Be Excellent To Each Other

Right just upgraded to 40Gb broadband! I can d/l stuff!

Ha!

Talking of which, I'm giving very, very serious consideration to changing ISPs from O2 to BT Infinity, especially as the nice man from BT told me he believes our line will support 39Mb download and 9Mb upload speed. Has anyone here got any experience of them? Are they any good?

I think there's a 10 Gb cap on Infinity

I'm moving to Infinity from O2 on Friday - from "£13/mo for 17mbps unlimited" to "£18/mo for estimated ~32 with 40GB/mo cap"... but with 3 months free, making the first year about the same price.

O2 have been pissing me off - primarily because they made the home phone deal "more attractive" by reducing the line rental to £6.50/mo from £9.50/mo... while raising the broadband price £3/mo. I only have broadband, and am locked into a BT line rental. Then they charged me £50 to move it to Hel's. Then they put the price up again. And considering the router syncs at 17mbps and doesn't ever disconnect, it's gone shit slow.

Not that infinite then.

We're on about going for the expensive uncapped option.

Annoyingly, if I'd done this at the time of moving, I'd've not had to pay either the £50 to O2 or the £130 connection fee to BT.

I don't feel the extra £10/mo for unlimited is worthwhile.

Fair usage limit though, right?

Oh, and O2 said "Ok you can leave as you're not in a contract, but if you use the MAC within the next 7 days we'll charge you £15. And if you don't return the router within 30 days we'll charge you £20." The router's about 3 years old! They did the same to my boss, and he doesn't even have the same sort of router they give out now, which is even weirder.

As far as I am aware it's still only Sky unlimited that has no cap or packet shaping at all?

Malc

You may notice that I'm not recommending O2 Broadband to all comers like I was a year ago.

Yup.

And indeed, Sky's new Anytime+ TV download service requires that you have Sky Unlimited, because with any other broadband you'd exceed your usage limit very quickly.

Probably, but there is on O2 and I never hit that. I'm not a prolific downloader, but I'd like the massive upstream increase because I do occasionally log in to my home computer from work during my lunch breaks if I'm a bit bored.

Plus as I'm living at the parents and paying outright for the O2 broadband that everyone else in the house uses as well, my dad has told me that I can just carry on paying the same amount as I do now for O2 and he'll make up the difference in price for going with BT. I can't really lose, provided they're not a totally shit ISP, because whilst comparatively slow, I do at least get a reliable connection with O2.

I'm not sure BT Infinity actually supports uploads that high, though. Never mind, I just checked - up to 10mbps, whereas my cheapy package is limited to "only" 2mbps upload instead of estimated 6mbps line capability. Oh noes!

We went for Sky's uncapped, as after getting the iPod Touches, the data use went through the roof.

I've had that about a month now (maybe 6 weeks?) I bloody love it!

It does seem to download all the "showcase" stuff in the background, not sure if that's what's caused my connection to slow down from time to time in the last month or not.

I wish I could access the iplayer stuff from it too, that would be really awesome (or from the xbox - which is connected to my other big screen TV), I guess it's not too much hassle to plug my laptop in to watch (hmmm, I've just remembered that the Wii does Iplayer...)

Malc

I don't know what to do about broadband. Now I've moved from O2 to Three for cell service, I'm paying £26/mo for my top tier O2 package (plus £15 a month to BT for a phone line that has no handset plugged into it), which is an awful lot. I'd move to Sky but they'd make me use their shit router rather than my l33t Airport/Draytek combo and I'm on the verge of dropping Sky TV anyway. No-one else seems to have decent unlimited tariffs. No Virgin or Infinity in my exchange. Woe. Suggestions welcome.

Edit -- oh, and BT have an off-putting 18 month minimum contract length.

Those upload speeds I posted on Sunday were from BT.

If you're happy to skirt the Ts and Cs it's pretty simple to pull the ADSL authentication data out of the Sky router and use it in your own.

I've read it's much less simple on the new routers, although I haven't looked into it for a while, admittedly.

New thread chaps? This could be useful info to someone that's getting lost in here.

BT Infinity unlimited has a 300Gb a month FUP. So not really unlimited.

The only two ISPs that offer truly unlimited and unrestricted are Sky and BE. I'm on BE and have no complaints.

Dunno. We do it every couple of months, it's a pretty changeable environment.

And the top Virgin package.
That I've noticed, anyway.

and them

BT Infinity unlimited has a 300Gb a month FUP. So not really unlimited.

The only three ISPs that offer truly unlimited and unrestricted are Sky and BE and Virgin. I'm on BE and have no complaints.

Virgin may shape, but to be honest I've never noticed.
And I did this once, so you'd think I would have.

Ok then.

BT Infinity unlimited has a 300Gb a month FUP. So not really unlimited.

The only three ISPs that offer truly unlimited and unrestricted are Sky and BE and Virgin, although Virgin may traffic shape. I'm on BE and have no complaints.

BE have some wooly thing in their FUP about 'excessive network usage', too. I don't know whether they've ever enforced that.

Not to my knowledge, and i'm pretty sure they say in their forums that they have no plans to.
I regularly pull down 400Gb+ a month with no problems.

Your knob must be in tatters.

There's some serious Gb/GB confusion in this thread.

If my ISP had a 300Gb/month cap, I'd be changing things up pretty quickly.

I don't remember making this thread either!!!!

I've just spunked a load more money per month, and the nice man is coming next Wednesday to give me 100Mb of BROADBAND POWAH!

There may be a few capitalisation issues going on, but I doubt anyone is confused...

I'm willing to let it slide so long as people aren't saying "gigabit" in their heads as they type it out.

That's ok, I call them gobbleboobs anyway.

That's 37.5GB/month, which I bet is still more than a lot of people's cap.

No it isn't.

I say Jiggabit.

Problem?

#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=300Gb+in+GB&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f068e0c5e7ca2203&biw=1280&bih=911">http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid ... 80&bih=911

Are ISPs really mugging people off that badly? Christ! I'm genuinely concerned they won't have Virgin Media installed in the flat/house we move to.

Actually, whilst we're on the subject - renters - have you ever had any luck convincing landlords to allow you to have stuff like this installed? Obviously paying for the costs yourself. Stuff like satellite dishes/fibre optic internets/sex dungeons/etc.

I just got cable installed. I'm sure they'll find out eventually.

Also, I probably don't use 35GB/month. In fact, I doubt many normal people would, if they didn't pirate stuff.

As a Landlord I generally tell people to do what the fuck they like. The way I see it I've got a free satellite dish, shed, fence and re-turfing done out of the deal.

That, surprisingly, is also wrong.

Haha! I like your style.



Do you reckon? I've probably used nearly that since the weekend - for entirely legitimate purposes. Streaming iPlayer, YouTube, downloading Steam games, XBLA games, demos, etc.

Hell, even if I did still torrent US TV I doubt I'd break the 40GB barrier.

Depends if you call downloading TV episodes pirating?

I still suspect I would do more than 35Gb/Month if I didn't do that, with TV streaming on the Boxee, Work related software and files, Steam, Xbox Live, iPlayer, Spotify, etc...

I was thinking this. For example - "can we paint your shitty walls, please, Mr Landlord?" Why would they say no? Hopefully we'll get a good one.