ADSL Max Business Premium...worth it?

[pdu]

Hi all, I work from home looking after servers and as such my internet connection is pretty much like a lung to me, to the extent I have 2 dsl lines in case one goes down (would prefer something non bt, but no joy where i live).  Lately I've been experiencing some shocking speed issues on one of my lines (with pipex atm, been perfect for 5 years, now since talktalk it's become trash) but my other line (o2 access, which i know everyone criticises) has actually been outperforming it by leaps and bounds, even when it's traffic shaping is active.  According to the exchange checker at plusnet the VP status at my exchange is red and it has been pretty much forever, I can't see it being upgraded before hell freezes over, so was wondering (after this really long ramble, sorry about that) if anyone here had ever switched from a standard to a premium service and actually seen a significant improvement?  I've read enough reviews to know idnet are going to be my new ISP, but the standard vs premium thing is in the hands of BT, so just looking for opinions as to whether i really need to shell out £80/month or not.  Cheers

[DorsetBoy]

 

I don't know about the Business package first hand as I have never used it but it is similar to the Home Super Max package I use which gives priority over standard traffic at the exchange and that definitely makes a noticeable difference to peak time speed, and my exchange is not congested.

The main differences appear to be the unlimited bandwidth ,Quality of Service (QoS) for optimum VoIP performance and the Enhanced Care with guaranteed response times.

We have members that work from home on non business packages,you have 2 lines so you have protection against an ISP outage,maybe you could try the Home Supermax package and change up to Business if you needed it.

Idnet support will tell you if there are any physical differences to the Business connection that would be of extra benefit to you.

[Steve]

 

I echo what Dorset's said that having exchange priority helps to alleviate that local congestion, then it depends whether you really need all the bells and whistles of a business package.

[Rik]

I echo what's been said.

[Glenn]

 

2 major points with the top business packages,

1. Enhanced care. Broadband Enhanced Care operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week including UK Bank and Public Holidays. BT will respond to a fault report within 3 hours of receipt of the fault report and BT will clear the fault within 20 hours of receipt of the fault report including out of hours engineering visits to site to complete a repair if required. (Whereas standard care offers a 40 clock hour clear within BT Wholesale with no guaranteed response time and no out of hours engineering visits available).

2. SLA. Our Service Level Agreement is backed with a money-back guarantee to respond and fix faults within 24 hours.

[g7pkf]

I do exactly the same, Look after servers remotely.

I am on the home super max package the extra up speed and priority really makes a difference on vnc/logmein/dameware etc.

for backup i use a 3g dongle, both for if my connection fails or i am out.

Luckily in the last 3 years with idnet any outages have been when i have not needed to log in. and they very rarely occur anyway (and its usually BT's fault)

a second adsl line is therefore unjustified so far (i do have 2 phone lines incidentally both with idnet)

[Simon]

Can't add to the above, but.

[g7pkf]

One other little thing one of my collegues lives in redbourn due to acts of vandalism and when they were putting in street lights cutting through the fibre he had no adsl on either of his phone lines for 2 week's.

he borrowed my dongle for out of hours work and came to my house for in hours work.

so the moral of this story 2 isp's and 2 lines if the exchange gets cut off your knackered.

[Rik]

Ultimately, there are so many links in the chain which can fail singly or collectively. There's no way to absolutely guarantee a connection that never goes down, the outage at LINX recently demonstrating the problem.

[pdu]

Hi and thanks for the welcome   I do have a 3g dongle as well, with three and in fairness it's signal it's brilliant where I live. Also have a UPS with extra batteries which powers my home server, desktop, both routers, switch, voip ata and phone.  Also have a laptop and 2 branches of mcdonalds near me on different exchanges, so if things ever got really bad, I could camp out there (especially since their coffee stopped being barn floor sweepings).  My motivation for the second line was actually thanks to tiscali after they took pipex over, they didn't actually screw my connection at all, but there was talk of them going bust, knowing the hassle people have had with broken ISPs and thus the inability to get hold of a MAC was what tempted me to get a 2nd line at the time.  The reason i didn't switch my main one from pipex was as said before, the connection literally never went down - i never logoff IRC and often leave ssh logged into servers for days at a time and I have a static IP as I use my home server as my primary mail server due to the fact I'm one of those people who has a massive imap inbox and stores his life in it (hence not shoving it off to a remote server in a DC).  Since TT took over Tiscali, the performance has become abysmal and also curious at the same time, I was trying to transfer some data from 1 of my servers in france which has an unmetered port, the deal on that is i get great bandwidth over peering links, but they admit dodgy performance over transit, this server I couldn't break 30K/sec ftp'ing with pipex (took 3 days to get my data, never went above that speed).  I decided to use my o2 line to get another 2GB off that server and it was a 'peak time' so traffic shaping was in effect on the o2 product, yet it instantly hit 450K/sec, and at about 11pm went to 800ish (exchange is on my street).  So the issue there didn't seem to be server side, so to test some more, I used my pipex line to fetch a bunch of logs from a metered server I have in the same DC, only get 10TB/month but they do guarantee transit on that port as well as peering, my pipex line hit it's top 800ish speed without a problem (whilst the 25K/sec still chugged along in the background) so it's almost like TT have screwed up their peering and are making more use of transit, my host, despite being french, actually peers at lynx among many other euro ixps too.

