I use Astraweb, £8 a month, unlimited downloads and SSL.

 

yup already got that , took a while how to actually get it to work but it's all goof now

 

but still not sure what compressed headers is lol

 

it allows the headers to be downloaded in a compressed format. if you open the accelerator you can see the throughput for the headers is nearly twice your max download speed. my 20mbit connection can get headers at about 5MB/sec which is about 50Mbit. just gets your headers faster. don't know if it would work with any other news servers like astranews, newsrazor, thundernews

 

@chrisowe

what's astra like. retention not quite as good a giganews, what are the completions like? what are speeds like on their EU servers?

 

I was with Giganews before I switched to Astraweb and for speed I would say they are slightly quicker. It maxes my connection out a 2.34MB/s anyway. Plus they are so much cheaper than Giga.
The retention is being upgraded to 365days! I've never really had a problem with incompletes.
news.astraweb.com - Signup with us

 

ok guys got my 50Mbit installed at 13.30 today. been doing some speed checking and well............. bit ropey at the start with wildly varying speeds. the engineer left with it running at about 40 - 42 Mbit/sec. He told me it might take a few hours to get up to full speed and should be fine tomorrow. played about with Speedtest.net and to my annoyance the speed just seemed to get slower and slower (less than 5 Mbit) for a server less than 50 miles away. My heart sank and i seriously thought about contacting VM to log a fault but i held on for another couple of hours. well now it seems to have sorted itself out and these are the sorts of speed i am getting from Giganews.

750MB Divx movie = about 2 minutes

12GB 1080p movie = about 45 minutes

8GB xbox360 image = about 24 minutes

the smaller 750MB file are in 15MB chunks and the connection seems to top out at about 47 - 48 Mbit/sec. The larger 12GB file are much meatier 101 MB chunks and they max the connection out at 53 Mbit/sec. I also had to do a bit of tweaking as i found i wasn't getting full speed (about 35 Mbit/sec), when i used all 20 connections. I kept getting an awful lot of can't connect to server errors. when i changed this to 15 connections the speeds seem to stabilise around the 51 - 52 mark.

general web browsing seems to be faster (must be my imagination), though the iTunes update came down pretty swiftly.

Overall pretty pleased so far. will be keeping the finger and toes crossed for the next few days until things settle down. Now how much are those 1TB drives on Aria

 

How nice is the modem!

virgin told me you can only use the London server to test. Those times you got are about right:Thumb: .

You'll be like me in a couple of weeks trying to find something to download lol

 

modem is damn sexy looking

 

Those 1tb drives are cheaper at scan

Tony

 

my connection isnt running as quick as it has in the past

 

token ring dave? mighty upload speed there :

 

Very impressive dave!

i'VE cancelled my trial with giga news and gone with astra and its just as quick if not quicker , just downloaded 7.9gig 21 minutes. and for £9 a month

 

nah, not token ring. 100Mb/s over STM4 iirc

 

did a check in work. we are a big government department in NI. 45Mbit downstream and wait for it.........30Mbit upstream

 

ok have has this for 3 weeks now. have to say it has been flawless so far. as above, i have changed news servers from Giganews to Astraweb and to be fair the latter has coped quite admirably. (having said that their EU servers are down at atm )

 

it's back up now as iv'e just downloaded a album from the eu server

 

I would be well pee'd off if I was only getting 100mb/s over an STM4! You can get more from an STM1

Tony