Metropol

I'm moving house next week, and so I'm currently on the lookout for a new ISP.

My parents are currently with BT Broadband Option 1 - and although it's a good connection, it's a little pricey for what I want really.

I'm looking for an unlimited download package - ideally bundled with a phone line for payment convenience. The TalkTalk package is tempting me at the moment, even though it's a 40gb starter package, I'd be taking out the boost to up that to 80gb which should be ample for iPlayer, online gaming, PS3 vidzone etc.

Any thoughts on which are the best packages at the moment?

I have Virgin Media's 10mb service. You get bumped up every so often. Back when it was Telewest it was only 512kb or something, before being bumped up to 1mb. We thought it was super-fast. Well, so is 10mb.

Do you know if your exchange is ADSL2 enabled? If so, I'm with o2/Be* and I'm finding them (same company and infrastructure, different brand) quite good. My speed is 16meg down, 1meg up, and I haven't been throttled despite me downloading quite a lot of videos from iPlayer HD.

I'm paying O2 £9.70 per month for a 16MB "unlimited" connection (£5 discount as I'm an O2 mobile customer). While they say they do have a fair usage policy, they've apparently never terminated a contract because of too much downloading, and they don't appear to be restricting bandwidth as I know well from experience that BT does. I'm very happy with what I'm getting for the price - I get about 10-11MB constant connection from them, compared to the 5MB in daytime and less than 1MB I used to get in the evening from BT, for which I was paying more than twice the price.

They don't currently offer a land line phone service though must be considering it as I got a survey from them recently asking if I'd be interested in taking up a service from them if they offered it. I'd probably would - I certainly have no loyalty to BT which is WAY overpriced.

BT seems to think people want lots of things they consider extras like online storage and VOIP and Openzone minutes and all that kind of stuff. I don't think they do. All I want is a fast broadband connection. Any other stuff I want I'll sort myself.

dbl wrote:Do you know if your exchange is ADSL2 enabled? If so, I'm with o2/Be* and I'm finding them (same company and infrastructure, different brand) quite good. My speed is 16meg down, 1meg up, and I haven't been throttled despite me downloading quite a lot of videos from iPlayer HD.

According to SamKnows.co.uk, the exchange that'll be serving me is pretty well equipped with a few LLU operators, as well as ADSL Max and SDSL (whatever that is!)

I'm scrounging discount broadband off my neighbour but would also suggest O2, particularly if you've got a contract with them. Not sure if they're still doing it but last time I looked the first 3 months were free with free activation and router.