[Colchester] Best ISP?

[john at cloned.org.uk]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Peter Weller wrote:

> Zen Internet[1] has offered an excellent service in the past, and I
> would not hesitate to reccommend them to anyone asking about a suitable
> ISP. They are, however, relatively business-centric, but they do still
> offer deals for home users. This is my Dad's preferred ISP, and he's
> extremely fussy, so you can be pretty sure they offer quality.

Zen are good. My parents use them and not had any problems. Their support 
is pretty good, although my opinion may be biased as I used to work for 
them about 6years ago :-)

> I have also had many people reccommend Be[2], they seem to offer an
> excellent deal: Unlimited 24Mbit for £24 a month. For an extra £4, you
> can get a static IP address - suitable if you want to setup a home
> server. Unfortunately, they don't offer their service where we live, so
> I haven't had a chance to use them myself.

Be dropped their prices recently and no longer charge for the static IP. 
Also, now O2 have released their broadband products, expect the Be service 
to get a bit worse contention wise, and the possibility of some usage 
limits coming in the future as that starts to take effect. (O2 own Be.)

I've used various ISPs over my time. I used Demon for several years 
(back when DSL first came out) and they offered a fairly good DSL service. 
They are more of a business ISP and their billing is universally 
recognised to be diabolical. I had to get them to remove my credit card 
details from their system to stop them billing me after I had cancelled.

Used Zen when I worked for them, and my parents use them now. A bit more 
pricey than others but I believe you often get what you pay for.

Had a couple of Nildram DSL lines and they have been OK, although they've 
been enveloped into Pipex and are now heading to Tiscali, so probably 
a down hill slope. Their support has been a bit shonky at times, and they 
managed to mess up a line we had with them where they reallocated the IPs 
being used on one line to another customer then couldn't get them back! 
The actual moving of packets though has been pretty reliable and that's 
what we cared about most.

Burstfire, an Entanet reseller, were also prety good. Run by a friend of a 
friend. It just worked. Nothing fancy. Nothing fancy needed.

Theres a few people on this list still probably who work for KeConnect up 
in Ipswich. I believe they run a good service, although not had the 
pleasure of using it.. again aimed more at business type users.

john