Well, I've moved house and no longer have access to cable for my broadband internet so I suppose I'll have to go for ADSL now! I have a couple of questions.

Have any of you guys got ADSL? If so, which providers are you with, and are they any good?

I've done an availablity check and my exchange is enabled, I've also done a 17070 and got a distance of 3k to the exchange so I should be good for 512k service.

I've got ADSL here with Andrews & Arnold and it's pretty reliable. The only outages I've had were caused by BT doing things.

Best bet to have a look at ADSL Guide and read the reviews of each ISP. Watch out for the billion popup ads that appear though.

- Trevor

I've looked at ADSL Guide before and it looks like Nildram is the current leader, but for how long though?

Sorry to hijack your thread, but which cable provider were you with? I'm getting it fitted by NTL next week (I finally got up the nerve to brave their call centre!), and wondered if there were any gotchas that I should be aware of.

Bryan.

Nothing that I can remember, I had my machine upstairs in my computer room and the set top box in the living room, all I did initially was run a crossover cat5 cable from one of my network cards in my main machine to the back of the STB. I know some of the NTL cabled areas use a separate cable modem box (mine was actually in the STB itself). Once I'd done that I followed the NTL instructions TO THE LETTER! I eventually bought a router (a linksys one) which I got set up in no time at all. Other than that, I've never had the service go down and I use it every day! Or should I say, used to use it, sadly I'll now have to make do with ADSL which, from the reviews I've read, seems to be a real bag of sh*te.

All in all, I've been very impressed with the service NTL have given me (even though their TV service is a bit pants). Hope you enjoy your cable modem, for what I hear even the 512k version (which is what I had) is faster than its ADSL equivalent.

Good stuff - thanks. I'm looking forward to a 512k connection. Should help me avoid the fact that XP's DUN is ridiculously temperamental and keeps stopping my connections (last night at 80% of emplode 2b13)!

Bryan.

I'm currently with EasyNet, but that is only because when I got ADSL 2 years ago I wanted the 1Mb business service and at that point EasyNet were the cheapest for 1Mb.

I am thinking of downgrading my service to the consumer 512k service and switching to Andrews & Arnold. This will save me 90 quid a month, most of which I can then spend on a colo box in telehouse or where ever.

A&A have been putting in line monitoring that puts all the other ISPs to shame, they are spotting and reporting faults to BT before the users even notice there is a problem.

The other ISP that appears to know what it is doing with ADSL is PlusNet, they are also probably about the cheapest.

In reply to:

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I've got ADSL here with Andrews & Arnold and it's pretty reliable

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As a business, I wouldn't put anything else in. The main reason though is not their reliability, but their customer service, which is absolutely superb.

By way of example, I have a customer who had a bank of 16 IP addresses hanging off their router. They decided they wanted a firewall, so I rang AAISP up and asked for an additional bank of four addresses and the routing changed. They did all this, including telnetting into the router to reconfigure it (saves me the bother ;-) in less than half an hour. Try getting that service from Demon/Freeserve/ANOther.

Nick.

I've been with openworld for just under a year.

Not any problems of any note, a couple of times I lost sync, that was all. It all depends how much support you think you may need, openworld are impossable to get hold of, although I think this is a story most ADSL users will tell.

ADSL is a bargin, £25-30 for a 24/7 internet connection 2 years ago would have been a wind up.

Cheers
Cris