[YLUG] ISP Recommendations (Continued?)

[Matthew Bloch]

On Monday 19 March 2007 15:17, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> On 19 Mar 2007, at 14:26, Doug Winter wrote:
> > Robert Hulme wrote:
> >> My experience with Bulldog has been very good, in terms of the actual
> >> service. It's (relatively) cheap, fast, and unlimited. Their customer
> >> service is amazingly bad though. They are still charging me (or were)
> >> for my broadband in York even though I left 4 months ago! (and yes, I
> >> did cancel it before I left)
> >
> > They have a fantastic backhaul, but their service is legendarily
> > bad: so bad they retired the consumer brand.
> >
> > No matter how good the network, I'd not touch them ever again.
> >
> > I vote Zen - although they aren't cheap.
>
> Zen are similar to Bytemark - they tell you exactly what you are
> getting, and they provide it pretty effectively.  They also have tech
> support etc with a clue.
>
> However they do not provide the type of service asked for, at the
> price point asked for,  by the original request - then again none of
> the current UK providers can unless they have only a few heavy users
> amongst a load of people subsidising them, or possibly their own
> network (by the way Matthew didn't even mention the external
> bandwidth costs - this was all BT stuff to get the bits from you to
> the ISP, and no further).

Well wholesale bandwidth costs in a major data centre for a sensibly-connected 
ISP are no more than about £5-£30 per Mb depending on destination (probably 
nearer the low end for UK traffic) which is about 10% of the central pipe 
costs.  It doesn't magnify the problem particularly.

If I didn't have control over the other tin can, I'd probably go for the usual 
geek-friendly suspects: Zen, AAISP, Nildram (we use Nildram as a backup at 
the office).  As you say, they are all pretty similar in price, clueful 
support (by popular assent), but nowhere near the price point of the original 
request.

-- 
Matthew Bloch                             Bytemark Hosting
                                http://www.bytemark.co.uk/
                                tel: +44 (0) 845 004 3 004