BF2S Forums Whats the best broadband in the UK?

i like Pipex

Be are by far and away the best around.

Tiscali, AOL, Bulldog, Sky and Virgin are all shockingly bad. Plusnet are pretty shit too.

Last edited by Bertster7 (2008-01-30 11:55:26)

henno13 wrote:

i like Pipex

David Hasselhoff put me off them for life.

Noobeater wrote:

Bertster7 wrote:

Be are by far and away the best around.

Tiscali, AOL, Bulldog, Sky and Virgin are all shockingly bad. Plusnet are pretty shit too.

I've generally heard that plusnet are good if you get the pro version (still only £20).

A mate of mine, who knows his stuff pretty well (working for Adobe or something at the moment I think), had plusnet and they are shit. All sorts of limits and port restrictions at certain times of the day. He had the Pro version.

mikkel wrote:

Uzique wrote:

henno13 wrote:

i like Pipex

Pipex FTL :\. Peak time throttling / port-blocking of P2P / Torrents, an aggressive 'Fair Usage Policy', and constantly changing service without any attention paid to customer information or contract. I was with Pipex for a brief stint, but quickly moved on when they were bought out by Tiscali (THE absolute worst ISP in the United Kingdom). Now that Pipex are owned by Tiscali, they have begun the process of unbundling the LLU's, effectively moving Pipex customers from Pipex servers to Tiscali ones... ones with far less bandwidth and far lower performance. Get out whilst you can!

I'd say the 'best' ISP is any ISP that is unheard of. Seriously. Large popular ISP's have more peak-time traffic, and will have to find some means of shaping or dealing with that huge amount of peak-time volume- so your service will deteriorate or be impacted. It's technically impossible to deliver a top-notch service to millions of customers simultaneously. Go with someone small, preferably who offer unlimited downloads (or at least unlimited Off-Peak usage).

I recommend ADSL24 or Fast.co.uk

It's definitely not impossible to deliver a high quality service to many customers. It just requires the proper investments, which very few ISPs seem willing to make.

Smaller ISPs are not necessarily better than bigger names. With smaller ISPs, you either get an ISP that has its stuff in order, and typically much more capacity than necessary due to solid initial investments, or you get an absolutely horrid ISP with a toss-together network fresh with whatever hardware the equipment broker had on sale, and a group of incompetent people running it.

You can never really know whether or not you're going to get good service with any ISP, but it's fairly easy to shorten your list of potential providers by googling and checking replies in threads like this one. Don't get put off by one or two bad reviews, though. Not everyone is going to have a good experience on any ISP.

QFT

Another thing to remember is that the good small ISPs will tend to be bought out by big ISPs at some point, then the service often becomes terrible. The Cable and Wireless purchase of Bulldog being the best example of this.

Bertster7 wrote:

Noobeater wrote:

Bertster7 wrote:

Be are by far and away the best around.

Tiscali, AOL, Bulldog, Sky and Virgin are all shockingly bad. Plusnet are pretty shit too.

I've generally heard that plusnet are good if you get the pro version (still only £20).

A mate of mine, who knows his stuff pretty well (working for Adobe or something at the moment I think), had plusnet and they are shit. All sorts of limits and port restrictions at certain times of the day. He had the Pro version.

Bert's right, I'm with PN and their service leaves a lot to be desired. I'm being throttled atm and should be getting faster speeds generally than what i do.

The Sheriff wrote:

Zen broadband
Eclipse

Avoid Tiscali/big names.

I'll testify that to experience. They were, without exception the worse ISP I've ever had and I've had AOL 56K. No joke. I never did any really large downloading. The biggest thing I downloaded while with them was America's Army (which was about 750MBs and took 13 hours). I was sent two emails about overuse and finally a letter saying I was going to have my bandwidth shared. At 6-11PM they would throttle my connection to the point where signing into Xfire/MSN became a challenge. Oh yeah. I almost forgot to mention how they love to screw their customers over. They never automatically upgrade a connection and when I found I was paying £18 a month for 256K when their 2MB package was then £15 I could have punched a baby I was so angry.

I'm on (and soon getting off) Pipex. They're not as bad but they're a lot more devious in how they're shit. They throttle torrents (I use torrents for large downloads when a HTTP link isn't available like speedruns or large mods). Two days after I signed with them, they implemented a Fair Use Policy; the very reason I chose them was because they lacked a Fair Use Policy which Tiscali bumfucked me with. They seem to limit bandwidth and provide a poor service during peak hours regardless of use. The fact that they're owned by Tiscali could make me tear hairs off my head it's so infuriating. I'm changing to BE soon when this contract runs out which is very, very soon. I've heard only good things from them and they're not well known.

TheEternalPessimist wrote:

Freedom2Surf broadband for gamers, expensive but leet pings will ensue.

I'll agree with that. I've been with them for just over a year now, and I'm perfectly happy with them. Pings (even on us servers) are fine albeit I can only have a 2 meg connection due to my distance from the local exchange BUT they have a pretty much unconditional no D/L limit, which is easier to hit than you;d imagine once you start playing games online.......

Full BT package works really well as long as you do not use there Home Hub that thing is the worst piece of crap I have ever seen