Thinking of Going From Dial-up > Broadband - What's The Procedure????

Ripperoo

Hi guys

I've been with NTL dial-up for 4-5 years now and am thinking of changing over to broadband.

Besides being undecided between NTL & Plusnet for a provider, I also need to know hat the procedure is for moving from dialup > BB.

Also, how long does it take to move fom one ISP to another?

I quite like the look of the NTL £9.99 deal, but am I right in thinking this is for new customers only?

If it is, then I think I'll opt for the Plusnet >2mb deal, which also sounds OK (with the free activation).

With regard plusnet, what's the deal with download limits for 'Plus' package users?

My heads in bits trying to decide, so any advice would be appreiated.

If I'm gonna be tied to someone for 12 months (sounds kinky), I want it to be a pain free as possible.

Many thanks.
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Regards
Ripperoo

heatherw_01

Do you have BT phone line?

Ripperoo

heatherw_01 wrote:

Do you have BT phone line?

Yup, I sure do. Sorry, forgot to mention that!

It's the £15pm NTL dial-up (inclusive of £15 of phone calls).
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Regards
Ripperoo

heatherw_01

As far as I can see the NTL Broadband £9.99 offer is only if you live in a cabled area which you can check online.

Rex_Mundi

With regard plusnet, what's the deal with download limits for 'Plus' package users?

There are no limits, but if you are downloading too much. They will warn you. They also use bandwidth shaping, which means that if you use P2P (filesharing), they will limit your speeds so you get really slow downloads.

JimArnold

plusnet are free to sign up but they have a sliding scale of charges £50 if you leave within 1 year down to zero if you stay 5+ years. Its not unreasonable as they have to pay BT to connect you in the first place.

Ripperoo

heatherw_01 wrote:

As far as I can see the NTL Broadband £9.99 offer is only if you live in a cabled area which you can check online.

Ahh, I get it. I'm not in NTL cabled area I'm afraid.

T'is looking like Plusnet then.

It'll be a shame leaving NTL seeing as they haven't been too bad for me personally (heard horror stories from others tho').

Three or four bad periods consisting of slow connections and e-mail problems. Which ain't too bad over the years I suppose.

Thanks Heatherw.
--
Regards
Ripperoo

heatherw_01

There is another NTL package called Freedom for those with a BT line:

http://www.ntlfreedom.co.uk

Ripperoo

Rex_Mundi wrote:

There are no limits, but if you are downloading too much. They will warn you.

Hmmm, what's considered t be 'Too Much' tho?

>1GB pm?

>2GB pm?

Rex_Mundi wrote:

They also use bandwidth shaping, which means that if you use P2P (filesharing), they will limit your speeds so you get really slow downloads.

Fairynuff, I suppose.

How slow tho'??? Still be faster than dialup I expect?

In all honesty, I've been prompted to take BB route, because it's a real PITA when downloading the occasional large file. Such as the 600mb+ free copy of 'Linspire' I'm currently trying to download (it's gonna take several days over dial-up to download the .torrent).

Don't use P2P myself, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Do they allow access to usenet via their own news server?

E-mail addresses are included too I hope.

Thanks for the advice guys, seem you've mad my mind up.
--
Regards
Ripperoo

salthepal

Ripperoo wrote:

Hi guys

I've been with NTL dial-up for 4-5 years now and am thinking of changing over to broadband.

Besides being undecided between NTL & Plusnet for a provider, I also need to know hat the procedure is for moving from dialup > BB.

Also, how long does it take to move fom one ISP to another?

I quite like the look of the NTL £9.99 deal, but am I right in thinking this is for new customers only?

If it is, then I think I'll opt for the Plusnet >2mb deal, which also sounds OK (with the free activation).

With regard plusnet, what's the deal with download limits for 'Plus' package users?

My heads in bits trying to decide, so any advice would be appreiated.

If I'm gonna be tied to someone for 12 months I want it to be a pain free as possible.

I had to laugh when I read this. It could have been me writing this. Everything applies! I would like to go with Metronet but you have to buy the modem (or can you buy your own?) and pay for connection but Plusnet come a close second because it seems to be the cheapest with higher than usual customer recommendations.

blinky

Plusnet say that 100Gb is the sustainable limit for the Premier Account. I'm not sure about Plus account but I'd imagine it'll be slightly less.

To put this into context the average broadband user uses around 6-7Gb.

P2P speeds with the Plus account (e.g. Kazaa, Emule/EDonkey, Bittorrent etc) will be very low ~ 5-7Kb/s. The website states that P2P traffic is slowed down at busy times but the way it works is the allott an amount of bandwidth for Plus customers to use for P2P. As there is no quiet time for P2P the speeds are almost always low.

On the Plus account Plusnet have recently modified the Terms and Conditions so that they can implement idle-timeouts. This means if your connection is idle for 30 minutes they could disconnect you, although you should be able to reconnect immeadiately. In any case it's easy to get around by setting your mail program to check for mail every 20 minutes. This should not be confused with the forced disconnections you see on dial up.

Metronet are very good but they don't supply you with an email address. They charge around £8-9 a year extra. The charging model will suit some people but not others.

Personally I moved from Pipex to Plusnet Premier about a fortnight ago. No problems so far - service is fast and reliable and all my support requests (domain related) have been dealt with in a reasonable period.