ISP's
 

We are with AOL. Lots of people hate it, but we love it. We have been useing AOL now for about 9 years, so we are not new to it. What is the best ISP in your opinion and why, and why do people hate AOL?

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AOL cause many problems in the internet world, your lucky you can access this site as at one point I was close to banning all AOL ip's. They use a caching and proxy system that doesn't agree with web standards, they have over enthusiastic spam filters, they bounce many many messages back to my servers for various trivial reasons, they think they own the internet, they try to censor the internet, they lull newcomers into a false sense of security by masking half of the internet and pretending their own intranet is actually the internet.... and probably a lot more that we don't even know about.. hehe.

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My husband belong's to aircraft websites and yes, their emails get bounced back on mass, but he just uses MSN instead.

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Originally(not too sure what they do at the mo) they didn't 'connect you to the internet' they connected you to their own private network which had a gateway to teh Internet. However to do this they use a totally different protocol (netbui instead of TCP/IP) however in their 'wisdom' their install disc uninstalled TCP/IP from peoples computers. So if you tried for a month then tried to use anyone elses, your PC quite simply would not connect no matter who else you tried.

Teh other side is that as Roy has mentioned they have their own spin on censorship. They often hide perfectly usable parts of the Internet(Usenet for example was not available for YEARS and I believe has been withdrawn again!)

One other aspect that I find annoying(Although its not AOLs fault directly) is that a lot of their users tend to break lots of etiquette and AOL will do nothing about it where all other ISPs will warn and then boot troublesome users.

As for good guys, Pipex, Zen, Eclipse, Demon, plusnet all get good reports amongst people I know. It is as with mopst things in life, you get what you pay for. If you are constantly chasing the cheapest deal you will find they have to cut corners somewhere.

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We use Pipex but I have absolutely no idea why. I wasn't involved in the selection process but apparently, Pipex is one to recommend.

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I have used it in the past and yes, it was fine. One to think about maybe.

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AOL is not the cheapest but seems to offer the most variety. We have Platinum family package with AOL Talk. With this we have a dial-up remote option. Do others offer this kind of set-up?

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There are lots of difefrent 'options'. I'm with Pipex and have been for 4 years now! (EEEK!)I use a different ISP for dial up as it provides 'points' which I get prizes for. I got a 20 gig iPod last year.

The trick if you are thinking of moving is to go round the usual suspects and see who offers what you want, then check up on adslguide to see what people think of them.

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That dial up ISP is?

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Ian says yes

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I am currently using Pipex and only had one little problem when they disconnected my account for a couple of days because I was being a naughty boy :D ;). I am about o change to the dreaded NTL. A good friend of mine has been with them for years with no problems. He is miffed that when he moves house he wont be able to use them still.

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dreaded ntl ????


been with them for about 3 yrs and had only 2-3 minor problems (early on) now all is fine and they provide an excellent service imho.....


now watch il be offline for weeks :D .........wheres that wood ;)

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Nice to here someone saying something good about NTL. I am interested to hear peoples problems with NTL and other ISP's.
I dislike AOL also. You can't use a router with some of their packages. People join AOL, buy a router to share the internet with a couple of PC's in the house only too find you can't on the standard package. I have no idea how the pricing structure works.

Why do you use the Platinum family package? What does it give you that other packages don't?

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I'm with Pipex, have been for 4 or 5 years and their service is excellent I have one issue though (a BT issue rather than an ISP issue) we are right on the boundary for the length of line from the exchange and as such I've had to have my connection throttled back from 2 meg to 1 meg due to frequent disconnects at 2 meg.

I still pay £23 odd for the uncapped Pipex service however I know I can get a 1 meg service for considerably less, but with cheaper services they're all capped - I'm going to run some software to see how much I D/L and then I'll have a good idea what capped service I can go for. I was going to go with Tiscali but having read some of the posts on ADSL guide forums I've changed my mind about them.

