Can any local Hullensians offer advice on good areas vs bad to live in central Hull?

kilby_007

cashmonger wrote: »

I would only be concerned about the service once up.

Hit and miss. Having lived at 4 addresses in Hull I've had first hand experience of poor speeds but the one I'm at now is 13Mbit which is quite good for KC (over a regular telephone wire). I've got friends who barely ever receive above a couple of mbit download speed and there's thousands of complaints about this so it's a fairly common problem with KC (check their FB page!) as their equipment and exchanges are dated and massively overloaded, however they're about half way through a program of upgrades to fibre so once you find somewhere I would check the post code on the KC website to see what speed you can expect. I would think they will have upgraded the exchanges around the town centre already.

kilby_007

My company have just set up a new office and are having KC fibre installed. They asked for redundancy and diversity (two pairs of cables fed from two different exchanges and via two routes). What they got was two cables joining into the same cable duct running under a main road 500 yards away, and with the cables running to the wrong end of the building (the server room was at the other end). They've been quoted £20K just to dig up and move the cables to the other end of the building (even though it's their fault because they didn't follow the specification) and shrugged their shoulders about the redundancy issues. So you can see how they're not the easiest company to deal with....

cashmonger

Do you know if these bandwidth allowances are for daily or monthly usage?

If it is daily then I can work with those stats but monthly would make them terrible.

I began monitoring my usage today and was at nearly 3gig after only a couple hours and that is when I thought my computer was idle (no videos etc just scripts that run in the background accessing websites but not heavy media ones)

Purebroadband would seem like an alternative but the initial cheap quoted monthly fees are ramped up by the £100 installation fee and an extra £40 if you need a router. I wont need one unless its a special router required to run their stuff which I don't think it is from their website info.

So it works out around £30 per month with them but they are unlimited so that is a definite benefit and may be necessary for me depending on what my usage stats tell me after a few days and/or whether the quotes on the kcom site are daily or monthly.

kilby_007

They're definitely monthly allowances!

kilby_007

I find it hard to believe you would use 3GB of data in 2 hours unless you're constantly uploading/downloading data via FTP or something. What are these scripts doing? Maybe switch them off if they're that data heavy and you're not using them...?

cashmonger

Hmm there was 2 gigs for some reason at 1pm don't know what that was about but that average is 300-500mb per hour.

I can't turn them off. It is to do with my work so I need them running all the time as that is how I make money; or try at least. I do Internet Marketing and they are editing accounts on webpages updating posting content etc. I think it is the page loading that does it because it is only download numbers that are high not upload. Doesn't make a difference practically tho :P. I was surprised they use that much but I guess it is the constant stream which makes them add up whereas if you are just doing it manually then it would be more sporadic.

kilby_007

Sounds like you need a business package if you're running a server (which is what it appears to be if end users are updating content via scripts on your computer).

glennevis

Cashmonger, I was born and bred in Hull and a lot of us are proud of our independent telephone service. But the world is a different place now and pride isn't enough. I worked in IT before I retired and I've dealt with the business side of KC as well as being a home user. IMHO they probably lack the resources to deliver the kind of slick professional service most businesses expect. I was lucky that I was able to manage servers remotely via VPN using the superfast network at my employer, therefore I didn't use a lot of data if I was working from home and speed was not an issue. But with the data usage you quoted, it sounds like you will be running servers from your home network. Think very carefully before basing your business in Hull.

Since moving to the far north of Scotland, for the first time in my life I now have a choice of ISPs offering unlimited data (ADSL) broadband at much lower prices and faster speeds, I sadly realise just how far KC have fallen behind the rest of the country.

I suspect that due to your IT work this could be a deal breaker for you. There are other fairly compact northern cities that offer the kind of accommodation you are looking for.

agrinnall

n217970 wrote: »

Going back to the Kingston/Hull issue - I could get the reference to the English civil war but I am reliably informed by my dad, in his late 60's, that he remembers everyone calling the town Kingston so it would seem to be a relativly knew thing to call the town "Hull", at least to folks in Yorkshire.

It can't be that recent, I was at Uni there in the late 70s and never heard the city referred to as anything other than Hull, and the football team has always been Hull City, from long before your dad was born. Perhaps calling it Kingston was a thing in parts of the city but not others (maybe in East Hull, home of Hull Kingston Rovers).

Anyway, it appears it was known as Wyke on Hull first, and Kingston replaced Wyle in the 13th century, so perhaps we should be calling it Wyke!

http://www.localhistories.org/hull.html

cashmonger

glennevis wrote: »

Cashmonger, I was born and bred in Hull and a lot of us are proud of our independent telephone service. But the world is a different place now and pride isn't enough. I worked in IT before I retired and I've dealt with the business side of KC as well as being a home user. IMHO they probably lack the resources to deliver the kind of slick professional service most businesses expect. I was lucky that I was able to manage servers remotely via VPN using the superfast network at my employer, therefore I didn't use a lot of data if I was working from home and speed was not an issue. But with the data usage you quoted, it sounds like you will be running servers from your home network. Think very carefully before basing your business in Hull.

Since moving to the far north of Scotland, for the first time in my life I now have a choice of ISPs offering unlimited data (ADSL) broadband at much lower prices and faster speeds, I sadly realise just how far KC have fallen behind the rest of the country.

I suspect that due to your IT work this could be a deal breaker for you. There are other fairly compact northern cities that offer the kind of accommodation you are looking for.

Well I thought I can still work around it if needed. I could just hire a server and upload all my stuff to it and only call things from my home to the server to set them running etc. and/or I could keep my main computer at my mums who has 50megs fibre now.

So I don't think it is insurmountable.

I have read a few people living in hull who are gamers and say the service is absolutely fine for that so I imagine it would be fine for my needs, and if not there is the backup plan mentioned above.

Anyhow I won't be tied to the place so I can get a 6 month contract and take stock from there.