[Klug-general] ISPs

[AllenJB]

Nathan Friend wrote:
> If you have Sky TV they do broadband packages that work well.  They bought
> out Easynet who have there own kit in the BT exchanges.
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/22/sky_easynet/  I get ~13 download and
> ~0.6 upload.
> 
> Virgin media technically should be good, with fiber to the street but I've
> not tried the service myself.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Nathan.

Virgin Media are terrible. We're on their 10M cable package (in Ashford)
and I just about get 2M down / 0.25 up (Not throttled). Their throttling
is terrible - you can barely download anything without being throttled.
Normal game and OS updates easily take me over. They're supposedly
introducing slightly lighter throttling at some point soon (it's on
trial atm). On top of that, you can completely forget about any type of
peer2peer (bittorrent, emule / edonkey) - even running on non-standard
ports and using encryption I get practically no download - it ends up
faster to pull it to my server then pull it down overnight once finished.

I don't know if they still do it, but I was on their ADSL package for a
year in Canterbury and that was even worse - the pings were so bad I
couldn't game on any servers (fortunately I found out too late for it to
be too much bother).

I'm going to see if I can't nudge my dad into moving to Sky, since they
look pretty good from the small amount of research I've done - they have
and unlimited package which reportedly (from users as well as the web
page) has no download limits or throttling of any kind.

I really wish we got BeThere here in Ashford, even if their new site
design makes my eyes bleed.

Allen