So far, so good with the switch to ADSL

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Back in January I wrote about my impending flat purchase, and the concern I had over being forced to move from cable to ADSL broadband. Well, by now I’ve been in the flat a few months, I have my broadband up and running, and I’m pleased to say it’s been plain sailing so far.

Thanks to all the readers who commented both with suggestions and with their own experiences – good and bad. After much consideration and a good look through the deals offered in my area, I opted for Be’s Unlimited package. It’s not cheap at £17.88 per month, but I was won over by the promise of a support team that actually knows about broadband and the lure of a static IP address, no download cap and 1.3Mb/s uploads.

It activated right on cue, and I even got to try out the support first hand. I have to confess to attempting the setup process with my own 802.11n router at 12:45am on a Thursday (don’t ask), and had a few issues with the settings for my static IP. Despite the ungodly time and my suspiciously slurred speech, a knowledgeable Dutch chap was all too happy to walk me through the process and we had it up and running within minutes. He was even chatty and cheerful, which is not something I’m familiar with when it comes to ISP staff.

Several readers suggested looking at SamKnows and ThinkBroadband, so before I made my choice I had a rough idea I’d be getting around 5Mb/s speeds at 800m from my local exchange. I ran some checks over the weekend and my actual peak-time speed seems fairly stable at between 5Mb/s and 5.8Mb/s. It’s not exactly Virgin cable broadband speeds but it’s plenty for my needs, and it’s good to see the estimates proved on the money.

So it’s first blood to Be, and a positive experience for me with ADSL so far. The next hurdle will come when BT’s Infinity fibre lines make their way to my area – pencilled in for late this year - ready for ISPs to take advantage. Has this reached your area yet? If so, has it met expectations? Let me know in the comments below.

Dreading the move to ADSL

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

In a few months I’m buying a flat. It’s not quite finished yet, but I’ve been inside it and I’ve seen the specs, all of which look impressive, except for one tiny problem. The block will have a communal Sky dish and connection points in every property, but I was told this week that cable won’t be an option.

This is bad. Very bad.

I’ve been with Virgin broadband in various properties for nearly four years now, and I’m genuinely despondent at the thought of switching to ADSL. Some of you will probably bring up traffic shaping, customer service and other less appealing aspects of Virgin’s offering, but I’m not listening. The blinkers have gone up and my opinion is set in stone: cable broadband just works, and I can’t live with anything less.

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Why I get faster connections in the West Indies than Suffolk

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

My tale of woe of ADSL Max lines rumbles on. “Max” appears to mean “maximum grief” – last week, I had five different engineers visit to poke at one or the other of my pair of ADSL connections.

Lots of hmm and humpf and hmmmm resulted. At the end of the day, the fault appears to be diagnosed as being between the exchange and the green box in the village. BT’s response was to offer me a choice – accept this new slower-than-a-modem speed as being “acceptable” or have the lines cut off. You can imagine my response. One engineer suggested trying a 3G modem stick instead – I was quite calm at pointing out that there is no 3G signal, only slow EDGE. (more…)

Honey, I downloaded the internet

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

You really do have to be careful when you sign up to one of those bandwidth-limited ISP accounts. It might be cheap, especially in these financially tough times, but you must ensure you don’t bust your way out of your monthly limit and run up some huge bills.

Fortunately, I’m with an ISP that doesn’t seem to mind how much data I pull through the network each month. That’s within reason of course.

But at the end of the day, he knows I am limited by having two ADSL lines and that I am a fair distance from the exchange. Think 1Mb per line and you’d be about right.

So you will doubtless be as amused as I was to see this usage log from my trusty TZ190 Sonicwall firewall. Apparently my main desktop computer had managed to download 16,777,215 Terabytes of data. And it seemingly did that in just 5 days 9 hours.

Yah boo sucks to the Acceptable Usage Policy – I think I have a backup of the entire internet now.

No “up to” speeds with cable

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Recently I admitted defeat in a battle with unhelpful telecoms companies and jumped ship to cable, and I’m absolutely delighted with the results. The Virgin Media kit was couriered to me within days, easy to set up myself and required a simple two minute phone call to activate. But the best thing by far is the speed.

Used to the fluctuating performance of ADSL, my new service runs like a dream. It doesn’t drop out, it doesn’t slow down when someone next door phones a call centre in India, and – best of all – it runs as fast as it should.

I ordered the “Up to 4Mb” service and last night ran a speed checker: my download rate is a little over 3.8Mb/s. Considering that’s faster than I ever got at my last address from my “Up to 16Mb” Sky service, I’m absolutely ecstatic with the results.

Others out there may have had wonderful experiences with ADSL, others may achieve speeds close to those they were promised when they signed up. I personally haven’t ever got what I paid for from broadband, until now. In this house at least, ADSL is history.