o2 are fine for me here

ping ~20 to good UK servers and I live in a small nothern village :E

Problem solved then.

o2 is fine for me 2, ping a solid 33 in QL.. download maxes out at all times of the day too...

Why dont you try be (owned and the same as o2, but i think the share ratio of the connection is lower so better)

after reading around different forums seems a bit hit and miss to wether u get a good connection with them, are you using the o2 router or your own?

o2 router, its the 3rd one.. but tbh ive always had a pretty solid time with be/o2 (for like 3years)

i get 120 ping every evening and weekend, after 3 weeks ive had enough
tried old router too but same thing.

uh, thats shite, id try be, o2 add tuns of interlacing, be doesnt..

the first thing i'd do is use this checker to see what is available at your exchange, and how far away you are from it (enter postcode and click on 'locality' to get your straight line distance).

if your exchange supports be, i'd recommend them. i've always had a reliable, quick service from them over 3 years. and they're one of the only residential ISPs that offer 24meg (the others seem to limit to 16meg).

you will always get a higher speed with ADSL2+ over ADSL1. however if you are miles away from your exchange you may not be able to get amazingly high. Here's my distances to exchange against achievable line speed that i've had in 3 different houses:

115m - 24meg (hit the theoretical max)
1010m - 19meg
1580m - 17meg

latency wise, i always got rock steady 12ms to my gateway, with good routing to europe (20ms to NL, 30ms to Germany).

i've also never had my download speed throttled, or not that i've noticed anyway.

they also now give you the option to control your own interleaving and snr profile directly from the website, so you dont have to ask them for fastpath, you can do it yourself.

can only get adsl1 =/ i.e. the 'upto 8mb' they advertise

that sucks. which exchange are you on, and how far away are you?

413metres from exchange, matlock exchange (EMMATLO)

according to that i am in the sky network area, and they say 'Currently we estimate that the maximum download speed your line could support is between 10 and 20 Mb.' dunno how much truth is in that?

anyone on sky?

Been wanting Be for ages but my dad never gets round to switching so I'm stuck with generic BT!

At uni I have to use virgin... shocking company.

What's wrong with Virgin?

They were NTL and I have had no problems for many years, mind you try changing billing information, or speeds etc and its borderline retarded.

But down this way, the service is flawless, I think it was one of the first areas to test it and it has a big call centre here, but really I don't have a bad word to say about NTL.

London etc is a lot more dense, so god knows how it is there.

youre incredibly lucky then

just had the 6th engineer visit today (and hopefully fix) the issue thats been plaguing my connection for a few weeks..

their engineers are useless, as are their operators (tech, non-tech or otherwise)

(im north london btw)

minus the current issue (the only one ive had sofar) the 50mb line is excellent

i would advise anyway to give their lower speed services a miss though.. and in a few months im sure ill be saying the same once they overload the docsis 3 (50mb only) network like they did to their docsis 2 (everything else)

edit: a small fact i just remembered from about a year ago: i was told by their operators that the node (home > node > internet) in our area had 96 customers purely on 20mb (+ hundreds on 10mb / 4mb etc).. whereas other areas had 20-30 customers on 20mb and half the total customers on each node

We got our landlord to upgrade to 20meg and virgin just started charging more but capped us to less than 1meg the whole time until we phoned them up and gave them a mouthful where they said that our router was "old"/"broken" and they sent a new one even though it went straight up to the full speed.

Even then they cap the speed during the day to insane levels.

Edit: Also this was in Portsmouth (everyone basically has virgin in term time since it's not economical to have a BT phoneline as a student) not London but I expect London is pretty shitty for cable.

Aaron has had virgin where he lives and it's perfect so, as to be expected from cable it's way more hit and miss than other ISPs.

Virgin's traffic management policy absolutely sucks. At least with ADSL you can switch provider.

http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

I'll probably be switching to ADSL. The good ole days for cable was when Virgin wasn't in the picture. They're offering these gigantic speeds when it's pointless when you look at the restrictions they're enforcing.

traffic management sucks, that's fucked them up.

but I've been with Diamond Cable / NTL / Virgin forever and can honestly say service wise they have been perfect and always stable.

The only trouble was way back when they first started out but I think every single ISP had that.

so yeah, aside traffic managent (and only recently) they are perfect! also, the XXL 50mbit package will have no traffic management, even more perfect.