Numpty advice please
Discussion
Hi all, I'm asking the PH IT massive for some advice to a general techno numpty in respect of ICT
At home I currently have ntl for phone and broadband and sky for TV
I have ntl because, at the time (a year ago) I was going to change everything as I still had dial up / ntl phone and tv. I changed tv but kept ntl phone because I got 1mb broadband for £9.99 a month for a year and this seemed quite good at the time.
That is now up. I have spoken to ntl to see what they can offer and the best they seem to have come up with is 4mb unlimited half price for 3 months (£12.50) reverting to £24.99 thereafter - but call back after 3 months to see what else they can do. Oh, phone line on top as well!!!
Thing is, as I'm with sky (and Orange) their packages seem better than the ntl one BUT it seems though I'll have to go back to BT (after 15 odd years) and get a BT phone line to get it.
Dilema - do I stay with ntl and leave things in situ or do I dump ntl get a BT line and sky or orange (or someone else broadband). I deffo wouldn't use BT for calls - I would use one-tel (used before) or someone similar as need to speak with brother in France and skype is too unreliable
Thought I would toss it out to people who are more knowledgeable than me!!!
Thanks in advance
Paul
At home I currently have ntl for phone and broadband and sky for TV
I have ntl because, at the time (a year ago) I was going to change everything as I still had dial up / ntl phone and tv. I changed tv but kept ntl phone because I got 1mb broadband for £9.99 a month for a year and this seemed quite good at the time.
That is now up. I have spoken to ntl to see what they can offer and the best they seem to have come up with is 4mb unlimited half price for 3 months (£12.50) reverting to £24.99 thereafter - but call back after 3 months to see what else they can do. Oh, phone line on top as well!!!
Thing is, as I'm with sky (and Orange) their packages seem better than the ntl one BUT it seems though I'll have to go back to BT (after 15 odd years) and get a BT phone line to get it.
Dilema - do I stay with ntl and leave things in situ or do I dump ntl get a BT line and sky or orange (or someone else broadband). I deffo wouldn't use BT for calls - I would use one-tel (used before) or someone similar as need to speak with brother in France and skype is too unreliable
Thought I would toss it out to people who are more knowledgeable than me!!!
Thanks in advance
Paul
Personally I use NTL for my broadband and have very few problems.
I don't have a telephone line at all and I don't use NTL's telephone service. Instead I use Vonage VoIP over my NTL Internet connection. With Vonage I pay £7.99 per month for unlimited local and national calls. International calls are extremely cheap (France: 2p/min, France Mobile 17p/min) and you get huge functionality such as conference calls, call redirect, call barring, etc. all of which you find a use for when you have it. I've been running this setup after moving from OneTel for about 18 months and it is outstanding.
I don't have a telephone line at all and I don't use NTL's telephone service. Instead I use Vonage VoIP over my NTL Internet connection. With Vonage I pay £7.99 per month for unlimited local and national calls. International calls are extremely cheap (France: 2p/min, France Mobile 17p/min) and you get huge functionality such as conference calls, call redirect, call barring, etc. all of which you find a use for when you have it. I've been running this setup after moving from OneTel for about 18 months and it is outstanding.
I have found it to be very clear and reliable.
Your main limitation is your upload speed. I ahve the 10Mb/s down, 0.5Mb/s up package so have no problems at all. The 4Mb/s package should be fine and you can actually reduce the bandwidth used by the VoIP service through the Vonage control panel if you do have any problems.
One of the other benefits is being able to choose a phone number with whatever region code you like, or indeed to have more than one number. A nice touch is having a foreign number (I think it costs £2.99/month for the number) for the country someone who calls you a lot from abroad is living in, which can save for them hugely too.
Your main limitation is your upload speed. I ahve the 10Mb/s down, 0.5Mb/s up package so have no problems at all. The 4Mb/s package should be fine and you can actually reduce the bandwidth used by the VoIP service through the Vonage control panel if you do have any problems.
One of the other benefits is being able to choose a phone number with whatever region code you like, or indeed to have more than one number. A nice touch is having a foreign number (I think it costs £2.99/month for the number) for the country someone who calls you a lot from abroad is living in, which can save for them hugely too.
Just checked bulldog website... you can have line rental through them and 16Mb down 1 Mb up unlimited for £24 a month (£20 for first 3 months or something like that)... That's hard to beat.
My friend has used them since the beginning and hasn't ever had a problem, having used his comp now and then I can tell you even 8Mb with 0.5 up is SOOOO fast!
For comparison... in canada I had 1.5Mb down and 0.5 up and my internet in almost all cases went faster than my home 2Mb down and 0.25 up. The large download speed only makes a difference when downloading from fast http servers. peer2peer and ftp and everything else is faster on faster upload.
My friend has used them since the beginning and hasn't ever had a problem, having used his comp now and then I can tell you even 8Mb with 0.5 up is SOOOO fast!
For comparison... in canada I had 1.5Mb down and 0.5 up and my internet in almost all cases went faster than my home 2Mb down and 0.25 up. The large download speed only makes a difference when downloading from fast http servers. peer2peer and ftp and everything else is faster on faster upload.
bez_uk said:
Just checked bulldog website... you can have line rental through them and 16Mb down 1 Mb up unlimited for £24 a month (£20 for first 3 months or something like that)... That's hard to beat.
My friend has used them since the beginning and hasn't ever had a problem, having used his comp now and then I can tell you even 8Mb with 0.5 up is SOOOO fast!
For comparison... in canada I had 1.5Mb down and 0.5 up and my internet in almost all cases went faster than my home 2Mb down and 0.25 up. The large download speed only makes a difference when downloading from fast http servers. peer2peer and ftp and everything else is faster on faster upload.
My friend has used them since the beginning and hasn't ever had a problem, having used his comp now and then I can tell you even 8Mb with 0.5 up is SOOOO fast!
For comparison... in canada I had 1.5Mb down and 0.5 up and my internet in almost all cases went faster than my home 2Mb down and 0.25 up. The large download speed only makes a difference when downloading from fast http servers. peer2peer and ftp and everything else is faster on faster upload.
Thanks Bez, Although I don't understand some of the techno aspects of this I certainly understand good value when I read it - I'll check out Bulldog. The general response I am getting is that, on the whole, ntl are considered pretty crap
Paul
Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff