5punk

im on NTL/Virgin 10mb. I pay nothing. Yes nothing.
Their offices are so badly run they do not realise they are not billing me anymore....

Anyway, the service in terms of reliability is good, speed is good, upload is not really though. If you get the top package, it truly is unlimited now.
Customer service is shit, but ive rarely needed them. (plus they are getting better)
The people who come out and fit the kit know what they are doing, and have been very reliable.


If i were to go ADSL, i would probably use:
http://www.minotaur.org.uk/broadband.html
A mate of mine runs the company. Their service is fucking fantastic, albeit pricier than tiscali/talktalk/aol etc etc but you get what you pay for.

WEY, has your abode *ever* had a BT line into it in the past (even before you lived there?) If so they can reconnect it for free and you don't need to arse about with the 100 and something quid they charge for a new line.

As for ISPs my personal preference is with Demon, i've been with them for about 6 or 7 years and they have been excellent. I can only remember the service being interupted twice, and one of them was due to my phone line being crap (it would destroy the phone signal when the cable moved and sadly the cable ran from a telegraph pole on the opposite side of the road and my street would channel the wind something rotten so it happened a lot until it was fixed)

Just thought I'd let you know, that NTL/virgin are going to upgrade 10megabit to 20megabit and are testing 50megabit in some areas. This looks to be a reason to go with them.

i think i need a new ISP too, i cannot get cable as I live in the stone age of technology but i think i can get upto 2mb broadband (ADSL) wud love a lower contention rate instead of the normal 50:1 standard shite.

Just had a look and we definitely have an old BT connection point next to the existing Blueyonder one. Thanks for the advice, plus 10MB to 20MB

I think I'm going to keep Virgin Phone and Interwebs, then get rid of my box set, and go freeview, all the non freeview programs I watch can be floorified anyway.

Richard Branson wrote: * Virgin Broadband
* Size: M
* Size: L
* Size: XL

lol, Supersize me!

narf, the thing that's always put me off NTL is their shit customer service, otherwise it's alwyas seemed the best, technically. Virgin, at least in their other ventures, like flights, music and phones have always had very good customer service, their trains - maybe less so, but that was a shitty mess when they got hold of it - maybe a bit like NTL? Whatever you think of the Virgin group, they have been uncommonly brave with what, and who they've taken on, and I respect them for that.

Anyway, their XL broadband's about £30, with a decent TV package available for £44 should I want to add it later.

That's my main question really to people who have their setup - how does the internet stuff work? Does it come through the telly box thingy, or is it ADSL through the telephone?

I plan to move my TV into the back room in a few months, and if I wanted to add their TV later, the telly box thingy would go there - I wonder how the installation guy would feel if I said I wanted the device in an empty room, furthest away from both the street and where my TV and computers currently are.

The TV and internet each come in from one cable through the front wall, which then goes to a splitter at some point and you can then route the wires to your set-top box and modem respectively. The guys I've had install stuff in the past have always been really good, and have routed stuff wherever it needed to go: TV in one room, modem in another. They attached all the wires properly to the wall so it was all very neat, and didn't take too long either. Only minor gripe is that they didn't hoover up after themselves, but not exactly a deal-breaker. In my last place the cable came in through the front wall at ground level, and I got the TV in the sitting room at the back of the house, and the modem in the bedroom upstairs and at the back, so each about as far away as possible.

Someone at work called them to say he wanted out of his TV deal cos of the lack of Sky, and got a free upgrade on his TV package, so I'm planning to try something similar when I move house, except for internet and push for the 4meg connection for the price of the 2meg. May even try for 10 if I'm feeling really cheeky.

Customer-service wise, NTL/Telewank have been a bit hit-and-miss; in the call-centres at least. The guys that have come out to install stuff have always been good. The service is generally very good though, and I've had very few problems in the last 4 years that I've been with them. On the TV side of things, I like the replay function that repeats a number of shows for a week after broadcast. Its only for BBC, Channel 4 and a couple of others iirc, but its an "on-demand" service. I also like the film rental type function - also "on-demand", costs similar to renting a DVD but means you don't have to get out of your armchair to sort it out. You get it for 24 hours for a couple of quid, and can pause/rewind etc too.

Cheers, thanks for the info. I'm assuming I can go with my existing router(s), rather than have to get an ADSL modem?

Undecided about the telly thing, I have about a quarter of a terabyte of downloaded/rented stuff stuff to watch now, and it just seems to be increasing. I have a freeview box with HD recording, so I get the pause live telly thing, and reasonable programmability (it's not aware of schedule changes, though). Although my aerial's a bit shit, only the main 4 seem to work well - the rest are mostly rubbish anyway, I had Sky for Movies, Sport and Pron - and at least two of those are available from alternate sources. I miss Discovery a bit, though, despite their rather dubious "facts".

