best ISP?
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J i m s t e r
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Depends what you are going to be doing. If you want to download a lot (torrents and any other peer-to-peer traffic) then you want to be looking at an ISP that doesn't use traffic shaping, otherwise your experience will differ vastly from the blazing speed the ISP will proclaim in all it's marketing. That rules out the big ones.
Traffic shaping is a mechanism all the big ISPs use to "Guarantee a fair user experience" for all users. Say they advertise 20MB download speed. That will be 20MB when you are surfing general web pages with text and images and pulling back common content like Microsoft patches.
When you want to download [insert legal content here, guv, not of that Frankie-Vaughn business], then the traffic shaping mechanism will be able to identify this traffic by the shape of it's data over the interweb and the speed of this kind of transfer will be throttled right back to much, much less than 20MB.
This is supposedly to stop the filesharers hogging the bandwidth that the ISPs have leased through BT's exchange hardware, and allow the ISP to provide a "Consistent experience" to all it's users, whether they are downloading Gigs of shunties or buying a My Little Pony off ebay.
My understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that, in very simple terms, BT ultimately bill the ISPs for allowing them through the exchange which BT put in at great cost. I believe this is somehow calculated on traffic, so it's in the ISP's interests to not allow massive amounts of traffic through kit that isn't theirs to keep the overheads down.
Small ISPs don't traffic shape and use this as a selling point, because they are not expecting to be inundated by average Pony surfers because they charge more per month to high-volume downloaders who are prepared to pay the extra for unmetered service.
If you are just browsing forums and ebaying then there's not much difference - go with a telly/phone/surf package from one of the corporates.
Here's a good site which explains it in as much detail as you'd ever need and rates the current UK ISPs.
http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php
Traffic shaping is a mechanism all the big ISPs use to "Guarantee a fair user experience" for all users. Say they advertise 20MB download speed. That will be 20MB when you are surfing general web pages with text and images and pulling back common content like Microsoft patches.
When you want to download [insert legal content here, guv, not of that Frankie-Vaughn business], then the traffic shaping mechanism will be able to identify this traffic by the shape of it's data over the interweb and the speed of this kind of transfer will be throttled right back to much, much less than 20MB.
This is supposedly to stop the filesharers hogging the bandwidth that the ISPs have leased through BT's exchange hardware, and allow the ISP to provide a "Consistent experience" to all it's users, whether they are downloading Gigs of shunties or buying a My Little Pony off ebay.
My understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that, in very simple terms, BT ultimately bill the ISPs for allowing them through the exchange which BT put in at great cost. I believe this is somehow calculated on traffic, so it's in the ISP's interests to not allow massive amounts of traffic through kit that isn't theirs to keep the overheads down.
Small ISPs don't traffic shape and use this as a selling point, because they are not expecting to be inundated by average Pony surfers because they charge more per month to high-volume downloaders who are prepared to pay the extra for unmetered service.
If you are just browsing forums and ebaying then there's not much difference - go with a telly/phone/surf package from one of the corporates.
Here's a good site which explains it in as much detail as you'd ever need and rates the current UK ISPs.
http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php
J i m s t e r
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BTW I am with Fast.co.uk and the p2p is INFINITELY better than pipex, who I was with until they put the traffic shaping on, and I watched my (entirely legal, of course) mp3 downloads go to less than 1K/s, or not work at all.
I would go as far to say that if you don't do any p2p and you decide to go with a Biggie, I'd go with the slowest and cheapest serivce they do because when I was at pipex (who I'd been with for 7 years) I noticed that their best 8MB service in 2008 was perhaps only very slightly faster at loading general web pages than the 512K service I had from them back in 2001.
I would go as far to say that if you don't do any p2p and you decide to go with a Biggie, I'd go with the slowest and cheapest serivce they do because when I was at pipex (who I'd been with for 7 years) I noticed that their best 8MB service in 2008 was perhaps only very slightly faster at loading general web pages than the 512K service I had from them back in 2001.
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Sky - we're miles away from the exchange and no Cable, so running about 100.0 Mbps acording to 'network connections', well LAN anyway...
Prob about 1.1 from the taps.
Prob about 1.1 from the taps.
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Talk Talk here.
Use it for downloading lots aswell as uploads.
I get very close to maximum speed etc etc.
All for less than £6PCM
Or with my line rental circa £16 with all inclusive calls.
Touch wood. Not a single problem.
M
Use it for downloading lots aswell as uploads.
I get very close to maximum speed etc etc.
All for less than £6PCM
Or with my line rental circa £16 with all inclusive calls.
Touch wood. Not a single problem.
M
JeRkY":2ng45zjz said:
i am and they offer super service not had any issues with them yet.
they are also 1 of the few ISPs out there that do offer NO LIMITS!!!!!!.
although they have a fair usage policy they have yet to implement it on any customer.
there are users on the Be forums who have said they download over 500GB per month and have yet to hear a word from Be about fair usage.
hoegaardenadds1
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be sounds good but not in my area yet :cry:
