Can anyone recommend me a Cheap Reliable Internet Provider please?

buglawton

z0nk wrote: »

Virgin are notorious for throttling......

When you use up to 50 year old copper wire strung on wooden poles for your internet, extra throttling is not needed, it comes naturally!

IF you have a real underground broadband cable passing your home, try to use your position as new subscriber to wring the best long term deal our of Virgin Media/whoever, you will get a built for purpose system.

tronator

glicky wrote: »

I'm with Tiscali/Talk Talk at the moment and I'm paying £14.99 for a service that is getting slower and slower, plus in the middle of browsing the internet it just cuts off for no reason and then comes back on! I've had the computer checked out and they say it's the ISP! I've called Tiscali/Talk Talk and they say it's not them!

Anyway, I've finally had enough of them (been with them for years) and would like to go somewhere else, but I haven't got a clue where to go and who to go with.

I don't use it much, just mainly for browsing the internet and sending e-mails.

Any ideas please?

+1 for BE

If you want it "cheap", go for the BE Value, otherwise chose the BE Unlimited. I'm with them for a few years now and never had a problem with them am I'm a quite heavy user...

glicky

Thanks to everyone for your replies.

My neighbours have Virgin and all they do is complain about them and for the past month they've had them down at least twice a week and eventually they fixed it after he had no broadband for a month, so that put me off.

I'm going to look into 02 (I looked at Sam Knows and I'm area 3, so that looks OK), Sky and BE.

Once again, thanks to all of you for your help and recommendations.

buglawton

Any and all internet providers will have phases when your system is down. I am on Virgin cable and had some bad phases when neighbours and I and had very intermittent service. Like all ISPs, Virgin would not admit the fault, they just mysteriously fixed it one day. Meanwhile, by comparison, a mate who lives in a countryside area where the only method it phone wires, had to have Openreach come out multiple times to fix poor connections on the phone wires, in order to make the broadband work passably - he still only gets about one 20th of the real world speed that I do.

I keep a pay as you go 3g dongle handy for the down times, the rest of the time I enjoy good download and fair upload speeds from Virgin Media - luckily at this location we are not one of the areas affected by the fabled "peak time" slowing down.

spud17

trotter09 wrote: »

I'd avoid Virgin - can be very slow at peak times.

If you have an Orange mobile you can get Orange home broadband for £10 a month. Works fine and if you get a problem you can call free from your Orange mobile. But learn Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi. Actually, you do sometimes get through to a call centre in UK.

Love it, :rotfl::rotfl:

VM cable vv rarely drops below 9.6 mbps (10mbps), but unreliable service, NOT,(irony), Friday night/Saturday morning, had the second drop in service in over 3 yrs.

As for Orange check HERE

DCFC79

I use virgin and not had any disconnections, customer service when called them has been fine

ben500

Richie-from-the-Boro wrote: »

- scroll down to the red bit

Thanks wasn't aware of that, may explain why I've spent money on replacing router and modem due to hanging pages after assurances I wasn't being throttled from the !!!!!!s. A fool and his money ............

PeteHerts

rdpro wrote: »

BE ( bethere.co.uk) or O2 (same company) - tops! no throttling, no counting, good service - even cheaper with an O2 phone (payg or monthly) - only problem is that BT won't allow them in at too many exchanges yet. Check yours by postcode (google samknows)

I'd have to agree with rdpro. I'm with o2 for mobile, broadband and phone. For the broadband I pay £10 a month (£5 off as I have a mobile with them) and I'm close to the exchange and an o2 agent said I was getting the best download speed he'd ever seen (around 2.3mb/s I think) which means a 700MB file takes about 6 minutes which I'm more than happy with.
They even rang me up after not even a year to resign up and gave me another 3 months free without even asking.
All round I would say o2 get my recommendation in all area's and no I don't work for them lol

macman

glicky wrote: »

Thanks to everyone for your replies.

My neighbours have Virgin and all they do is complain about them and for the past month they've had them down at least twice a week and eventually they fixed it after he had no broadband for a month, so that put me off.

I'm going to look into 02 (I looked at Sam Knows and I'm area 3, so that looks OK), Sky and BE.

Once again, thanks to all of you for your help and recommendations.

Being on a Market 3 exchange does not mean that you can necessarily get O2 LLU. If you look at the samknows data, it lists all the LLU ISP's available on your exchange, which may or may not include 02.
If it does, that's the one to go for, at £7.50pm.

inmypocketnottheirs

Have a look at plusnet.

TT are absolutely cr*p.

Now with the PO, not the cheapest, but never any speed or availability issues.