Re: [OxLUG] broadband

> So, anyone had a fantastic experience with an ISP? Are there any that
> I should do my damnedest to avoid? What does OxLug think?

I know you have already ruled them out but I think I have to stand up
for sky and say I'm rather impressed by the service. In fact I'm rather
suprised because I thought it would be typical mass consumer rubbish
service.

I'm connected at 6Mpbs which is very good IMHO considering how far I
am from the exchange. I also seems to get download speeds consistent
with this. I don't notice any slow periods although I don't really use
it during the weekday.

I'm not a heavy bittorrent user but seem to get pretty snappy downloads
when I do. I have no idea if they are doing any traffic shaping but I
don't notice it if they do.

I had my first issue the other day and I phoned their tech support line.
Although I was paying for the call (I don't think it was too expensive)
I spoke to someone with a clue, who didn't question what OS I was using
and sorted out the problem swiftly. He suggested replacing the
microfilter as occasionally they go faulty. I replaced it and the
probably went away so I assume he was right and I think the
phone call cost was well worth it.

I was paying £25 a month with Zen (who are excellent) but for only an
extra £5 I get sky tv with Sky+, a bunch of free phone calls and what
seems to be an even faster broadband connection (they are both
supposedly the 8M service but I was getting about 4.5M with Zen and
get about 6M with sky)

The only gripe I had is I think sky have disabled their SMTP relay
servers so if you want that you would have to get it elsewhere. I still
pay Zen for that as part of my domain hosting.

I was on a set of static IPs for years but I don't see the point now.
The router sky supplied supports dyndns (I think) so it was trivial to
point an entry in my domain to my home machine to allow ssh access.

No, I'm not being paid by sky to advertise. I was just very impressed for
a change.


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