Reliable uk isp needed.

[Federico Voges]

dan d wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I've been going through some rough times with my isp (NTL) for the past 
> year or so now. Lot's of
> maintenance that causes us to be offline for several hours at a time, 
> shoddy service for really high
> prices, a who cares attitude about being a spammers haven and just a 
> general disatisfaction caused
> by their general refusal to really provide a reliable service.
> 
> Couple that with the fact that we are now unable to post to a lot of the 
> mail lists we belong to through
> our isp account (including this one) because of NTL's refusal to deal 
> with spammers and we feel it is
> time to change isp's.
> 
> If any of the list members are in the UK and you don't mind, could you 
> reply with your opinion of your
> isp (besides NTL, btopenworld and Virgin)? I'm really hoping that one 
> exists that can keep a mail server
> running for more than a day at a time, will take some action against 
> spam, and will not use maintenance
> for an excuse to be down for hours at a time.

I used to have BT business service (2mbit/s + 5 static IPs) and besides 
the fact that their modem/router is crap and BT's DNS servers suck (they 
go down for days), it was pretty decent.

The company I work for used to pay for that connection (about ?80pm).

Now I use BeThere (www.bethere.co.uk). They offer 24mbit/s (the average 
real speed is 10-12mbit/s) with an option for 1 static IP for an extra 
?4pm (the service is ?24pm). They also offer a business with better SLA 
and unlimited static IPs.

They tend to have some downtime but not much. The router they provide 
supports VoIP and WiFi but as with BT it is crap (they tend to hang, 
reset or seriusly degrade throughput).


They are provisioning a different router now (bothare manufactured by 
Alcatel) and it seems to work a bit better.

I'd recommend to google a bit and you'll find a couple of forums about 
UK ISPs.

There's an unofficial forum for Be users: http://www.dontbethere.co.uk/

Cheers,
Fed.