Sky offers good value broadband.

[Rik]

What more could a body need...

[adamr8965]

i have no idea im not a oap yet rik 

[Rik]

We can wait. 

[Technical Ben]

Sky are changing theres packages across the board, good for people on a budget or not bothered by [the internet cutting out during out of office times...]

Sorry for the pessimism. But I;ve been on a "home access" service. It's horrid.

[pctech]

O2 have been doing a £7.50 a month unlimited up to 24 Meg ADSL2+ deal for ages although you have to have either a contract or PAYG mobile which is topped up with a tenner or more every three months (price without is £12.50)

Tried it myself but because line is so long it was unstable so moved back to ADSL service.

Unlimited won't stay unlimited for ever, capacity has to be paid for and remember Murdoch is talking about charging for news content on his websites.

[Gary]

O2 have been doing a £7.50 a month unlimited up to 24 Meg ADSL2+ deal for ages although you have to have either a contract or PAYG mobile which is topped up with a tenner or more every three months (price without is £12.50)

Tried it myself but because line is so long it was unstable so moved back to ADSL service.

Unlimited won't stay unlimited for ever, capacity has to be paid for and remember Murdoch is talking about charging for news content on his websites.

I used the O2 LLU service, it was not bad, but I hated the contract length, when I moved it was alas O2 access, the most awful abomination ever, slow after 6 is an understatement, especially on an 8128 sync. It would crawl below one meg. AS said above unlimited is never truly unlimited forever, and already they are throttling and shaping and doing all they can to make it work, hopefully the LLU side is more robost.

[Technical Ben]

Well, "unlimited" could be, within reason. If there was one cable to every person, then it could run at full sync continuously. But as it's all shared down central connections, it's not possible. They should be honest. You can say "as much as you can eat for £7.50" because you know no one has a stomach as large as a hippo, or greater than the size of the supply of food. However, you cannot say "as much downloads as you want for £7.50" when you know that not all of your customers can even log on to the internet at the same time, let alone get a service.

[pctech]

The unlimited thing works on the principle that the vast majority will not heavily load their connections and thus the network 24/7 so to them it is unlimited.

The problem comes from the bandwidth hogs who run peer to peer with the transfer rate at max while watching iPlayer, Youtube or whatever.

This slows down not only the access circuits but the core links within an ISPs network.

One of the first things you are taught when doing the CCNA as I am is that network usage has to be properly managed otherwise the network will grind to a halt because the roiuters, switches and other equipment becomes overwhelemed and traffic gets dropped.

I do agree that unlimited shouldn't be used though but the problem is, the bandwidth hogs that fall foul of the fair usage policies have little or no technical understanding of the effects of their actions (and probably don't care)

so I can see it from both sides but I do back the actions of some ISPs that have booted users or hobbled their service,

[pdu]

Carrier routers can handle immense quantities of traffic without issue: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/prod_models_comparison.html - the limits placed on connections are largely down to the insane cost of rolling out new cabling in the UK, mostly local taxes.  3 years ago a friend of mine in Germany laughed her socks off that we had bandwidth caps in this country as we fetched a movie to watch on her alicedsl 16mbit connection at 8pm without any problems whatsoever, I can see why they do it in the US, it's a massive country and rolling out more fibre to IXP and transit locations can be massively expensive, but we're a tiny island, if the Gov't eased up on their greed for digging up pavements, we could (and should) have one of the most impressive national networks on the planet.  Incidentally, under Thatcher, BT had cash to spare and approached the Gov't asking if they could begin their fibre upgrade to plan for the future, unfortunately they were told no, and the cash was diverted elsewhere.

[pctech]

Very true yes but does depend on whether this or lower end kit is being used.

Also it does depend on how much a tier 1 provider want to charge per connection or for a trunked connection (I am endeavouring to find price lists for the likes of Level 3, Cogent, Sprint and the like)

[Technical Ben]

Like I said. If the system/equipment cannot handle it, don't offer it.
It's like saying "all you can eat" and then taking the second plate off someone for the "cheek" of eating more than one plate...

[DorsetBoy]

http://www.trustedreviews.com/networking/news/2010/04/26/Sky-Upping-All-Broadband-Connections-to-20Mbit/p1

Virgin Media's cable broadband may be running away with the UK speed crown, but Sky could well be the new DSL champ. Murdock's minions have announced it will soon provide all subscribers with a free upgrade to a 20Mbit service. Catches? Actually, not many.

From 1 June Sky will simplify its broadband services with two primary packages: 'Sky Unlimited' and 'Sky Everyday Lite'. The former will cost £7.50pm for Sky TV customers with Sky Talk or £12.50pm for those without and will have no traffic shaping and no fair use policy.

In Sky's own words: "It comes with no usage caps, fair use policies or traffic management, making it ideal for those who want the freedom to download emails, photos, TV programmes, movies and games. It's also ideal for those who want to access live and on-demand TV through Sky Player." Yep, good stuff.

This'll ruffle a few ISP's feathers ....

[Glenn]

It won't happen, there are  lot of exchanges where either they have no equipment installed, or the exchanges have not  upgraded to ADSL2+

[Rik]

But what great hype along the way...

[Gary]

Companies could hang fibre from the telegraph poles, I think Virgin are trialling this, why BT have not thought of that  but once again small exchanges like ours with very little in the way of financial gain will get nothing.

[Technical Ben]

"it will soon provide all subscribers with a free upgrade to a 20Mbit service."
There you go. A lie. Will they install ASDL2+ for me? No, so I will not get a "free upgrade to *20Mbit service"!
That's it. How about I offer to now give the entire country a free upgrade to *2billionbit connection?
/leaves thread





*up to, no garuntees

[Rik]

You mean you don't trust a promise from Sky, Ben? I can't think why. 

[pdu]

PCTech: as for pricing of bandwidth from upstream providers at the carrier level, I can tell you off the top of my head that hurricane electric does pricing for $1/mbit as long as you buy a minimum of a 1gbit link, that's full commit uncontended and unshared and obviously you have to meet them in a DC where they operate, many of the usual London centres are where they operate.  Also it's worth remembering the likes of linx, lonap, amx which are seriously cheap IXPs where you can pickup 10gbit link for not much over £1k/month.  I can't actually remember the pricing from L3/Cogent/Sprint etc.. but it shouldn't be too much more than HE are charging.

[pctech]

Interesting info but I think a lot of ISPs (particularly the large consumer ones) are cheapskates in that regard and will max out a relatively low bandwidth link such as a Fast Ethernet link rather than invest in Gigabit links which are required when people are making heavy use of services that don't make use of multicast.

As others have also said the problem may also lay with the links from the exchange, its all a matter of how it is used.

[pdu]

I love the fact that if you push in excess of 80% of your links traffic with lynx consistently, they bill you a port overuse charge equal to the cost of another port, if more upstream providers did this then we wouldn't see cheapskate ISPs trying to get by with insufficient bandwidth for their customers   It's not as if the connections are fully utilised with the asymmetric nature of home broadband anyway, hence most ISPs that operate their own infrastructure also have side brands doing server hosting and colo.  You'd think charging twice for bandwidth they'd splash out and get a bit more wouldn't you lol

[pctech]

Yes indeed

As an academic exercise I did look into the costs of setting up my own ISP but stopped after seeing the costs of the BT centrals whiich were stupid thousand pound a month each.

[Rik]

Not to mention the installation costs.

[pctech]

Yes, plus routers, rack space and then of course the external connections.

[Rik]

Not to be undertaken lightly, eh.

[pctech]

definitely not and you need rather a large bank balance (or bank loan) to get off the ground.