3km from exchange, best BB options?

fiish

I am moving to a new place and am weighing up my options for broadband internet. Internet is pretty much my sole communications need and I use it quite heavily. I shall be living alone so I am trying to keep the cost down as far as possible.

O2 broadband seems to be getting a lot of positive feedback and I use O2 for my mobile anyway, so they're a strong option. Thing is, my place will be about 3km from the nearest exchange and I'm wondering how much of the promised 8Mbps I could get.

Moneysavers, could I pick your brains on sutiable alternatives? Will the distance kill any hopes of a decent connection and slave me to Virgin Media? VM has some nice deals but they require their home phone which is far from the best deal about.

weegie.geek

at 3.5 miles you'll be lucky if you get it faster than 1mbit. 0.5mbit is a realistic expectation.



3.5 miles is more than 5.5km, so considering the phone line doesn't run as the crow flies, you're probably looking at 6km of copper between you and the exchange.



There's no necessity to take a VM phone with their BB, or there wasn't in the past at least. It's not advertised though, so you'd have to brave calling them.

fiish

Thanks! I've been looking for such a graph and it seems I just wasn't looking in the right places.

Anyway I had misread my distance calculator, it's actually in kilometres, which suddenly looks a lot better on that chart (about 6Mbps on the 'up to 8M' chart, probably will get closer to 3-4M).

Again, thanks for the chart.

jhp

weegie.geek wrote: »

There's no necessity to take a VM phone with their BB, or there wasn't in the past at least. It's not advertised though, so you'd have to brave calling them.

Virgin Media Cable Broadband only is available. No phone required.

See: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/product.do?id=227

fiish

Hmm, you're right, it does get expensive after 12 months though. Though I've read the thread on threatening to leave after a year and it seems to pay dividends

weegie.geek

jhp wrote: »

Virgin Media Cable Broadband only is available. No phone required.

See: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/product.do?id=227

I stand corrected. Good to see they're advertising it now. Lots of people have no use for a landline these days, with mobiles and voip.

fiish

Yup, the only reason I'd get a landline is to get broadband over it, and if the speeds are going to be so poor what's the point.

I don't particularly agree with VM's traffic management policy (it seems a little heavy-handed to me, especially with the cheapest package which kicks the throttling in at 500MB - quite ridiculous for iPlayer or Skype usage).

My other considered option is O2 Broadband, coming in at 7.50 + 10.50 = £18/month
For VM, I'd be taking the 2Mb or 10Mb package, (9/month or 16/month), depending on my usage; I'll have to do some measurements over the next few days....