Broadband / ADSL options

[Blue Cat Buxton]

My broadband supplier (NTL) has just told me they are going to 'upgrade' my service.

I currently have a 312kb unlimited monthly download.

They are offering to upgrade this to 1MB with a 3GB limit, or I can keep the 312kb with a 30GB limit.

On the face of it, the faster service seems the way to go. How realistic is a 3GB cap?

[Chris]

Thats slow. I've never heard of a monthly download limit. I get 6mbps dl speed with no total monthly limit. Its the base for cable here.

[James]

I've never used less than 11 gb in a month, and I'm on cable. It's... 3.5megabits/s (about 438 kilobytes/s).
Canadian ISPs suck (at least ones over here) so I've got a 20 gb bandwidth cap, and, more often than not, go up to 40-60gb used in a month.

[MarkB]

Blue, are you tied into NTL? There're a bunch of cheaper, faster options I'm sure.

What are you paying atm?

[John]

I've never used less than 11 gb in a month, and I'm on cable. It's... 3.5megabits/s (about 438 kilobytes/s).
Canadian ISPs suck (at least ones over here) so I've got a 20 gb bandwidth cap, and, more often than not, go up to 40-60gb used in a month.

Not my ISP, I live in Canada (Nova Scotia) and I have a 10mbs connection with no download limit and a 60 gig upload limit, all for $45/month. :)

[Blue Cat Buxton]

Blue, are you tied into NTL? There're a bunch of cheaper, faster options I'm sure.

What are you paying atm?


We only have cable for telephone and TV - no bt/telephone line at all but the tv reception without cable is cr*p, so, we are sort of tied.
it is £13.99 (I think) a month just for the broadband. This may be the catalyst to change though and get sky plus BT,

[Todd W]

In countries other than the USA bandwidth limits (download and upload) are common from what my friends have told me.

Here in California I have Comcast 6mbit/768 and was told it ws going to be going to 8mbit and 1.5mbit in NOV.

I don't monitor my download/upload usage but I`m pretty sure download is ~40-50gb and upload probably 10-25gb depending on if I`m uploading videos or large pics for my sites.

[r2d2]

I'm using Freedom2Surf with 2mps at £14.99/m with 2Gb limit. At 2mbps, very few downloads seem to max out the connection. And if you are only web browsing, along with the odd 100Mb or so download, 2Gb should be fine (if I go over, its £1.50 a Gb I think). Freedom2Surf have a very good customer service reputation.

Use ADSL Guide's compare service (http://www.adslguide.org.uk/isps/compare.asp) to compare BB providers by user rating.

Have only heard bad (well terrible) things about NTL (in particular their customer service - they seem to be just 'hard sell to get loads signed up, then forget about them as long as they pay'). Actually look at NTL's customer ratings (http://www.adslguide.org.uk/isps/compare.asp?f2s=ON&nildram=ON&ntlhome=ON&zen=ON&cmp_action=Compare) compared to some other big names.

[Blue Cat Buxton]

R2D2 - Very helpfull, particularly re the limit, thanks

Yep, NTL's customer service suck, really really suck. When it works it is fine, but if you ever have to speak with them then forget it. When we first moved in the tv would go into slow motion and then just freeze and after about 20 minutes is a telephone queue and 20 talking to tech, all they could reccomend was to turn the box off overnight !!!

We had 3 or 4 boxes from them to sort it out, bur at the moment, it works ok.

(To be fair, we had to have the broadband router moved a while ago and they were very good, quick and helpful in getting that done, and I can only think of one or two times when the broadband has been unavailable - ill stop now before I start ranting about them again :) )

[James]

Not my ISP, I live in Canada (Nova Scotia) and I have a 10mbs connection with no download limit and a 60 gig upload limit, all for $45/month. :)
Lucky bastard! :p