A note from an Internet addict

[selenay]

Our home Internet was down all evening yesterday. It was horrible. No email! No LiveJournal! No IM! No ability to update websites, which I'd actually been intending to do last night!

Urg.

I have reminded Da that he was planning to change our ISP because this is becoming a much too frequent occurrence.

This was on top of a day filled with power outages at work - 0.5 second ones - that buggered up my reports multiple times. It was not a good day.

So instead of all the good things that I was planning to do yesterday evening, I veged out in front of the TV with Heroes and ER. We've managed to addict Mum to Heroes :-)

Comments

[mingmerciless.livejournal.com]

JOOI, which ISP are you with?

[selenay]

BT Internet *sigh* I definitely wouldn't recommend them.

We're looking at possibly Demon or Pipex (I think Da is leaning towards Demon), but Da is the guy who set it all up so I have to wait for him to remember to do it!

[gmul.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I'd recommend Pipex, although it's so hard to say - they've bought up some many companies it's hard to tell if you're dealing with a good bit or not!

BT Internet haven't thus far caused me any problems, either at home or work. Openreach need watching like a hawk, at least until you've confirmed that they've sent someone clueful (which to be fair usually is the case IME).

I was a Demon founder member, back in good old days of the UK non-academic Internet... More recently, I can only think of a couple of our customers who use them and they've been OK except for one occasion when Demon "upgraded" their line, which included a change to their external IP addresses that they didn't bother to mention in advance. Cue sudden rush to site to re-configure Important Things.

Bear in mind of course that whichever ISP you go with, the actual traffic will still be going over BT's network at least the first part of the way. Even if you have an unbundled service (which I don't expect, given your description of where you live) you're still connected to BT's "copper", at least as far as the exchange.

I'm sure you'll have had a look at www.thinkbroadband.com and had a look at the ratings. Actually, looking at the site myself reminds me of one of the reasons I don't like them - I find their David Hasslehoff adverts to be really, really annoying!

[mingmerciless.livejournal.com]

OMG, were you one of the original Tenner-a-month lot?

Wow. Feeling very old because I can still remember the days of Cliff Stanford selling cheap DS modems on Cix!

[gmul.livejournal.com]

were you one of the original Tenner-a-month lot?
Guilty. Ah, the wonders of KA9Q. Glad to see Mr Karn is still kicking around.

[mingmerciless.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed!

Alas, Demon was set up at an early stage of my online evolution. At the time, I still thought a 9600bps modem was most impressive and couldn't see why I'd want to venture beyond Cix's conferences!

[gmul.livejournal.com]

Around that time I bought a 2nd hand IBM PS/2 model 60 (and still pretty funky 286 processor) with a v32 modem in because it was cheaper than just buying an external v32 modem would have been by itself...

I think we could probably bring this episode of Old Pharts on the Internet to a close before all those Young People start rolling their eyes even more than now... :-)

[selenay]

I can remember watching my father hooking our BBC BASIC to a telephone in some magical fashion and then there was computer stuff coming in from outside. It was very cool :-)

[gmul.livejournal.com]

I must make an icon of my acoustic coupler for these sort of discussions. Or perhaps not...
:-)

[mingmerciless.livejournal.com]

You didn't have a Prestel-compatible 1200/75 modem, did you?

[gmul.livejournal.com]

At one stage. And one of their dedicated terminal thingys with funny little button keyboard, although that was a little later.

[selenay]

We're leaning towards Demon at the moment because they've provided my father's office with such good service over the years. I'd hope that their home package would have the same level of service as their business package, but it has to be better than BT Internet!

At the moment, my major concern is up-time - we're currently having it down for an hour or two a couple of times a week, which isn't exactly helpful. My father works from home a lot, logging into his office via VPN, and it looks like I may soon get the facilities to work from home ocassionally as well. Unreliable Internet service isn't going to help us *sigh*

[mingmerciless.livejournal.com]

If it helps, I'm with Be. Tad pricey but they seem to have the promised high speed connectivity (17Mbps according to speed test rather than the theoretical max of 24Mbps but I suspect I'd have to be living in the exchange to get that!).

[selenay]

Heh, I suspect that our echange wouldn't support 24Mpbs, knowing how long it took to get broadband to us at all...

But thanks for the suggestion :-)