Asking for the imposable...

After the (latest) Virgin Media broadband fiasco of earlier this week , I have finally had enough ; so I'm looking for an ADSL service provider that is reliable, doesn't block or otherwise play silly-bu**ers with access to torrents, Tor (etc, etc), and doesn't cost too much...

My phone line has been tested (by BT) and will max-out at 2-2.5 Meg, so paying for anything faster is probably a wast.

Anyone got any recomendations for ISP's to look at and ones to avoid?

Orange have served me well for the last 8 years plus - currently free if you have a mobile phone contract with them. I beleive 02 do a similar deal also.

Sky offer upto 8 meg.... depending on area.

Tiscali are cheap... though sometimes they are a little naughty with bandwidth shaping (preventing peer to peer)

at the end of the day aloo baring the able providers use BT's landlines to run their broadband down. The only difference being who has installed their equipment at the exchange.

I'm with O2 at the moment. I had the same doubts about settling for a 12 month contract when I looked at them, but they were recommended to me by somebody else and so far they haven't put a foot wrong. I'm syncing at about 8500kbps stable. Customer service should you ever need to use them has been great. Can't fault them so far!

Also if your a BitTorrent user as you said above, the generous upload speed and lack of download limitations will probably swing it for you

Sounds good to me! And you should get the speed your line is capable of with them. Good luck!

if ure exchange is llu enabled then you can switch to upto 24mb adsl, its a shame cable didnt work out im on there 50mb line and its awesome no throttling what so ever

You could try using an iplate - depending on the phone sockets installedi n your home. designed to give you a more stable line and in 8 out of 10 cases increased speeds (according to BT)

Wythenshaw? You have my symapthy.

BTW they do perform traffic shaping even if you don't push the limits.

ONLY 75%?? Business users used to get more throughput on a 2Mb link than the domestic users did on a 10Mb due to the contention rates.

Why are you recommending the very same provider that the OP is having problems with?

Sounds like O2 have a problem with stale sessions - they're dropping the data link at their end after a period of inactivity but not dropping the whole connection. You then try and reconnect and it bombs because the exchange thinks you're already connected. The only way then to fix it is a full power off for a couple of minutes as you've evidently seen.

Do you have any keep-alive settings in your router?

QoS is Quality of Service and (I think) it's just about proper packet management to stop huge continuous streams of data (like downloading) interrupting tiny bursts (like network discovery, IM, web browsing).

Under my PPPoE settings, I have an option for "always on" which, in turn, disables the Idle Timeout box. See if you have something similar, maybe set idle timeout to -1 or 3600 seconds (10 hours).

Basically you want your modem to keep requesting data once in a while to stop the server thinking you've fecked oof.

Here's my test:


And For ping test:



And tell me what do you think?

Did you think you were the only one then !!!