On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 14:19:17 +0100 Craig c@wizball.co.uk wrote:
On 8 Oct 2004, at 13:11, Ricky Bruce wrote:
I know this topic comes up every few months but what dsl providers would you lot recommend. Id like to find a nice balance between cost (£25 or so a month) freebies, (a router would be a lovely although somewhat unrealistic target) and reasonable speeds. Also i might be moving from Yarmouth to N'arch in a couple of months so the ability to switch to a new property without incurring any penalties or charges would be great.
And of course tech support who understood that Linux isnt some kind of Windows program but an OS in its own right. Or even tech support that understood what an OS was :)
Take a look at plusnet (http://www.plus.net). I am currently on nildram and sent the order to change to plusnet soon. Only £21.99 and you get a static IP etc. Mind you, they offer a cool 'control panel' on the members login. Possibly one of the best I have seen so far :)
Interesting comment. I'm on Nildram myself, and have a customer on Plusnet. I rarely use the Nildram web site for anything as I have my own server with webmail supporting my various domains, etc., but the webmail is perfectly usable and I've set the reverse resolution of my static IP to sit with one of my own domains. The service in terms of the connection hasn't given me any problems personally, although my parents managed to get caught by the BT firmware upgrades that took out a load of ADSL units with a particular chipset for a while - and Nildram was the first to get upgraded unfortunately :-(
On the Plusnet side I have found their tech support largely useless having transferred an account in from VCISP when they went under. The domain associated with the account got left behind and transfered to another company that I had to track and arrange to get transferred back to where it was (one outage as they moved their nameservers and updated the record), then once transferred in they forgot to renew the domain and caused a second outage. I'm having problems downloading mail over around 3M using fetchmail (although this could easily be the Red Hat install causing this). Their web panel used to be fairly functional, but the main thing I've had to use is the webmail section which they have just 'upgraded' from basic but perfectly functional to pretty but largely unusable! Admittedly I'm connected in through a different ISP, but that's the point of webmail access isn't it? It is blindingly slow (even with broadband) and when I tried the IE only version it got even slower.
The ISP I've had best technical support from has been Fastnet who are based in Brighton/Hove somewhere and use BSD extensively - I've even considered transferring my connection, but I'm not having any real problems so there doesn't seem much point!