[Gllug] Aaaaarrrggghhh!!!! I need a working ISP

[Lesley Binks]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:38:37AM +0000, - Tethys wrote:
> I know we've been through this before, but I need some recommendations
> for an ISP. I need:
> 
> 1. Telephone technical support (email only is not good enough)
> 2. Technical support out of working hours. The times I tend to notice
>    things breaking are when I'm at home and using the service,
>    not when I'm at work. Ideally, the support would be 24x7, but
>    I could cope with at least being open late at night during the
>    week. Being open at weekends is a must. I've been without
>    email this weekend, and there's nothing I could do about it.
>    I have had the same problem when my connectivity has
>    gone down in the past (sadly all too common these days)
> 3. 8Mb/s -- faster would be good, but it's not necessary
> 4. Sensibly priced for around 20GB usage/month
> 5. Nothing whatsoever to do with Tiscali
> 6. Multiple static IP addresses. At the moment I have a /28, which is fine
> 7. No firewalling, filtering or other tampering with my traffic
> 
> I don't need DNS, web space or email. After having too many bad
> experiences elsewhere, I'll be doing all of that myself. All I'm
> looking for is connectivity. Nor do I need VoIP, bundled TV or
> telephone or any other "value added" products or services.
> 
> >From memory, the usual culprits mentioned around these parts are
> UKFSN, Nildram, Zen, Plusnet, Eclipse and A&A, but all of them seem to
> fall down on at least one of those requirements. My current ISP (F2S)
> meets them all, except for #5, which has been recently added due to
> their quite astounding levels of ineptitude (Tiscali now own F2S). Any
> suggestions on where I should be looking?


Any of those might be better than Tiscali.  I have been a Demon user in
the past and used Zen for many years - both I would recommend.  

Zen has a support page where you can check for system events that might
be giving you problems as well as check for planned maintenance.  Can't
recall if Demon does this because it has been so long since I used them
- back in the days of dial up - but they probably do supply something.

In the last two years of using Zen, I think I had one outage resolved 
by a phone call to Zen support and powering down my router while they 
reset the line at their end.  Seamless movement around the country
maintaining my Internet facing IP address wherever I was.   

Regards

Lesley
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