[Gllug] Broadand in London without phone land line

[Shannon Carver]

Sorry about the quotes below (Google hasn't made it easy to cross quote in
replies), unless I'm doing something wrong!

Lucian Wrote...

"Imho, the only real ISP in London is BE (bethere.co.uk). And even with
them you might not get a quality connection because of the old
infrastructure, but at least they're trying.
The rest are just, well, living in another world, severe capping (at
times) and ridiculous upload speeds (always). UK is lagging with about
10 years behind (some parts of) Europe when it comes to internet
quality, unfortunately..."

Agreed completely about bethere, I've installed it at several (small)
companies I've worked at since moving to the UK, and had it installed
at home for 2 years before moving to a property that only had Virgin
cable (more below).  Bethere's Annex-M service is AFAIK unrivalled
completely.  21mbps/2.7mbps completely unlimited with static IP for
£21/month!  Preposterous.

As far as cheap and cheerful goes, you don't get better, and as long
as you're in an area with decent DSL (and bethere coverage), and
aren't too far from your exchange, nothing compares!


Commenting on Christopher's post from above:


> I had the misfortune to use Virgin's "20 Meg" service.  It seldom
> achieved much over 7 Meg, and would occasionally give bursts to 19 Meg,
> showing that it wasn't local limitations reducing the speed.  Their
> "fibre network" is actually only partially fibre to the cabinet, and the
> vast majority of it is crappy quality coax.  They have severe download
> caps - your speed will drop to about 10% of the speed you get at best
> for up to 24 hours.  This cap comes in at ~ 1Gb of data, so downloading
> two Linux distros in a day isn't really possible.
>

I've now had the (mis)fortune of Virgin at 3 premises in South London. While
the first install was nothing less that horrible, months of letters,
repeated (useless)
visits by Virgin staff and external contractors (eventually got a large
refund, apology,
and free service for some months), in the last 2 years I've had next to no
problems with the service since moving into the last place.

I don't disagree that Virgin, and the smaller cable companies they've
swallowed up
have their own share of problems, but it's not all like that.  6 months ago,
I was offered
free upgrade to the 50mbps service for 12 months (with a £20/m increase
after that.).
It can be slow during peak hours (5pm -> 10pm), but outside of that, I can
quite happily
get 4MB/s + either from large public site (Microsoft/Apple) or via
accumulated torrents.
It's not unusual to get 2-3MB/s from an Ubuntu/Centos repo at any time when
I'm doing
updates either.

On top of that, their rate caps that you mention are called Virgin STM, and
are relatively
well publicised (at least on consumer forums).  The (approximate) rules are:
- Use over <early_threshold> amount between 10:00 and 15:00 and be shaped
for 5 hours
- Use over <late_threshold> amount between 15:00 and 21:00 and be shaped for
5 hours
Where the thresholds are:
- 10mbps cable - 3GB and 1GB (early  and late)
- 20mbps cable - 5GB and 3GB (early  and late)
- 50mbps cable - ?GB and 5GB (early  and late)

The fix is simple though, go crazy from 10pm until 10am and you'll have no
problems, and
use it for 'normal use' in other periods.  I download an awful lot (not
mentioning content), often
nearing 1TB a month and have never had an issue.  The one time I was shaped
during the
evening, the service was woeful, but was still perfectly fine for web
browsing, IM, and probably
even Youtube, if you're that way inclined.


> They persist in falsely advertising "unlimited" internet and specious
> speed claims.  They also sell browsing data to various "targeted
> advertising" companies, so your browsing habits are broadcast to all and
> sundry.  Your service will be disconnected for "violations" if you
> either complain about their abysmal "service" or if you connect to any
> filesharing site (they even classified Sourceforge as a pirate software
> site).  They are entirely without either scruple or clue.
>

I'm yet to see/hear anything of that nature, if they were to disconnect my
service
(I'd assume this would mean cutting my current contract too?), I'd simply
pick up
and go back to Bethere, or maybe BT Infinity if its in my area by then.


>
> Their TV "service" is an appalling joke, too.  When our local cable
> company was "Cable Camden" then "Cable London", the service was great.
> They had well over 90% of the households around here because of the
> non-existent off-air TV signal.  By the time Virgin had been here for a
> year, they had just under 5% of the households....
>
> Diff between North and South London maybe?
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