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I use bulldog broadband, its UPTO 8M down and 512k up..
I live on lower manchester road and the exchange is just next to the bus station in accrington so live fairly close and get the full download and upload speeds which are around 830kb/s down and 60kb/s up

However, they have a bad reputation for customer service (I knew this before I joined them so ensured I phoned them practicly every day to ensure everything was fine). Their future is also unknown as last weeks Sunday papers were reporting that they might pull out of the retail broadband business, although I don't see that happening. (or if it does, they'll just transfer us to another provider)

I don't think their customer service is any worse than major ISP's such as BT and Wanadoo, i've had MANY more problems with them, and never with Bulldog. I think the majority is down to BT being crap, and since bulldog install their own equipment in the exchange, it cuts BT out somewhat, but not all together.

Few details:
I'm on the 'inter@ctive' package which is £19.50 a month
No download caps
Free modem (and I think at one point they were doing a router for £1 which retails at £50)
You have to transfer your phone line to them, its £10.50 which I think is the same as BT.
Oh and £1 connection or £1 to get a new line (needed if you're NTL customer)
However you can check the phone call prices etc along with what you get at http://www.bulldogbroadband.com/resi...ive/index.asp#

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Are you sure Bulldog install equipment in BT's exchange? I would be very surprised if they did. After there are an awful lot of exchanges about.

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Yes, you can find out more about LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLU

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Aye, Neil, lads right. LLU is how most of the higher speed stuff is coming. Be are talkinga bout 24M lines and Accrington was listed for Feb untill Feb1 came round, now it says August.

The only bit I'm not keen on about LLU is that you normally have to take their phone package as well.

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Actualy, as far as im aware, bulldog is the only company that makes you take the phoneline as part of the package (correct me if im wrong). I'd prefer not to take the phoneline, but I think Bulldog are the only company that have unbundled the accrington exchange so I went ahead :)

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Have a look at this info on Accy exchange

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I'm with Tiscali broadband, which has been ok apart from the odd disconnection for no apparent reason but can usually reconnect pretty quickly. Think they may just get overloaded or sommat.... non techi on the crash computers forum....exit quick red...WHOOSH :p

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rtun run run and cancell your ntl

they have limits on how much bandwidth you can use each month and on the slowest speed it is a mere 1gb a month

they arnt charging for over use yet but they are going to do so if your with ntl i wouldnt surf too many high detail websites and definatly not watch and stream video , web cam or you will be paying extra ontop of your standard internet bill

also wouldnt plan on downloading any music either

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To be honest I wish NTL would put some cable down manchester road.. eventualy they'll have to make their caps bigger to compete with the likes of Bulldog which offer unlimited bandwidth for pretty much the same price.

Good thing about NTL is the pings (time it takes to communicate with the other computer(s) on the internet) are generaly better than adsl.
And... they plan to upgrade everyone to 10Mb speeds sometim and downe this year!
Best bit is they can in theory give you 100Mb connection, although when (if) they will ever roll that out is a different matter :p

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Well i am with NTL and have been for 4 years and never had a problem,as for bandwidth i get 1 gig per day thats 30 gig a month
there was no problem moving we moved in on the sat and NTL moved everything over on the monday putting the cable where i wanted it running.
they even fixed a broken phone extension box for free .

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I at present use BT but as I am a fair distence from the exchange I only get 1.1g down and 230m up. I could go cable with telewest as the connection box is there but
aint made my mind up yet weather to stay with BT or move.

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We have been with NTL for 5 years and apart from a few teething problems in the first year or so which could have been my fault LOL, all is up and running fine here.

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I personally would not touch NTL with a barge poll. Their customer service has got to be the worst of any. Anyway, I found this on Digital Spy. It may be of interest to some.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds29099.html

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We are running two networked computers with AOL. We have a router that could take two more. We have never had a problem with that aspect of AOL, though we do use a wired network.

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no cap on my ntl bandwith and no extra charges either ...so not sure where you got that info from :confused: :confused:

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Has anyone else had a slow BT connection this week.......it's been a nightmare!!

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My connection has been intermittant for a while, BT are looking into it, not sure if there are any widespread problems