Yup, we have the modem feed into a Linksys router and then into a PC and an old iMac, and no problems at all. I've had the modem-into-wireless-router setup in 4 different houses now, and its always been fine.

I'm not too fussed about the TV either to be honest. We currently get it for free due to some haggling with them a few months ago, and have decided that if they try to start charging we'll just drop it and get a freeview box. Similarly to you, anything on TV I particularly want to watch I can download, and the main 4 channels (I still don't acknowledge 5 as being "proper" TV, the snob that I am) are the only ones I regularly watch. I also have 6 entire series of various programs that I have yet to watch, and thats growing daily too.

Out of interest, how much is it for a freeview box with HD recording?

Lateralus wrote:Out of interest, how much is it for a freeview box with HD recording?

From Tesco, £129 for 20GB, £185 for the one I got with 60GB.

I wonder how they handle bigger HDDs, someone should test

FatherJack wrote:Although my aerial's a bit shit, only the main 4 seem to work well - the rest are mostly rubbish anyway

Get a cheap aerial booster, it made a massive difference in the old house when trying to get all the freeview channles, and you can pick them up dead cheap.

If you have power in the loft, you can always stick it up there, and have every aerial connection coming out of it to boost the whole aerial as opposed to just in one particular room.

If you move from a Telewest house to a Telewest house, point out to them that you are a good customer and that you'd like to stay with them, but Sky are offering some great deals - basically don't show your hand.
I did this, got a 6 month instead of a 12 month contract, and a discount for the 10Mb line from £35 to £17.50. Plus a £20 rebate.

I also did something similar with them at the last place after the contact ran out, again mention that other people are luring you away with their great deals (find the best you can even if the service is shit) and if they say it's shit (they did when I compared them with TalkTalk) then point out that you have friends on it and they have had no problems.

Remember basically that the market is very competitive and that whoever you go with (out of the big players) they will bend over backwards if you umm and arr and say "well X is cheaper than you, what are you going to do about it?"

If you're after service rather than cost I recommend these guys we put all of our customers on them and they make our life soooo fucking easy.

MrGreen wrote:Virgin TeleWank are Great, but don't let them install a Scientific Atlanta modem, I have a friend who has the same one, and they crash all the time, but I've had this ISP for years, so the modem might be no longer standard issue.

ive also been with telewank virgin for a good few years and my expirence with them has been great...no real problems. they installed a scientific atlanta modem and only crashed once in the 5 or 6 years ive had it .

Thread resurrect time:

I'm looking at internet providings for my new place. According to <a href="http://www.samknows.com/broadband/sdche ... amKnows</a>, I can get tiscali, pipex, AOL, Orange, BT or Eclipse

Now I'm not going pay more than £20 month, definitely not going with AOL or BT. SO the remaining few are:

Tiscali
Pipex
Orange
Eclipse (though they're charging £29.99)

What do you folks think?

Is that standard ADSL you are looking for?
out of that lot I would go for the eclipse, business broadband option 1
8mb/448kb, unlimited usage, "priority support" and £19.99/month

tandino wrote:Tiscali
Pipex
Orange
Eclipse (though they're charging £29.99)

For ADSL, a friend's just had a nightmare experience with Orange - the line was basically fucked, and after repeated calls causing a £150 phone bill (even from an Orange mobile!) they did jack shit. They cancelled and got BT who fixed it in a matter of days. In my conversations on their behalf with Orange Broadband's India-based call centre, I concluded that they had difficulty distinguishing their arses from their elbows.

Pipex now own the people who look after my rather odd WDSL setup, and they've been okay at fixing faults and bill queries, but on ADSL BT basically own the lines and (possibly criminally) don't seem to provide the same service fixing line problems as they do to their own customers.

I hate BT and don't even take my phone service from them, but if you're tied to ADSL, you might get cheaper elsewhere, but a less-than premium service if there are line faults.

ProfHawking wrote:Is that standard ADSL you are looking for?
out of that lot I would go for the eclipse, business broadband option 1
8mb/448kb, unlimited usage, "priority support" and £19.99/month

Just had a look at that and it's reporting

eclipse wrote:
Congratulations - You can enjoy Eclipse Broadband at speeds…

up to 512Kbps

Whereas I've been quoted speeds of up to 6 - 8 mbps (I'm about 400 yards from the exchange ) from other providers.

tandino wrote:Eclipse

If they're in any way related to Eclipse Computers, avoid them like the plague.