Thanks for the feedback people, premium sounds worth it, I think I'll go with business premium, when I woke up this morning I realised I already wanted it, I'd narrowed my choice to 3 ISPs, Eclipse (who still haven't confirmed if i can configure rdns on their IPs), IDNet (who confirmed it instantly and without pausing for breath, so clearly know their stuff) and Zen (who I used years ago and were great, but IDnet seem to be bundling enhanced care with only a 50p/month price diff compared to zen).

Now I just need to endure pipex support to get my mac, might try my arm at getting idnet to do me the annual pricing on a monthly contract/billing, got to be cheeky sometimes in this world

[Ray]

 

[g7pkf]

Sounds very similar to what my set up was.

Now that i am a datacentre manager i just put my mailserver etc in there ( internet feed directly on london fibre ring) ups and generator back up aircon etc etc.

Saves me a fortune on home electricity (about £15 a month).

Dean

[zappaDPJ]

 

[pdu]

Being a DC manager would be lovely, but I can't afford to build one yet   Just been through pipex to get my mac, the woman asked if I'd be willing to talk to 2nd level about my speed and routing issues, so thinking i was going past the muppet support desk, I stupidly agreed since they'd been great up until recently.  2nd level support my bottom, achmed (or whatever his name was, I didn't bother asking) completely ignored (or failed to understand, i'm not quite certain) what I said about the issues being related to certain routes and servers and wasn't interested in the 40K/sec rsync I did as he was apparently watching, but only in the results of speedtest.net, and then only from the maidenhead server, which reported 6.5mbit, so he was happy and stated a target IP address was no use to him (what does he think carrier class routers do? lol).  So he shoved me back to cancellations, who asked the same questions all over again, ignoring the speed issue problem (again) and trying to convince me to stay if he could cut my bill down to £20 a month, despite the fact I'd already told him I was moving here on an £80 package, which might be a clue that quality is more important than price.  I've hunted all over the net to try and find a bad word about idnet, just to balance out the super positive stuff and I can't find any, I think based on that, I can't wait to join the family

Thanks to all for your help, I'm sure I'll hang around here and bore you all with my little anecdotes from time to time

[Simon]

Please do! 

[g7pkf]

Were renting out co-lo space.

as we are just starting up it's on a discounted rate.

if your into voip we can provide e1's from multiple carrier's (gamma verizon cable and wireless and BT)

pm me if your intrested.


Yes i know Rik shameless plug, but our DC has got to work and make money.


Dean

[pdu]

Ooooooooh, colo eh, I could make use of that, do you have any pricing info anywhere? I'm not in need of voice services, but I've been providing more VPS stuff recently and could do with a colo host that doesn't want to charge me a fortune for an empty U (often more than the cost of a bloody dedi from many other places).  Basically I'd be up for a U to start with and test the water, if it goes well, I'd be keen to move the rest of my servers to a decent provider and move away from restrictive dedi offerings

[g7pkf]

Ooooooooh, colo eh, I could make use of that, do you have any pricing info anywhere? I'm not in need of voice services, but I've been providing more VPS stuff recently and could do with a colo host that doesn't want to charge me a fortune for an empty U (often more than the cost of a bloody dedi from many other places).  Basically I'd be up for a U to start with and test the water, if it goes well, I'd be keen to move the rest of my servers to a decent provider and move away from restrictive dedi offerings

Check your PM, if it's not there sorry will resend as i got distracted at the end and may have cancelled it by mistake

[Simon]

You do realise, Quandam, that according to the forum rules, you are wholly responsible for the posts you make, and that we would be legally obliged to forward your details to any party who may consider taking libel action?

[Rik]

Simon raises a very good point, Q, I believe your post would be deemed libellous. As it's in an open part of the forum, where search engines can see it, for your protection and ours, I  feel it is necessary to remove it.

[quandam]

Fine, no problem

[pdu]

Well, I've just given idnet my mac code and setup billing in the customer portal, so now just a waiting game.  Fingers crossed my internet connection returns to it's legendary reliability, because for 90 quid a month, if it doesn't, I think I'll just cry lol.

[Rik]

We'll join you - but I'm sure we'll be celebrating, not drowning our sorrows.

[quandam]

Hopefully the change from Pipex will be smooth and trouble free You have made the correct decision without doubt.

[pdu]

Well, the pipex end isn't trouble free... According to my idnet email my connection will be live by 6pm on the 29th, but it looks like pipex have just dropped me as I'm not getting chap auth failures on my modem, bless them.  Ah well, only 2 days to wait and my idnet connection should be up and running

[Steve]

Hopefully they haven't put a cease request on your line.

[Rik]

 

I think Pipex are in breach of contract.

[zappaDPJ]

So no change there then

I hope your reconnection to a proper ISP goes as planned 

[pdu]

Just switched to my idnet line, fantastic   Just tried a transfer from one of my servers that pipex could never break 20-40K/sec from, and bang, 816K/sec average speed transferring 120MB of data.  It's worth pointing out that 3 desktops and my home server are on, my firefox has 26 tabs open on this computer alone, my forex app is running and updating currencies second by second, i'm on 19 irc channels and have 11 ssh sessions active.  I think i'll be sticking with idnet, despite it costing 3x as much as my pipex line. If it's as stable as I think it will be, I'll cancel my o2 line and save some cash back there

[Simon]

Welcome to happy land! 

[Rik]

Nice to see you in IDNet colours.

[Glenn]

Talking of colours, I need to speak to Simon/Tim about logos for my shirt.

[Rik]

Good point. How's the sponsorship drive going?

[Glenn]

Nothing this week, so far, not even a reply from HP

[Rik]

We'll have to have a whip round, we can't have you going on a 'half tank'.