jrawle wrote on Jan 7^th, 2009 at 10:57am:

I thought speed was how far you were away from the exchange rather than the provider's ability.

I guess everyone's traffic will be monitored in future.

I had a couple of guys come to my door from Npower yesterday and told them I was not interested. They then asked me who my electricity supplier was and I told them it was none of their business. Not telling them stops them trying to switch you without you knowing, as I have read in the press that this does indeed happen.

sherbert wrote on Jan 7^th, 2009 at 11:17am:

No sherbert this is not correct as distance from the exchange only determines maximum possible data sync speed with the exchange and not actual data throughput speed.  So with TalkTalk you might be 50 metres from the exchange and theoretically capable of getting 20Mbps on their new speed boost products but in reality at most times of day (especially evening) you will be lucky if you get 0.5Mbps because TalkTalk does not have enough backbone capacity beyond the exchanges in their network to support full speed for their customers at nearly all times (other than may be from 1am to 6am).  Whereas if you go with www.newnet.co.uk or www.idnet.co.uk they guarantee that you will get the full speed your line is capable of at all times.  But you will pay considerably for that privilege.

Broadband is not like electricity or gas where the product is the same no matter who you pay your bill to.  With broadband the service beyond the exchange varies hugely between different broadband providers.  That is why TalkTalk, Tiscali and most of all Virgin ADSL can offer their cheap and shoddy products at such low prices.  I believe I have tried to explain this to you before but you still seem to think that switching broadband supplier is like switching gas or electricity supplier.

I definitely wouldn't go with BT broadband (expensive and very poor quality customer service based in India) but their wholly owned (but quite separately operated) supplier Plusnet is currently offering an incredible deal for anyone on an exchange with no LLU (Talktalk, Be Unlimited, Sky etc) providers.   This works out at less than £5 per month on top of line rental cost in the first year for a 10Gb per month broadband allowance.  Unlike Tiscali, TalkTalk and BT Plusnet repeatedly get decent customer broadband satisfaction ratings.

See www.plus.net/residential/broadband/broadband_with_homephone_us.shtml for the Plusnet special deal through Uswitch

and

www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php for customer satisfaction ratings of different ISPs.

For further discussion of the Uswitch deal with Plusnet for line rental, 10Gb broadband and free evening and weekend calls see the separate thread I have started on this at:-

www.saynoto0870.com/cgi-bin/forum/YaBB.cgi?num=1232384727

I do hope sherbert does not feel I was being in any way unduly critical as I know you are a staunch supporter of this website.  But in summary you may not notice the slow speeds delivered by Talktalk, Tiscali and especially Virgin on ADSL if you only send email and browse the internet but if you download large tv video files or use Voip etc then you are likely to notice that inferior data speed (on the same phone line connected to the same exchange) pretty quickly.

BT are offering me a 12 month rolling contract, (like the land line deal) for Broadband bringing the monthly charge down by £2 to £12.65 for Option One.
I started paying £17.99 a couple of years ago, so good to see something come down in price for a change.

As I have said previously, I have never had a problem with the Broadband service so far.