ISPs (Broadband) - UK users

[shabbagaz 444]

Bit of a specific topic for UK users.

I've been with Virgin Media for 9 years (since they were Telewest) and never had a problem until a few months ago - ended up having an engineer call out who changed the super hub and a few other bits and pieces. It was fine for a while but I've been having problems again over the past couple of weeks - slow internet, signing out of PSN, timing out when trying to load GTA Online (seems to do it periodically and its happened three times this weekend alone).

I'm getting closer to telling VM to go fuck themselves so can anyone recommend an alternative or have an opinion on BT & Sky who seem to be the only other ones to offer fibre optic?

Having an ISP that's good for gaming is obviously essential!

[DuPz0r 5361]

Virgin, BT & Sky are also the most expensive ISPs. They provide TV if that's what you're after, but if you only want internet, there's far cheaper alternatives. Plusnet, Primus, EE, TalkTalk all do cheap Broadband only packages. And all you pay is a base line charge monthly, and the broadband usage cost. As you already have Fibre Optics installed in your area, they can't cap your speed by much, so even if you were to go with their cheapest packages (from £2 a month) you'll still get a decent bang for your buck. If you have to have 100 of mbs for whatever reason, then you'll have to pay more, but no-one really needs that much for gaming alone...

Here, this may help:

http://www.money.co....dband-deals.htm

Just go through the options and see how much you want to spend.

[narcolepsy 581]

TalkTalk are wank. Avoid avoid avoid. "cheapest possible route" is not the word when it comes to the lines they use. They are absolutely god awful. Marney was a cunt but he wasn't lying when he said TalkTalk are crap.

Sky... meh, I have family that use them and I've never seen internet as poor. 4AM in the morning, 5PM at night they're both as slow. Peak times don't exist for sky from experience.

Just start applying pressure to Virgin, they'll start making changes. Every few years my performance gets a bit crap and when it does I talk about switching etc and it fixes itself pretty sharpish.

[Indy 350]

BT have peak-time caps on P2P... jus' sayin.

[narcolepsy 581]

Every ISP has peak time caps on browsing, period. From then on it's a case of finding which doesn't use the cheapest [usually the longest] route possible.

on TalkTalk I've used tracert and found websites I KNOW are hosted in leeds be bounced around the united states.

[cuda 939]

Internet in the UK is wank.

[narcolepsy 581]

Its worse elsewhere. I don't know how I'd survive if I had caps like most ISP's in the US put on

[cuda 939]

Compared to Portugal, ISPs here are shocking. Caps in Portugal happened something like 10 years ago, and this was my basic service back home:

Pretty much all of country has fiber optic coverage too.

And don't even get me started on censorship around here, brb blocking TPB, brb allow ALL proxies.

[Mercy 30]

Plusnet is a branch of BT I believe

[narcolepsy 581]

I wouldn't touch plusnet with a 40 foot pole. We were burned once when we were one of ~1k people they booted off because "unmetered" dial up according to them was being abused by us [granted, we used it alot] in 2001.

They also had an absolute farce with sensitive emails being completely lost and they didn't have backups, and then the year after the webmail service they used had a trojan built into it.

[Qdeathstar 1763]

Its worse elsewhere. I don't know how I'd survive if I had caps like most ISP's in the US put on

unless you video stream 4hrs a day every day the caps arent noticable

Ofc, im paying 99/mo for internet though

[narcolepsy 581]

Its worse elsewhere. I don't know how I'd survive if I had caps like most ISP's in the US put on

unless you video stream 4hrs a day every day the caps arent noticable

Ofc, im paying 99/mo for internet though

guess who streams video 4hrs+ a day.

meeeeeee!