UK ISP Recomendations?

[Andrew Robinson]

paul.maddox.mail-list at synth.net wrote:
>  Nowhere in sight -here, the oil capital of
>  Europe, indeed- is 24Mb internet, and even if it did exist, it would
>  probably cost ?50 a month for an 8Mb limited service that is throttled
>  to buggery but that bit wasn't mentioned in the advertising...

This does exist in bits of the uk, from bethere.co.uk ...I'm on it at
the moment. It's unlimited, unthrottled and ?24 a month, but the 'up
to 24Mb' actually tops out at 14Mbit because I'm about a mile from the
exchange, and the upstream is only 1.5Mbit. I do see torrents coming
down at over 1 megabyte a second quite often though and I regularly
upload at 185kb/sec all night, there's no noticable contention either,
so no slowdown at 7pm when everyone gets online after work. The
downside is that the tech support is even more hopeless than usual
(bulgarians who have no access to their own support forum), their DNS
server takes up to 2 seconds to resolve addreses so you need to use a
different one, and they block port 25 so you have to either use their
flaky outgoing mail server (fine by me as I just use Gmail these days)
or buy in mailserver access from someone else who can use a different
port... oh and they've been bought out by O2, which probably means
impending throttling, contention, capping, plague of locusts etc.

I'm going to be changing soon as I'm moving to Worcester where they
haven't yet put their ADSL2 equipent into the local exchange and
therefore they have no service here.

- Andy_R