[GLLUG] Broadband/cable provider [OT]

[Nix]

On 5 Mar 2013, John Winters spake thusly:

> You're caught between a rock and hard place here - it sounds like you
> want a quality service at a gouging price. It just isn't going to
> happen. It's like asking for burgers at £0.99 for 20 and expecting not
> to get horse in them.

That can happen:
<http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/03/01/horse-meat-testing-finds-something-even-worse-no-meat/>.

(though I'm not sure a vegetable pie labelled as beef is actually worse
than a horse pie labelled as beef).

> I can't say I recognise your description of A&A though. Yes, they
> don't do an "all-you-can-eat for £7.99 (* note in small print - this
> is a lie)

I actually *got* an all-you-can-eat for £30 a month from Demon.
Unfortunately it was all-you-can-eat capped-at-512KiB/s-but-claimed-
to-be-uncapped, with the crack accounts department and all that it
implies. They're only rolling out ADSL2 now, in 2013! (and that long
after they have dropped unimportant stuff like SMTP mail delivery: it's
provided by Exchange now, boggle. Of course I haven't used them in
ages.)

>           and free for the first 6 months" deal, but they do offer an
> excellent service at a very fair price.

Agreed. Heck, I'm actually paying well over the odds for them, 'cos I'm
working from home and absolutely rely on my network service, so I'm
channel-bonding, which means roughly twice the price. Still, I'm on one
of their smallest packages and have never come within a factor of three
of breaking the usage limits, even given that last month I pulled down
something like a gigabyte of Windows update rubbish in the middle of the
day.

Unless you watch iplayer or bittorrent stuff in the middle of the day,
or have a games console that likes to download gigabytes of junk at
totally random times, I don't see how you could have a problem with it.
(But then I have no idea how *anyone* could come close to using the
amounts of bandwidth that some people protest about being limited to, so
my usage is clearly unusual.)

>             Very puzzled about your description of them being
> "restricted".

In bandwidth they are. In anything else, not at all.

>> Is there an ADSL service I can sign up to and get good results?  Ideally
>> with helpdesk staff who can speak comprehensible English and don't just
>> read out their useless scripts?
>
> Have to recommend A&A again. Their service is (generally) delivered
> using BT's wires, but they do their level best to insulate you from
> BT's incompetence, and quite effective it is too.

Quite so. When I had a line so noisy after rain that I could hardly hear
BT's line faults representative, I opened a fault with A&A. BT blamed me
and closed the fault nineteen times, because their tests carried out a
random times of day when it wasn't raining showed no problem. A&A just
kept reopening it and chased it until BT finally tracked the problem
down (corroded joints in the middle of the town).

Most ISPs don't do that, but it's an essential if you don't want to be
left with 'no useful broadband, forever' when entropy attacks your phone
line, which it always will, eventually.

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