NTL users take note!!

[HughJarse]

Yes Sky Talk, it doesnt do everything but hey for a £5.
Broadband is free if you dont use much... yes FREE!!
£5 for 8mb connection 40gb download limit, or £10 for 16mb and no limit.

http://broadband.sky.com/

Im not kidding, I really think its a good deal, I appreciate that its not all European countries but it includes 10 international landline destinations:
United States, Ireland, Spain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Italy, Netherlands (also includes calls to international mobiles in Canada and USA).

You can also try this website - I can vouch for it, Ive used it for years.
Gambia is still expensive at 15p per minute, but other countries are normally about 1p per minute.
http://www.telediscount.co.uk

 

[ckember]

I pay Sky £5 a month for free calls 24/7 including international.
I get 16mb unlimited downloads broadband for £10.
and All SKy channels for about £42

Think Im in the right place.

I dont think so.

Your package from sky = £42+10+5 +BT landline rental £15.00

I would check that speed unless you live less than 200yds from the exchange the best you may get is 8Mb, in realality probably only 2Mb. This is Sky's get out they offer up to but they cannot always deliver. the further you are away the lower the speed.

Just had the V+ box from virgin installed, as having lots of hassle with ntl charging twice since a box swap last summer. Now have two fully loaded, boxes, HD movies and BBC HD( Blue Planet is amazing in HD) Can record to the box and then have the option of copying to external DVD writer later,when in HD mode the scart picture is disabled plus 10mb unlimited and free phone calls all day to landlines, and cheap mobile calls to, And I currently get a reduction in price, £75pm for the whole thing,

 

[HughJarse]

YOU DONT THINK SO!!!
AHHH the almighty ORACLE are you...

MY BT line rental is £11 not £15
I connect at 12400 ( yes not 16mb but not at best 8mb or even 2mb!!!)
Would you like to know my attenuation and SNR both down and up. Maybe you'd like to know about my hard wired adsl faceplate?
so I pay about £20 less than the above quoted NTL user.
I pay... hold on lets get my maths correct.. oh yes £68 which is less than yours and not at a reduced rate !!!

Not quite sure what point youre trying to make, but YOURE WRONG.

Or would you like me post my router stats and BT bill? and another point youre wrong on is that Im approx 2.5 km from the exchange or have you moved my house?

 

[Carrotchomper]

Oooh! Get her... Handbags at dawn in the forum...
:bannana: :bannana:

 

[HughJarse]

lol, hey are you dissing my post?

 

[fuzzer]

ah , ADSL ... your alright.

Ill keep my flawless cable connection thanks

 

[Spinal]

Thats my major gripe about leaving Virgin... They offer cable... everyone else seems to have ISDN/ADSL/etc....

If it goes over the POTS, its not worth having imo... Sigh... I wish I were in Italy (we have fibre optic straight into the house... no caps).

Before we start a flame-war over which-provider is better, lets get the basics down...
Fibre Optic > CAT6 > Coaxial Cable > POTS
its that simple... Be offer 24 mb internet (or so they state) - but then again its ADSL2, so there are way too many factors to accurately predict what speed you will get.

One thing I found funny is people who confuse bits and bytes... (not referring to anyone specifically). I have a friend who was confused as to why his 4megabit cable connection only downloaded at half a megabyte at best...

ADSL is a patch. Its taking old technology and trying to extend its life-line. Sooner of later, it will get left behind - I'm guessing companies like NTL will lay all the cable, then (similarly to what has happened with BT) they will be kindly asked to rent their boxes out to other companies.

Sky, Be, etc may have all the great deals they want... but they don't have cable... its as simple as that...
Michele

 

[Fandango]

YOU DONT THINK SO!!!
AHHH the almighty ORACLE are you...

MY BT line rental is £11 not £15
I connect at 12400 ( yes not 16mb but not at best 8mb or even 2mb!!!)
Would you like to know my attenuation and SNR both down and up. Maybe you'd like to know about my hard wired adsl faceplate?
so I pay about £20 less than the above quoted NTL user.
I pay... hold on lets get my maths correct.. oh yes £68 which is less than yours and not at a reduced rate !!!

Not quite sure what point youre trying to make, but YOURE WRONG.

Or would you like me post my router stats and BT bill? and another point youre wrong on is that Im approx 2.5 km from the exchange or have you moved my house?

12400 Mb ?? I'd like to see those router stats

Most new ADSL installations these days get hardwired.
Also, are you on some kind of low user tarrif? I thought BT would not let you put ADSL on those line, they call is "incompatible product"...

I'm just asking out of interest, not doubting you...and certainly not interested in handbags at dawn

 

[HughJarse]

Seriously, I do have that speed; however I do know what Im doing when it comes to tweaks; Spinal I totally agree, this is ADSL2 and I get these figures because its sorta my job and I know how to play around. Unfortunatley youre wrong, most adsl installs do not change the master faceplate - they do in some european places. You need to know what effects your line and how that affects your connection; changing this faceplate can serioulsy up your line speed ( its all to do with internal house cables and extensions being poor quality) - this is where cable comes into its own. However We have a new estate and I have one of two answers from the cable companies, the first is that the cable is laid and BT bought it, the second is that they simply chose not to activate it.

