Re: [OxLUG] broadband

My thanks to one and all for your thoughts on this. Having had a look
though your suggestions, here is my shortlist:

Be - looks perfect, £18 for an 'unlimited' plan, good upload speeds
1.3mb (I'll want to do a little small scale web serving) with static
IP. Though the fact that they are now carrying O2's traffic is a
little worrying.

UKFSN has some obvious plus points, ie, Free Software Network, but I'm
the only one that will be using nix so I can't really justify the
slower comparative speed with the same cost. Still, one can't help but
wonder if the lower rates for the same tarriff is more of an accurate
reflection of expected performance. What is the chance of really
getting 24mbs from Be?!

The Phone Coop sounds like it would be a fine ethical choice, but
their prices are way to high for what you get. Shame really, but I
shall revisit them as the years go by

I also received a personal email from the guy behind Goscomb, which
was flattering :) But their caps were far too low. I know it sounds
mad but with a good connection I'm sure four of us could easily get
through 100gb a month.

I'm not going to go with AOL as my family were with them for years and
I just thought they were to MScentric. Sky is somewhat pointless as
I'm not going to get a TV. You also seem to find that most of the big
players are bundling in some kind of phone deal, but we all use
mobiles so this is a wasted expense.

I'll continue to look but you guys have given me some great pointers
and I thank you all for that.

Kevin



2008/7/17 M.Blackmore <mblackmore@???>:
>
> 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.
>
>
>