Internet Access

The best place to look for a comparative review of ADSL end-user internet access providers^[1] in the UK is adslguide.org, as it seems to have a healthy supply of feedback from end-users and up-to-date package and price information. The comparison and search pages are pretty useful, but the site doesn't actually offer a list of providers in 'reliability' order or 'customer service' order. To make up for this, I've put together an ADSL League Table.

An interesting revelation is that plusnet's 2Mb service is provisioned at 20:1 contention ratio, normally only offered at the business level. Residential users will normally only get 50:1 (ie, you could potentially share your 512kb or 1Mb bandwidth with 50 others), and basically plusnet's reason is that they can't actually get 2Mb at 50:1 from BT. This might be true for other ISPs, and plusnet certainly hasn't made this ratio public knowledge at the point of sale. Furthermore, plusnet has now dropped the metered monthly price to £14.99, regardless of connection speed - 512kb, 1Mb or 2Mb. What a deal!

Now even Faster! Here's a quote from PlusNet on 17 Feb 2005: PlusNet's Broadband PAYG products (formerly known as "Lite") will also be extended to include 4Mb and 8Mb speeds from April. At £14.99 per month, and £1.50 per GB thereafter, speeds of up to 8Mb will be a fantastic value product option for light and infrequent Broadband users. This is something to look forward to!

• Some people might like their low prices on "unlimited" (within reason, presumably) package - called Premier.
• More prudent users, like me, may prefer the Lite package that limits the amount of bandwidth that you've paid for, and any extra is chargable per gigabyte used. On this plan the 1Mb option is only £15/month with 1GB of bandwidth thrown in; I would recommend this option, possibly with the 2GB bandwidth option at an extra £1.75/month.
• Remember that Lite users can always buy more bandwidth if they need it, and will be automatically charged if they exceed their bandwidth usage. That charge is slightly higher than the amount charged if the bandwidth is prepaid.
• More importantly, note that you will be charged around £15 to switch between 'Lite' and 'Premier' or if you want to change your download speed (ie, you want to go from 512kb/s to 1Mb/s)

I was with NTL for a few years, between 1999 and 2004, on their NTLWorld package. Technically the service was reasonable, but their customer service was highly mediocre. You could not expect much, if any, feedback on the rare connectivity outages, instead relying on frequent attempts to reconnect. It wasn't bad value at the time, though, but nowadays (late 2004) looks decidedly overpriced compared to the ADSL marketplace. Raising the bandwidth amounts has helped to narrow the gap, but it still seems overpriced.

Once you've decided on your ADSL provider and package, you then have all the fun of the hardware. I've put together a working guide to using ADSL to help you along.

broadband uk - Google News
Tories pledge high speed broadband for all in 10 years - Register	Register, UK - 22 hours ago ... telecoms firms to provide better broadband to the whole UK, including sparsely populated regions where the return on investment is likely to be poor. ... ISPReview UK Broadband Expert Broadband Finder  -
UK broadband too expensive - Techwatch	Techwatch, UK - 23 hours ago by David Allen In a recent survey of UK broadband users by ISPreview.co.uk, well over half of those asked believed that they were paying too much money to ... Broadband Genie www.BroadbandChoices.co.uk The Telecom  -
Breakfast Cereal Club, Sam LJ Pushes Broadband, Cuts at Ogilvy - Adrants	Adrants, MA - 17 hours ago Sam L. Jackson fronts for Virgin Media Broadband. - UK's Benylin is in the dog house for using ads to teach people how to call in sick. ...
IPWireless Relaunches as a Private Company to Build on Its Strong ... - Business Wire (press release)	Business Wire (press release), CA - 2 hours ago (BUSINESS WIRE)--IPWireless, a pioneer in the development of 3GPP mobile broadband and multimedia broadcast technologies, announced that the management team ...
Brown and fast broadband - BBC News	BBC News, UK - Jan 6, 2009 But it looks as though there are only two companies with the scale to take a fibre network right across the UK - BT and the cable firm Vigin Media. ... ITProPortal Broadband Finder guardian.co.uk  -