[SWLUG] Recommendations for ISP?

[Neil Jones]

swlug wrote:
> neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk wrote:
>> Can anyone recommend a decent ISP for an ordinary home user please?
>>
>> I have been helping a family member set up a system and Demon 
>> Internet's support is abysmal. I don't like being lied to. The mickey 
>> mouse speedtouch modem they provide won't work with either Linux or 
>> the new Vista laptop. 
> Is it the Thomson Speedtouch 330? Works fine for me on Vista (32 bit 
> on 64 bit AMD) and Ubuntu 8.04. FWIW.
>
Yes it is the 330. It won't work for us at all. Fine on the old windows 
machine. I can't get the drivers to work with Linux. Now Dynamode say 
the router bought  brand new a few weeks ago is a very old model they 
don't support. I WON'T BUY DYNAMODE AGAIN! I am furious with them and 
Demon. This is a problem that probably takes a person with the right 
knowledge just a minute to fix. It doesn't help when Demon send their 
support overseas, and for example, I had someone spelling something out 
some technical settings phonetically because I couldn't  understand him 
and then discovering part of the problem was he was misspelling it!
Internet systems are fine when they work but the ISPs just seem to be 
full of cowboys.  I hate to think how non-technical people cope with 
things like this.
It seems from the activity on Demon's newsgroups that lots of the 
technically minded people have left. It used to be a hotbed of computing 
activity.

If you are wondering how I manage here. It is simple. My Demon account 
is a dial up. I use Virgin for broadband. Their support couldn't run a 
bacchanalian  orgy in a brewery :-) either but everything usually just 
works.

Neil Jones
neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk