Cheapest Broadband Provider Discussion

Daveuk

Just like to add my three pence worth, I signed up with e7even Monday 27/06/05, notified by return that they would get BT to activate my line for ADSL as soon as possible, received notification from e7even this morning 05/07/05 that everything was ready, all connected up within minutes.

Six working days from start to finish.

Great deal £10 per month
Great Speed 1mb
Great Service
No Caps

Anyone interested in e7even, please use Mike_Peterson's referral code in Referrers Board.

Dave

Roger_Rampant

My advice would be to go with someone you can trust. it seems you get what you pay for!

I agree with the first part, but not the second

laurence1972

Is there a concern over e7evens service regarding p2p?

laurence1972

E7Even have just offered 2meg connection for a tenner for one week only. Can someone advise me regarding their P2p restrictions. £10 sounds tempting!

Stumpy

Hi. Looking for a bit of advice ....

I'm currently with NDO, who I've been, on the whole, very happy with. They seem to regularly be on or near the top of the adslguide charts (at least, with the ones I randomly pick to compare with!). However, they're changing their packages. I'm currently on a 500 uncapped package for just under £20, which I could stay on if I wanted, but I got all excited when I discovered that, during this month, I could upgrade for free to either a 1Mb or 2Mb capped package for the same price per month (well, 4p cheaper actually!). Turns out it can only be 1Mb due to my line, and since applying for the 1Mb have discovered that the 5Gb cap is a little low for me. They've just introduced (or I've just found) a part on their site that tells you how much you've downloaded/uploaded per month, and in the last month I've apparently downloaded about 5.5 Gb and uploaded about 2.5Gb.

Anyway, I had a look at a few other providers, and V21 seems to stand out for what I want - they do an uncapped 1Mb service which includes (a small amount of) webspace, e-mail, together with their own browser which you can adjust to have parental control for kids. This for the same price, ie, just under £20.

Does anyone have any experience with them? Tried looking on the adslguide site, but they're not on the "compare" list.

Also - does anyone know how the capping thing works - it is just based on the amount downloaded, or the total of downloads and uploads?

I was impressed to note, too, that on Saturday, when I watched a couple hours max of live8 on my PC, I downloaded nearly 800Mb!!! So it soon builds up.

pjala

Capping works on downloads plus uploads, so your transfer for the month is 2.5 plus 5.5. Just a note, you probably have a p2p application running in the background to have so much upload bandwidth being used - if you don't know about it check it out, cause it could be getting you into trouble.

Best of luck.

Stumpy

As far as I'm aware, I don't have any peer to peer stuff running - that's stuff like torrents? I've downloaded the odd thing occasionally - actually, this month, I did download a couple of different Linux OS's to try via the torrent thing, so I guess that could have boosted it, but there is nothing running now - don't normally leave it running that long. What else causes uploads? Just e-mailing and updating websites? I do a bit of typing which involves producing reports with photos, which are then e-mailed out, so that may boost it somewhat as well.

But ... saying that, I've just had a reply to a query I sent to NDO - they class only the download amount as part of the capped limit.

I suspect, unless they suddenly increase the cap or something goes pear-shaped, that, once I've been upgraded to the 1Mb line, I may migrate - just come across plusnet - which seems too good to be true? £14.99 (for up to 2Mb), free migration, no cap, bigger webspace, more e-mail addresses, cheap or free technical support, monthly payments, ability to disable p2p access (? so if I do have a problem that I don't know about, I guess I could use that?).

They also have a "broadband premier" which has a lower contention ratio of 30:1 and is aimed at the big downloaders for £21.99 per month, which is only £2 more than I'm spending now, plus £1 per Gb over the cap.

I had a look at another one E7even, but didn't really like that one - I prefer to pay monthly, doesn't hurt so much that way!!

theloft

laurence1972 wrote:

E7Even have just offered 2meg connection for a tenner for one week only. Can someone advise me regarding their P2p restrictions. £10 sounds tempting!

There have been a lot of threads/posts about E7even and the oft quoted £10 per month is misleading I think. If you sign up for 1 year on the latest deal it is £170 up front for the year, which equates to £14 per month. Only if you are prepared to sign up for 2 years with £240 up front does it equate to £10 per month as you then get free connection (no modem or filters though). Yes it is 2Mb but a lot can happen in 2 years, so I am going to wait a bit longer to see what else comes up. As Alared points out on another thread, there are still around 7 million dial-up customers, that is a big customer potential for some ISP.

pjala

I'm with plusnet, the premier. I know people who download 120G a month regularly and this is no bother to them.

I recently moved from Pipex, and saved about £1 ish per month, better contention ration, and upgraded to 2Mbit from 512. I, like you, liked the reporting on the bandwidth download, and p2p limiting - so moved to them instead of the cheap e7even. I was worried that with e7even that paying for 2 years up front may mean they could go bust.

Your upload bandwidth is only ever 256K, so to get 1/2 the transfers of the download seemed like a lot to me. Run spybot to check out whether you have any spyware running in the background.

PS if you move to plusnet, I wouldn't mind the referee, if you have no objection!

Stumpy

Unless something major crops up in the near future, I'm fairly set on plusnet - send me a PM with how to use your referral and, if I do go with them, I'll use it.

I'm a bit concerned about this upload thing now - I've had another look at my account, but it only shows the total upload and download per month, and the daily breakdown for the week.

For the last week it is showing:

Date Data Uploaded Data Downloaded
2005-07-01 10 mb 61 mb
2005-07-02 36 mb 822 mb
2005-07-03 4 mb 16 mb
2005-07-04 9 mb 50 mb
2005-07-05 10 mb 58 mb
2005-07-06 22 mb 59 mb
2005-07-07 15 mb 298 mb
2005-07-08 9 mb 100 mb

and totalling it up, for the week I uploaded 115 and downloaded 1464 Mb. Now for the download, doing a very quick x4 for the month, that comes out about right, ie, 5856, but multiplying the upload shows that I should only be doing around 460 per month. If it was spyware (for which I'm intending to scan tomorrow when I'm a bit more with it!!) I would expect it to be consistly high still, so the only other thing I can think of is that torrent download/upload I did a couple of weeks ago - can't remember how much it was, but I suppose it depends how long I left it chugging away to itself!

Anyway - that plusnet is quite good for the extra apps and things they seem to have going, like checking your exchange (although, depending where you look, mine could either be getting another upgrade shortly, or nothing is planned!!). I noticed while I was checking them out, someone mentioned something about them using LLU (local loop unbundling, I think?). My exchange doesn't support that at the moment, but I can't see anything plusnet's site saying it has to have it. The other thing I was concerned about (this is why you shouldn't dig too deep - too many questions!!) was if there was a problem going from an IP that does, to one that doesn't, use LLU, assuming they get my exchange upgraded some time in the future.

All I've got to do now, is wait for my 1Gb line to kick in (so I can transfer to the same speed line) and decide whether or not to go for their premier or plus packages. I don't download that often, but when I do I'd prefer not to be stuck waiting all day for a game demo or something to download, and I occasionally watch streaming video (BBC, that type of thing - just discovered how much THAT takes up of your "allowance"!! :eek:) so I don't know how that would be affected. Suppose I can always upgrade the package if necessary.

Oh - and I thought it was really cool that Plusnet have live webcams set up in their offices so you can nosy on what they're up to!!