[SWLUG] Recommendations for ISP?

[Steve Hill]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Neil Jones wrote:

> 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.

I'm afraid Demon went very downhill the moment they were bought by Thus. 
My biggest gripe was that they used to be very good about publishing 
outages (even if it was "oops, someone tripped over the power cable to one 
of the routers") and as soon as they became part of Thus it seemed that 
the PR people moved in and immediately squashed any chance of customers 
(and indeed, their own tech support people) finding out when there were 
service problems.

I had too many incidents of Demon denying there was anything wrong, 
causing me to spend hours debugging my own systems to find the problem 
when it turned out that it was Demon at fault all along.  Demon have 
always been one of the more expensive ISPs and I was pretty happy paying 
over the odds for excellent service, but once it got to the point where I 
was paying over the odds for persistently poor service I gave up and 
switched to PlusNet.

PlusNet have been relatively good, although I saw signs of them starting 
to lose the plot around the time they were bought by BT - support was 
getting progressively worse (although still relatively good compared to 
other ISPs), and there were some notably abysmal projects such as their 
VoIP service that never worked properly and they hardly ever acnowledged 
problems with it (even when I offered to help debug the problem and sent 
them copious logging).

So when I moved house I decided to give EntaNet (UKFSN) a go since I was 
going to have a break in service anyway.  My only complaint so far is that 
they haven't yet replied to my email asking to take part in their IPv6 
over ADSL trial.

> I use Virgin for broadband. Their support couldn't run a
> bacchanalian  orgy in a brewery :-) either but everything usually just
> works.

I've heard of a lot of infrastructure problems with Virgin (notably often 
revolving around their completely unstable transparent^Wcompletely opaque 
web proxies which I believe they have now removed after years of 
problems).

My general experience of ISPs is that a proportion of the smaller ISPs are 
really good, but as soon as they get big they pretty much universally turn 
to crap.

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence