[sclug] Phone/broadband recommendations?

[Tom Carbert-Allen]

I have 10mb Virgin Media, H3G contract and BE pro adsl2. Just about 
manage to keep on line 99.999 with that combination. the cable is ?20 
with medium TV included for the other half (no virgin phone line, it IS 
possible to buy this if you insist enough you don't want a 11 a month 
phone line you will never use). The ADSL is running an off site backup 
system for my and customers colo'd boxs, and takes quiete a heavy usage 
(some times 1TB in a month!) and they don't seem to mind (colo box's are 
in UK so only going via a peer arrangement not transit)

both services go down at least twice a year according to my logs, 
although virgins DNS servers seem to go down more often so I don't use 
them anymore

There has been one time in which the adsl and cable were down at the 
same time so I needed the 3G, it was July 2007 when everywhere flooded.

in my experiance all connections will go down no matter how much you 
pay, I would recommend XEN DSL which a customer has which had been up 
for 4 years, but it went down in march and took 4 days to fix it (broken 
line card so they tell me) but there customer service is good but you 
pay a lot more for it.

it's all a gamble, is it worth paying more for customer service just for 
that once a year you might call them?

if you seriously want to stay online, just get two lines and a decent 
routing setup under linux :) mine even monitors which line has the 
lowest latency and routes my personally browsing down the fastest one. 
That is normally the cable modem, but that is probably just because it 
gets the least traffic as the backup system not speed routed, only cuts 
to the cable modem if the ADSL is down (virgin aren't so great on high 
traffic, even if it is virtually local [london])

TCA