Not sure how good the service is all over town, but out past the Byre it's certainly sufficient.

[Freaker]

We're with plusnet, which really isn't all that bad, and quite cheap for what we get. For proper fast speeds most of the time and pretty good limits (if at a slightly higher price), try the UK Free Software Network. I have heard very good things about them regarding speed and service.

[starsandsparkles]

Stay away from VirginMedia - complete nightmare!

[orudge]

We're with plusnet, which really isn't all that bad, and quite cheap for what we get. For proper fast speeds most of the time and pretty good limits (if at a slightly higher price), try the UK Free Software Network. I have heard very good things about them regarding speed and service.

UKFSN is an Entanet reseller, as is the ISP we currently use, ADSL24. Service has been very good, speeds generally excellent - for the price (and as a flat of very heavy Internet users), I can't complain. They do have limits, but they are very clearly set out. Unfortunately, service has been a little slow as of late, but I'm assuming/hoping these are just temporary issues which will be sorted out soon.

Another benefit of ADSL24: tis a 1-month contract, no silly 12 or 18-month contracts to have to deal with!

[bbp07]

Stay away from VirginMedia - complete nightmare!

okay... but why? what issues have you had with them?

[starsandsparkles]

Stay away from VirginMedia - complete nightmare!

okay... but why? what issues have you had with them?

It took ages to get set up because they send you an email about it. They didn't seem to understand that we didn't' HAVE internet so couldn't keep checking for email.

"Unlimited" is not unlimited, despite the fact we said very clearly when we signed up that we were six students living together so internet usage was probably going to be high.

They spelt the name on the account wrong and wouldn't correct it despite us telling them several times. They refused payment because the name on the account didn't match the bank details (their fault) and cut us off, but only told us via email, which never gets checked because they won't send it to your personal email address, only the one they gave you.

Hm... then when they re-connected us they put us on reduced service due to overuseage which was basically useless and only worked properly (but slowly) at 2am.

When it did work, the service was still unreliable - cutting out, running very slowly etc.

I'm not going to pretend we were blameless, but they were useless too and when we rang to spoke to them it took forever to speak to a real person and then you keep getting transferred, put on hold etc (although BT is like this too).

[bbp07]

OH Damn... Thanks starsandsparkles! I won't be signing with them!

[bbp07]

Thanks everyone for your help!

I will probalby go with Tiscali. Though AOL is giving away a PS3 to sign with them, but they limit your downloads to 40 GB... how much is that??? we watch a lot of online movies but i don't think we download them, just free stream. i just don't want to go over our limit with normal use and end up paying loads for it.

Also, does anyone know about freeview tv, do you like it?

Cheers.

[orudge]

Your average streamed movie is perhaps a couple of hundred megabytes (depending on the quality and the length, of course), so you could view a couple of hundred movies a month in that limit (there are roughly 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte). If you use the likes of the download version of the BBC iPlayer or 4OD, note that they use more bandwidth because they act as "peer to peer" clients (which upload data to other users as well as download).

As for Freeview, it's fine enough, a reasonable choice. E4 and Dave tend to be on the most in our flat.

[bbp07]

Thanks orudge! That really helps.

After looking all all of the suggestions you all gave us, we are going to go with tiscali, simply because they have the cheapest package to get tv, broadband, and phone and then we don't have to bother with the internet usage limits, we get on demand and 70 channels, and unlimited phone calls... rock on! Thank you all for giving your advice on this, we really appreciate it!

Cheers.

[bbp07]

Okay so I don't know the basics of setting up internet here but DAMN... I don't think the 8 people at bt and tascali know either. I've been told to contact this person, do this... blah blah blah... and all i needed to do is set up a f'n line rental! How hard is that to tell someone!

Anyway, I have one more question. We often watch movies online but we don't download them we watch them like you would a youtube video. They have to upload into the browser but we don't download them to our computer... will this count towards downloading limits?

Thanks again everyone, you all on here have more answers than the people in the business. Cheers.

[orudge]

The majority of ISPs will require you to have a BT landline. Your phone calls may be charged through a different company, as will your Internet access, but the line rental will generally have to be paid to BT. (Around £11/month, I think.)

As for streaming movies, that still counts as downloading - indeed, pretty much everything you do (downloading/reading e-mails, web pages, instant messenger, Skype) will result in data being downloaded and will count against your limits.

