BF2S Forums Best UK isp?

i'va always stuck with telewest,never had no probs with em,& 10meg dl at £35 a month suits me.i've heard their upgrading it to 20meg sometime this year.

BT ftw i was with telewest and it sucked in my area constantly down for work on it .

BT 8meg is great m8 .

But try bulldog or pipex

Does anyone use talktalk and is it anygood for BF2?

Im on AOL and mostly its fine...2mb broadband, reliable, but sometimes it drops off, their software is good had no probs with it, but if i was you stick with the british companies..they are better. try NTL,BT or bulldog

In the UK you have two basic options, cable or adls.
Their are pros and cons to each of them.

I'll start with cable. The pros, huge bandwidth potential. The cons, shared bandwidth. You can get up to 10Mb with most cable providers. The issue comes at 16:00 and 18:00 when the kids, and then the adults come home from school and work respectively. Everyone in your street [or maybe multiple streets] shares a fibre link back to the cable company, this means that if there are lots of cable users in your street then you may have preformance issues during peak times.

ADSL has two subsets.
1. Is BT broadband, or BT broadband that is repackaged and sold by other companies. All of these terminate on BT's DSlams in the exchange.
2. Are ISP's that have local loop un-bundleing. These are different from BT because the phone line terminates on a private DSlam that just happens to be in the BT exchange.

The pros are that you get dedicated bandwidth between the DSlam and your router, the sharing of the bandwidth occurs at the DSlam, which has thousands of connections but huge bandwidth itself. Think about it as the difference between 5:1  and 5000:1000, on the first if 4 people are busy then your bandwidth is gone, but on the second you need 4000 people to be busy.
The cons are that your maximum bandwidth is limited by your distance from the exchange. You may only be able to get 1Mb. You also will need to have a land line and may have to pay line rental on it even if you only use it for your broadband. This is where the non BT broadband come into it's own, they are less likely to charge you line rental.

Last edited by DrM (2006-08-29 10:11:43)

Vilham wrote:

DO NOT use bulldog or pipex.

BT is reliable, and reasonably cheap.

Why not?

tiscali are 10 times worse!

Viper007Bond wrote:

I think you mean to ask which is the least worst...

I agree.. the UK is like a third-world country when it comes to internet. It's overpriced, mostly limited, and it has horrible reliability.

Like my internet service (Tesco) goes offline every night a 9.. wtf?.. its a cheap piece of shit. The "free" modem they provided had to be disconnected and plugged back in every time I started my computer... I finally came up with an excuse to smash it with a hammer.. it was very satisfying.

Also the fact that they don't sell ethernet DSL modems at all.. its either poor wireless or this POS $10 for a dozen USB modems - what makes it worse is that the USB modems AREN'T $10 for a dozen.. they're $60 for ONE!.. WTF?!

Germany's T-Online system was much better.. Not one single problem.. and plus they use ethernet modems so I can use a freakin router!

Last edited by USAFDude_1988 (2006-08-29 11:54:13)

do tiscali really suck tht bad ?

I've been on NTL for like 9 years, and I've only ever had a few problems with downtime. Longest one being for a few days thanks to a storm, but other than that... nothing to complain about for me.

Entanet are very good. They're not the cheapest, but they are fast and reliable. You also get good tech support if you need it.

[edit] ...forgot to say avoid BT at all costs! They will stuff up your order to begin with, they will likely bill you for things you don't have and if you get a problem with your connection they will flatly refuse to help you if the Bangladeshi help desk can't help (which they won't).

Last edited by EricTViking (2006-10-29 16:27:19)

GNOMESWINEVERYTIME wrote:

I have used BULLDOG since the start and never have any down time and am now on 16mb at the 30 quid mark. only problem I have had is them is the billing. Taken too much and then nothing at all. LOL Always sorted out after an email in their defense. Found help line, very good when installing my new router.

Bulldog are rubbish. I've used them, so have many people I know - many, many problems. Billing issues, line downtime, port throttling, random disconnects, crap support. Bulldog are one of watchdogs worst ISPs.

Tiscali are awful as well. My parents ran Tiscali for a while, but never actually recieved a proper ADSL signal, despite Tiscalis claims that they had, support was the worst I've ever seen.

Talk-Talk are another of watchdogs terrible ISPs. I haven't used them personally and the deal they offer sounds good. But everything I've heard about them other than that is very, very bad.

NTL are a very poor ISP that I have had experience with as well. AOL are a terrible ISP too. BT are another crap one to avoid.

There you go, 6 ISPs not to use.


I'm currently using Be, they've been very good so far, although their support staff don't know what they're talking about. 24Mb has kept me quite happy. Only drawback is that it's only available in London.

It does actually run at speeds close to 24Mb as well, not like services from other ISPs I've used, it runs at 19.5Mb downstream/1.3Mb upstream on my line. Bulldog, on my old 8Mb connection, I used to get 4Mb downstream, NTL on an 8Mb connection - 5Mb.

Now I get speeds around 600-700KBps (4.8-5.6Mbps) on p2p and rarely get pings above 20 in BF2. All for £20 a month.

Last edited by Bertster7 (2006-10-30 06:46:40)