mega_stream

Put up with Telewest for 18 months now, had enough of outage and long long phone calls

£24.99 a month gets me a Demon ADSL connection, anyone use them?

I'm also wanting to cancel my Telewest phone and go back to BT.

I assume I can use my Motorola Surfboard cable modem with Demon????

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

No way, no how for the surfboard

mega_stream

Bu99er

Any idea the cheapest device I could use, not too up on ADSL tecno stuff.

mark_h

I used to use Demon on dialup, and got fed up with their customer service and frequent network problems. My Dad uses them for ADSL and says they're OK, but he still suffers from network problems which Demon don't seem to report.

I use Plusnet for ADSL (£22.99 a month I think). At least when they have a problem they keep people informed on what's being done to fix it.

For hardware, you can get an ADSL modem for around £50-75 quid. Some ISPs will sell you the hardware too, or let you spread the cost over the first year's subscription. For a bit more money, you can get an ADSL modem/router, which makes things a bit easier if you want to hook up more than one PC.

mark_h

Oh, and ADSLguide.org.uk is a good place for ISP and hardware reviews.

IanW

John,

I had a few problems with Telewest initially, but they have all been sorted now. What problems are you getting?

Ian

mega_stream

Cheers for the replies, just had a look at Tiscali £27 a month free installation, £65 for a modem.

Ian, they have p1ssed me off since day 1, the connection drops out quite regular, the helpline when it is down is useless, on hold for normally over 20 minutes.

Plus we get nuisance calls nearly every night, despite being ex-directory, we hardly got any when we were with BT.

And my montly bill seems to be around £50, inc the £10 telephone rental, no way were our BT bills ever £25 a month.

IanW

John,

If your connection is dropping regularly then there is something that isn't quite right. I haven't lost my connection to BY for a while now. It DOES help if you actually speak to one of there staff who know what they are talking about. I tend not to bother with their first line support if I do have to call them up.

I had an awful lot of problems for a while with mine, but it all got sorted and the service is really good now (apart from the first line support, but i tend to bypass that now).

Ian

WillieF

I am in the lucky position to have access to masses of bandwidth at work - and at customers sites from lots of different providers. I have even worked on some of the providers networks here in Scotland which gives me a good insight. Firstly i have to state that on a broadband front they are all much of a muchness as all except NTL and Telewest rely on BT's ADSL network

At home I have a telewest cable modem which is connected to a Netgear wireless router which works a treat as it demands an IP address every so often so keeps the link alive reult virtually no downtime.

At work we have a telewest 2mbit cable modem for downloads and things and a Demon 2Mbit ADSL for mail and IMPORTANT things - get the hint. The Demon feed has been down about 6 hours over the last year which is fabulously reliable. We also have some other stuff on test for a couple of providers which is giving us a lovely insight as to where the world is going..

A lot of our customers use Demon ADSL and it is pretty much ok. I would recommend that you get some sort of ADSL router which you leave on 24 hours a day.

Demons network has been taking a little bit of hammering recently with a lot of routing probs - go and have a look at their announcement pages. these routing probs have lead to a high packet loss at some times during the day.

Demon email accounts seem to have big probs with spam get yourself a domain from someone like Lee at Titanhosts..

good luck

babber

Mega,

YHM

Cheers Phill C

IanW

I wondered how long before Mr Babber spotted this

IanW

At my old company we had a 2Mb leased line from Demon Internet, and quite regularly this would lose connection, and then dont get me started on the mail delays

WillieF

Ian how would you get mail delays if you had your own server? surely you weren't using pop3 on a 2Mb leased line where you demons pop3 is ****e

IanW

Nope this was using an Exchange Server with an SMTP feed from Demon.

This was a constant battle I was having with the IT manager at my place, I prefered to send the mail directly, and he insisted that it was better sending it via one of Demon's mail gateways

WillieF

ahhhhh

IanW

You are obviously seeing my point of view

babber

IanW,

Thanks mate, I rarely come in this forum, as there are loads of things for me to sort out usually I have emailed John and hopefully should be able to help him get to the root of the problem, Can't promise too much at this point.

Cheers Phill C

PS Ian hope your connection seems ok ?

Sith

Can't fault BY and Telewest. Only had one down day after a Year and a half, that was because of severe flooding, can't blame them for that.

IanW

Phill,

My connection is fine now, apart from the lack of upload speed 256k just isn't enough

Cheers mate

Ian

babber

Lol,

We'll i got a 2 Mb downstream and a 512 Kb on test at the moment......Hello well impressed with it

Oh and as I have mentioned once or twice before on here, please don't un-crack your cable modem.....We will know about it and you will be booted off.....Just a friendly warning

Cheers Phill C

IanW

Phill get me on that test

I NEED more bandwidth!