Open post to IDNet

[pctech]

If your copper loop isn't great it will have a detrimental effect on your speed and latency if heavy error correction is required.

What Simon is referring to is that they want to ensure that as much as possible your packets take the most direct route to their destination as although ISP/carrier routers are very quick and can process billions of packets a second, this processing can introduce latency so the goal is to keep it 'on the wire' or fibre as much as possible hence why premium ISPs like IDNet invest so much in their networks.

[Simon_idnet]

That's right. It's no help if you run a speed test that shows that your local connection to the cabinet/Exchange is healthy and yet when you try to visit a site on the Internet it is dog slow, as Gary was describing with his Mum's Infinity connection. What really sets ISPs apart is the quality and performance of their network beyond the local loop. That's why we enjoy selling leased-lines so much - the quality is sufficient to get the most out of the bandwidth available as it's not shared with hoards of residential video streams.

[kinmel]

After having Zen, IdNet and AAisp as providers, I moved to Sky for fibre. Whichever ISP provided broadband, provided line and calls too.

Sky works differently ( I didn't believe it either at first ).

Support is 24/7 with a specialist fibre team who have an excellent relationship with Openreach.  After your initial call to support, all further calls are intercepted simply from your phone number and you jump any queue and you go directly to the agent(s) dealing with your issue. When you connect, they have your history in front of them and you do not need to go all over it again.

My problem was a new fibre install that dropped from 27Mb to 9Mb on day three. Within 2 hours an Openreach engineer was on-site. Every time he decided the line was now operating "normally" circa 18Mb and he closed the fault, Sky sent him back without any intervention from me.  Two full working days later I was back at 27Mb.  I know two people who have had the same experience and on no occasion was it suggested that the calls would require a payment if no fault was found. Their view seems to be that the drop is in it self evidence of a fault.

Of course as a Sky subscriber my internet connection is used for catch-up, boxed sets and all other sorts of other high usage downloads too, but that bothers me not at all. I have no idea what I use each month because there is absolutely no cap, or throttling.  Every test on TTB and Speedtest.net show the download speeds matches the line stats and my real downloads show it too.

At £20 per month plus line and calls costs means it is not the cheapest, but any premium paid above that is definitely money wasted.

[colirv]

That's one point of view. Mine is that no money kept out of Murdoch's hands money wasted!

[Bill]

That's one point of view. Mine is that no money kept out of Murdoch's hands money wasted!

I'll go along with that

[pctech]

Not many ISPs are media giants with their own news arm.

Can you imagine what might happen if BTOR annoyed Sky in any way, the amount of negative publicity would be unthinkable, I suspect BT's various tentacles also provide a lot of other services to Sky both here and overseas so it would be a big account to lose.

[Tacitus]

Martin has been testing an update to the RSS feed which he has now made live. This should show you usge today so far.

I've been getting it for the past few days and so far it's working very well.  You do have to remember to check it though........   

[Bill]

You do have to remember to check it though........   

Depends what you mean by "remember to check"... as I said elsewhere my RSS client just gets all my feeds without any effort on my part.

I can even check my usage if I'm not connected to the internet at the time. I'd be most reluctant to manage without a stand-alone RSS client.

[Gary]

I added it to Mr Reader on my iPad via feedly, that captures a few rss feeds I like that I cant be bothered with on the Mac, since I don't use it that much these days.

[Bill]

I added it to Mr Reader on my iPad via feedly

Not having an iPad that doesn't mean much to me, but I'm glad it's working for you again