Re: [OxLUG] broadband

On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 20:28 +0100, Kevin Carmody wrote:
> about who my
> new home broadband supplier will be
I've nothing but good things to say about the Phone Coop. Fixed IP,
going through BT copper of course at the end so don't know what impact
that has on the service and must ask who their backbone supplier is cos
I gather they changed last year. Don't seem to do any filtering, but
then I've only got the basic 2m connection and don't need anything more
(we don't download films and kids aren't old enough for online heavy
games, music downloading, and social networking sites yet above Club
Penguin level and I don't have inclination for those things myself etc.
and anyway the internet pages don't come up any faster than a 2m
connection copes with so why the hell pay more for extra bandwidth I
won't use for a few more years by which time it will probably be
standard anyway?).

Always get to talk to a proper tekkie in a short time when hit a problem
(like the real sneaky firewall one we had last week ... turned out to be
corrupted DNS cache on the flash "hard disk" on the second line solid
state linux (ipcop) firewall, took us quite some time to pin down that
one until I spotted something wrong with filesizes by sheer fluke. NTL
would have blown me off ages before that but the support guy really got
the itch in the proper "this is not going to beat ME" technicians
mindset that one needs for problem solving - and thats worth the extra I
pay per month compared to some ISP deals).

We also get an all you can eat 1p/hour landline phone service from them
for an extra couple of quid subscription a month, useful for when wife
works from home. Our mobile use is minimal so don't need any mobile
deals in the tariff either as mobile bill barely exceeds 2 quid a month
each!

And of course they are based in Oxfordshire (Chipping Norton) and are a
cooperative so nice and cuddly right on.