JSC

I'd agree wth phillipas - Bulldog CS has deteriorated to new levels since they were bought by C&W and tried to expand their customer base at rate they cannot cope with. You may have seen a Watchdog programme recently that slated them and now they are being investigated by OFCOM...

Having said that I am a customer myself and have not generally had any service problems, but have had a nightmare with Billing when I switched between 2 products. Took 2 months to resolve and only then after I complained to the ISPA, the trade association for ISPs. Incidentally this seemed to bring the problem to their attention so I would advise others to try this route if all else fails: ISPA - look under the Consumers Area.

It is a risk to switch to them but if you are lucky enough to not have to speak to CS then it is a pretty reliable and fast connection.

BitPipe

I've been with Eclipse for years and haven't had any problems - many of the smaller specialist DSL companies seem to be good (Eclipse, Zen, Nildram etc..) and you get quality techy customer service .

The larger ones (BT, Wanadoo etc..) sdo eem to suffer from poor customer service when things go wrong as they have the largest subscriber base.

The aforementioned websites have great explanations of just how it all works and you can see how much influence BT (local loop) and the actual DSL service provider have over the service.

flyclub

Thanks for that, as I am convinced some of BT's DNS servers are not the most reliable I have come across, especially compared to what we use in work anyhow.

tristan727

Right- so who is known to have the best, most reliable service in all areas then? I'm not in the mood to have any nightmares with Broadband when I switch suppliers for the sake of a couple of pounds a month - just stick to saving cash on stuff I know how to deal with & save my time instead.

Dave_C

Atlas Internet are a good, very small ISP. They're expensive, (£25+VAT/mo for 2mb), but have decent customer support, no call centres abroad and you can always get through and speak to a person. They're also a very mac-friendly ISP, and fully support them.

Frequentflyer99

I have been with Plusnet for a couple of years. 2Mbit with 2 Gig limit at £15.99 pm with £1 per Gig extra over the 2 Gig.

Brilliant service and custoemr service. One of the best It organisdations it has been my lot to deal with. Delighted to provide a referral to anyone who is interested (not sure what it gives us but they keep encouraging it).

flyclub

An update on progress:

1 - 1pm - Still not working at home - rang them up again - mentioned I was going to cancel and swap to someone else - decided they will send me a new wireless router to try and see if that is the problem! I am still not convinced!

2 - 2:30pm - Just phoned them again, as I'm not convinced its the router. This time they tell me "We have just discovered a fault at the exchange, we should sort it out by 5pm today"

I dispair - exactly what I thought this morning!!!!!!

Oh well, always ebay for the spare router.....

dnw

Its annoying when ADSL breaks but try to remember a) its not a proper business service with a SLA and b) you pay next to nothing for it.

Leased lines are still the only way to go when it comes to mission critical apps. (As a side note- any IT manager that sanctions running missional critical internet apps over an ADSL connection should be shot!)

Of course a leased line can't even be considered for a home user (I haven't checked in a while but it was only a little over 3 years ago that we paid £15k/year for 2Mbit with a 99.7% SLA and ADSL was well established by then...) but its worth mentioning to put it in perspective.

oiRRio

In London I've been using PIPEX for about 3 years now. There have been a couple of outages for a few hours but overall the service is good if not the cheapest out there.

JSC

Useful summary today on BBC which explains LLU
BBC broadband

tristan727

That sounds like the one - I gave up on my studenty-like illegal downloads of Movies & media ages ago - just want speed, not download allowance, which others are probably utlising to clog up my un-limited allowance Tesco Broadband.

Just googling it, apparently theyr'e offering upto 24mb's now - what to do with it?

edited to add-ooh, apparently it can handle two high-definition tv channels on it - count me in! Any tecchies know here if I'll be able to side-step Sky's 720 offering and get 1080 through this? Or does it not matter, as no-one producing in it?

matthewuk

It's possibly a digi-sender or something so he can transmit his TV signal from it's source to another room.

You could try changing your wireless channel or ask him to change his....

latitude

Had exactly the same issue at home , have digi-senders to beam the TV around the house.

After extensive fiddling with channels on the router and the latop finally got somthing that didn't mean the signal dropped out when I was 10 ft away from the router.

jakesterUK

I would second this, I've got 2 Gig (though it actually only every reaches about 1GB).

The problem is BT Wholesale, not any (well I can't speak for all) of the suppliers. If you try to deal direct with BT Wholesale, sometimes they will speak to you and sometimes they won't. Sometimes they will lead you all the way through a problem, only to say at the last hurdle that you must deal with your own supplier. Suppliers have a lot of difficulty with BT Wholesale too, often getting customers to call them in the hope that they will sort themselves out (which they inevitably don't)...

This is of course my own opinion (based on my experience), and is in no way intended to reflect the views of others on this board!

jakesterUK

Just don't is my advice. I had the worst experience with NTL ever when I moved house. They are evil (IMO).