I have a question. Volume 2

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Fri 1 Nov 2002 11:45
Broadband. Which one? - madf
Broad band?

There are 2 separate questions here.
One is the supply and maintenance of th physical connection to a broadband service be it cable , telephone or satellite (by far the most costly and unsuited for most)
Second is the ISP you can use.

In many/most cases chosing the physical provider dictates which ISP you use.

Cable: in UK Telewest or NTL. Both debt raddled but likelt to survive. NTL have one of the worst telephone help lines imaginable and some of the best (my experience only) engineers .

Telephone. Usually uses BT lines but depends on provider for choice of ISP.

I have 16 hours/day connection requirement (trading futures) but limited bandwidth needed and use NTL . General experience is very good with few failures and no cut offs due to demand.

On telephones , the system works by sharing capacity between all users and assumes most are not on/requiring data all the time. If they get very busy, they may have to ration usage.



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Fri 1 Nov 2002 12:36
Broadband. Which one? - BrianW
You are lucky to get broadband.
We live less than three miles from the centre of a County town but our local exchange is not enabled.
Our road is not cabled.
Our only option would be satellite, presumably!
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Fri 1 Nov 2002 13:19
Broadband. Which one? - madf
You can always try BT's ISDN. Expensive - but faster than a 56k modem
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Fri 1 Nov 2002 22:00
Broadband. Which one? - BrianW
"You can always try BT's ISDN. Expensive - but faster than a 56k modem"

I don't fancy going back to looking over my shoulder at how long I've been on. Also I can't remember if you can make and receive phone calls when online with ISDN.

I'm using Freeserve Anytime at the moment with a Virgin address as a backup. OK unless you've a big file to download, 15 megs took about 25 minutes to download last night and about 45 minutes to forward on to the office!
At work we were on Pipex, but weren't terribly happy with them so went over to a broadband connection with Merchant Internet. That is very expensive but works great and has excellent support.
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