For anyone whos on adsl2 the best tip I can give is to resync your router ( turn it off and on at about 7 oclock in the evening ), adsl2 relies on a number of things but of of them is SNR or signal noise ratio. This is basically how much background noise your router can accept/ deal with; so what you do is join the network at the noisiest time of day, it will sync at 6.9. So when it gets quiet this will go up which is a good thing, but shouldnt drop below what it has accepted as normal ( really noisy as you joined at 7ish - a very busy time of day). If anyone wants to now more i can post a big post - sorry to hijack this thread.

Oh and once youve reset it and got it good - DO NOT turn it off.

 

[HughJarse]

Here you go

 

[Spinal]

You might want to cover up your Ip address too...

 

[scotth_uk]

I realise that there is a city vs. country debate to be had for tech, but I had no problem receiving between 22 and 24 meg on my UKOnLine account using ADSL2+. All of my city based friends are getting within 10% of the max claimed bandwidth.

 

[Dieter]

Hi,

Looks like (CKember) is getting VIP package @ £10 pm discount but to get V+ equivalent (i.e. SKY+) don't you have to pay £300 up front . Also 10 MB service going up to 20 MB in June.

I've just subscribed to above VIP package AND all output is upscaled (via V+) to 1080i (using HDMI). Thus SD is even better than before and the current VOD content (not available to SKY users) will increase (to include HD and Lost etc.).

Only down side is loss of SKY1/news but I can live with that .

So I don't think either provider is better than the other it's down to the end-user to choose what suits them best. Some people just can't stand having a 'dish' stuck on their house

Cheers,

 

[fuzzer]

personally i think virgin is better than sky. Sky have realised this and have put sky one as bait on the hook and seeing how many people follow it.

Cable all the way !

 

[Carrotchomper]

I am on Virgin at the moment.

In terms of internet terminology I am a complete dumbass though. Is this ADSL?

Also, I currently have the cable modem on the same circuit as the TV, amp etc, which I turn off after use to save power. Would I be better keeping it permanently on, and resetting at 7pm or thereabouts for optimum speed? Ta.

Very interested to hear about V+. Think I might have to have a pleading session on the phone and tr to get it as a freebie somehow...

 

[Gollom]

Nope, it is not ADSL technology, but Cable. And yup, I'd leave the cable modem on all the tiime

 

[Dieter]

Hi CC,

The V+ is a hard disk based tv recorder system with which you can record from two channels simultaneously whilst watching a third etc. i.e. has 3 tuners.

You ain't gonna get it for free.

Also it does not support b/band but VM will supply appropriate modem.

For more info on V+ click here:

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/dtv/vplus/index.html

Cheers,

 

[HughJarse]

You might want to cover up your Ip address too...

Yeh youre right, its dynamic luckily... missed that one though.

 

[Spinal]

I am on Virgin at the moment.

In terms of internet terminology I am a complete dumbass though. Is this ADSL?

Also, I currently have the cable modem on the same circuit as the TV, amp etc, which I turn off after use to save power. Would I be better keeping it permanently on, and resetting at 7pm or thereabouts for optimum speed? Ta.

Very interested to hear about V+. Think I might have to have a pleading session on the phone and tr to get it as a freebie somehow...

You may or may not be... Virgin (for the most part) uses cable; but in certain more remote areas; they try to use ADSL/ISDN/whatever-goes. (From the virgin site). Just look at what's plugged into your modem; do you have a cable very similar to the old-tv aerial cables (Coaxial-cable), a roudish-semi-flexible-tube-like-cable (fibre optic-cable, VERY limited use in the UK), or something that plugs into your phone socket(ADSL)?

If you have cable, you don't need to do ANY of the resetting stuff... Your speed does not fluctuate. Your speed gets assigned as what you bought (e.g. 2mb), then your local router will do some load balacing (i.e. sharing its pipeline with other people on your street); and hopefully, by the time it gets off that line, there is sufficient bandwidth to handle everyone.

In theory, (sorry, I don't work for virgin, so have no clue what equipment they use); if every local box had a gigabit connection (which is what you can get to your house as an individual in certain countries...), and they sold 2mb lines, they could have 500-ish users connected at the exact same time and have no ill effects on anyones speeds...

Regarding the Virgin vs. Sky debate - I'm DEFINETLY not swapping ISP... Might swap tv provider or phone provider if the phone doesn't get sorted within a few days... TV I've discovered some other channels which aren't so bad... 119 and 120 are quite useless, but others aren't too bad...

Michele

 

[ckember]

12.4Kb I get better than that on my mobile phone, at 52Kb on my landline which is soooooooo slow if you only get 12.4K I would ask BT/SKY for a full refund. This year Virgin will bring out 100Mb broadband which BT based services can never match with current technology

As I didn't know where you lived I generalised the picture on distances, this has long been a contention with BT based Broadband services.

I was only pointing out that SKY and any other compnay that specify broadband speeds of upto 16mB from two pieces of copper wire are not able to get very good connection speeds. If you do You must live very close or in an area with a low contention ratio. If you are the only person on that connection in your area you will get very good results. If however 10 people are online at the same time downloading the speed cans drop to less than dialup speeds. This is not the case with NTL/Virgin to the same degree.

If you added the Sky HD package you would, in your case be paying £3pm more than me plus £299 upfront fee for the box. plus the cost of installation. Also how much did SKY charge for the broadband connection setup £50.00 ?

i have just checked and for all the above on Sky as a new customer would cost £73.50pm plus a one off £299 for HD, this equates to an all round figure of £98.42pm for the first year. and then an extra £50py for the box insurance, as you own the box, NTL will replace the box for free even after the first year.

So I do think I am winning still