The time has come to get broadband. Please could you give me the wealth of your experience, so I can make my mind up.
My use of the computer is limted to about two hours a day, so continious broadband seems a waste of money to me. My current phone bill for internet access is only £15 a quarter. Its the speed I think I am after. My boy will also download every song on the net to his I tune thing but I think its time I made the step.
What do you feel are my options, I have to say I am in favour with sticking with a large company rather than an unknown.
Well BB is continuous (always on) unlike a dial up...
You need to try and guage how much you will be downloading, that includes anything from a webpage, email, streaming video, music etc etc then either go down the usually cheaper "capped" download limit or go uncapped and pay a bit more. From the sounds of it you'll need uncapped if your son has the urge to download quite a bit of music etc.
Most ISP's now are pretty good, avoid AOL though as they screw your machine up (word of warning). Also depends on where you live and if you have access to ADSL (Telephone broadband) or Cable (NTL/Blueyonder) have a look on adslguide.org for info.
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from personal experience
AOL - has issues that mean you have limited hardware options
Pipex - good service, problems with a/c's (took too much) and not the cheapest.
Plusnet - who we are with now but have a fair use policy, which all companies are going to start sooner or later.
IMO, its best to avoid the "Free" modem unless they now come with built in firewall, get a router that you can setup and has a built in firewall. Another advantage is that you can disable the firewall on your PC, which speeds things up. When you swap over to BB you will need to make sure that your anti virus and spy sweeper are kept up to date.
Sounds dire but well worth it for the vast improvement in speed and functionality.
Mood: My Jota goes rumpety rump! & I have my wife exactly where she wants me!
I also use AOL and have no problems What so ever, its on a wireless router that serves 3 pc1s & 1 laptop.
The only downside I have found is that although you can limit the kids access to AOL, by their own timmings, you cannot stop them from accessing MSN messinger, to chat to there friends, coz the pc is always connected to broadband, this can be a major problem. I just remove there wireless dongalls ?
I'm on NTL, unlimited at 1.5Mb (I think - it gets upgraded from time to time). No issues at all with it, despite all the NTL horror stories I've heard in the past, I've never had a problem with them.... Now if that hasn't put a curse on my BB connection I don't know what has!
Tiscali Broadband for me, £15.99 a month, 1 Mb connection speed, no limit on usage. No problems at all from a technical standpoint (just a slight misunderstanding over double-charging which took a few months to sort out). You do get stuck with a twelve month contract though, so if you want to change your mind in that time, you still have to pay for the year.
Security is sorted via Norton, I don't have a router. It's money well spent in my opinion, though others will say otherwise.
NTL cable broadband here. I've just downgraded from 10mb/s to 2mb/s as I didn't need the higher rate. I pay £24.99 with no cap on the usage, In 15 months I've had one outage. I am more than satisfied with my experiece and have had none of the hassles that get reported.
15-Feb-2006, 23:52 
MJS
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