[bbp07]

The majority of ISPs will require you to have a BT landline. Your phone calls may be charged through a different company, as will your Internet access, but the line rental will generally have to be paid to BT. (Around £11/month, I think.)

As for streaming movies, that still counts as downloading - indeed, pretty much everything you do (downloading/reading e-mails, web pages, instant messenger, Skype) will result in data being downloaded and will count against your limits.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're awesome! You're the only person i've come across that can actually clearly state what downloading means. And as for the BT landline, I didn't know how they worked exactly and didn't know that we needed a line rental. In the US its all one package, you don't rent lines, they automatically come with whatever service you're buying. And I was told 4 different things (by tiscali and bt employees) before someone finally told me that we needed a line rental. lolol. what a nightmare. Thanks orudge.

[Freaker]

Some providers may also be able to arrange the line rental for you, without having to deal with BT. Tiscali may have that, I am not sure, just specify that you do not have line rental yet when ordering. Line rental may be quite pricey - it depends on whether your line is still alive or not. If it only needs to be "reactivated" (for example, if someone paid for line rental in the not too distant past), that is often for free. If they need to open up the line again, the post office (who we are with) charges more than 100 pounds for that. There is a number you can call that will tell you the phone number your line had before (if it is still alive), but I have forgotten that now - does anyone on here know? [Also, be careful to not pay that fee if the line is indeed still alive - post office charged me at first, but I got a refund after telling them it was only a reactivation.)

To sum up - new phone line rental = expensive. If people who lived there before used the phone, reactivation = free. Check whether line is alive, and whether Tiscali can arrange the line rental for you.

[bbp07]

Some providers may also be able to arrange the line rental for you, without having to deal with BT. Tiscali may have that, I am not sure, just specify that you do not have line rental yet when ordering. Line rental may be quite pricey - it depends on whether your line is still alive or not. If it only needs to be "reactivated" (for example, if someone paid for line rental in the not too distant past), that is often for free. If they need to open up the line again, the post office (who we are with) charges more than 100 pounds for that. There is a number you can call that will tell you the phone number your line had before (if it is still alive), but I have forgotten that now - does anyone on here know? [Also, be careful to not pay that fee if the line is indeed still alive - post office charged me at first, but I got a refund after telling them it was only a reactivation.)

To sum up - new phone line rental = expensive. If people who lived there before used the phone, reactivation = free. Check whether line is alive, and whether Tiscali can arrange the line rental for you.

Thanks Freaker! Thats good to know. Ours just need reactivation so I'll make sure to fight it if they try to charge us : ) But BT has a total monopoly on our phone line rental, we have to go through them know matter what. I was going to use Tascali because the line rental was included but not for us. After all of this, I'm actually just going to go with BT unlimited internet because its the approxmately the same cost of every other offer out there and their internet speeds remain at a good quality at peak times... so i'm told.

part of the problem i've been having is me not understanding how things work, the companys not telling me how things work and assuming that i know, even though I clearly have an accent and tell them that i just moved here, and because our address has 3 phone lines linked to it and two flats and bt couldn't tell whose line was whose. I actually had to go to the flat and dail some code to get the old phone number so we could preceed... thankfully I finally came across the one bt employee that understood the situation and knew how to fix it. Bt and Tascali kept refering me bact to the other and saying that the problem was on the others end and then I got refered to openreach... i still don't understand that one. Thankfully its over, I understand how it works now, for the most part. : )

Thanks everyone for your help, really! I've gotten more info from you all than the people in the business.

Cheers.

[orudge]

Some providers may also be able to arrange the line rental for you, without having to deal with BT.

At the moment, the only providers in St Andrews who can also rent lines are TalkTalk/Carphone Warehouse, and O2/Be are meant to be starting an LLU service this coming weekend, supposedly (although that has been put back several times, it seems). I think for pretty much everyone else you will need BT for the line.

Hope you get it all sorted out, anyway, bbp07! The system can certainly be confusing.

[bbp07]

Some providers may also be able to arrange the line rental for you, without having to deal with BT.

At the moment, the only providers in St Andrews who can also rent lines are TalkTalk/Carphone Warehouse, and O2/Be are meant to be starting an LLU service this coming weekend, supposedly (although that has been put back several times, it seems). I think for pretty much everyone else you will need BT for the line.

Hope you get it all sorted out, anyway, bbp07! The system can certainly be confusing.

Thanks orudge. I think its all sorted out now. Bt is hooking us up on thursday with a line rental then the rest will be done next week. Hopefully, i'm not speaking too soon.