[GLLUG] Broadband: Bethere -> Sky

[Christopher Hunter]

On 07/04/14 09:55, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 04/07/2014 09:02 AM, Matthew Copperwaite wrote:
>> So I was on O2 and Sky offered us an insanely good deal if we switched
>> before the merger was complete. So we took it. I have to say being owned
>> by Murdoch hasn't been too bad so far. The router is pants, I use it as
>> a bridge for my WRT54 (I couldn't get my DrayTek ADSL modem to work on
>> the Sky line) speed has been acceptable for my podcast but have yet to
>> deal with their technical side.
>>
>> So it's OK, but I couldn't recommend it unless you get an insanely good
>> deal.
>>
> that is interesting - i've been a bethere customer for many years, the
> Sky guys tried to upsell us to their brand pre-merger as well, but
> wanted £11 more than what I am paying at the moment, so I declined.
>
>
I'd been with BeThere since they started, and the Sky "deal" I was 
offered was derisory.  They also couldn't make any speed or contention 
estimates, so I went to BT Infinity 2.  Service is actually surprisingly 
good (I even got an installer with a clue!), and circumventing their DNS 
abuses is easy (which I do as a matter of principle rather than to get 
to anything "dodgy").  Their price is pretty good, and the data rates 
are quite remarkable.  I'm over 400m from the cabinet, but still get in 
the region of 135 Mb/s down and over 42 Mb/s up.  Their default wireless 
set-up tries to steal some of your bandwidth for "BT Wi-Fi", and this 
cannot be disabled in their current router, so I replaced their effort 
with a Draytek box and a couple of cheap TP-Link wireless access points, 
and get great results.

Chris