Need help with picking ISP!

im moving into a new house soon and its in a FTTC area, so my question is who is the best and cheapest FTTC provider

As always, it depends on your requirements.
See https://spreadsheets0.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key... for useful data.
and of course look at the ThinkBroadband ratings http://www.thinkbroadband.com/isp/compare.html (unfortunately these don't separate ADSL and FTTC).

Sky are pretty cheap, but have very limited upload speed, and only 40 max download. Not sure on their traffic management rules.
BT Infinity are cheap too, and seem to have very little traffic management unless you want to use p2p.
Plusnet have good reviews and are quite cheap. Fairly fierce traffic management unless you pay the extra £5 per month for Pro, Also limited upload speeds, and 40 max download.
John Lewis variant of PlusNet might fit you as well.

Sky and BT both have fairly bad reputation for customer service.

Edited by StephenTodd (Sun 20-May-12 11:58:55)

looks like bt are the best for price and speed and usage, as for torrents i don't download any

My conclusion having looked at all the ISP's is that BT is surprisingly the best candidate.

I would prefer Zen or similiar but the prices are so much higher, I don't think I can justify it. In the 'old' days I was happy to pay a premium to go with them, but the price diferential is huge and having to worry about how much I am downloading.

I do use torrents occasionally, but as long as they are not blocked completely I am not too worried about traffic management.

Of course, I have to wait for BT to actually enable the exchange, but they just started cutting a tree next to the cabinet I'm connecting to so I have hopes it'll be soon ...

In reply to a post by iWoomy:

looks like bt are the best for price and speed and usage, as for torrents i don't download any

If it works BT are very good on price and "service" but if it fails.. then good luck... I have given up calling their "call centre"...

Plus Net are strongly rumoured to be announcing their revised product range at the end of May, which should include the 40/10 and 80/20 products, and hopefully improved data allowances. So if you can wait 11 days they might have something to offer, and they have a very good reputation for customer support, especially on the forums.

yeh thats fine i don't move in till the 1st of june but the deal breaker for me is the price, if bt is still cheaper im going with them

Just read between the lines they are cheap for a reason and that is to get you over to them at 'all costs'.
Dare say its ok if you dont mind simple problems taking 4 weeks or more, by that i mean what a decent ISP can get done within a few hours.

Theres more things in life than price.
I havent actually started their service yet but already looking forward to see if i can get away from them in 18 months!
So far not good, billing for extra charges, no recollection of direct debit setup and failure to supply FTTC product over two days ago with no way of delving further in to the situation than a pre recorded message "Theres a problem with your line, were working on it". I can see i will be having fun - not.

who is the best and cheapest FTTC provider

As ever, these two criteria don't sit well together. You can have cheapest, and you can have best, and ne're the twain will meet.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

who is the best and cheapest FTTC provider

As ever, these two criteria don't sit well together. You can have cheapest, and you can have best, and ne're the twain will meet.

BT seem to have done a reasonably good job with Infinity.

I can get 8Mbyte/sec down on uTorrent (seeds permitting, of course) pretty much any time of the day.

What you need to do though is change your settings thus:

Tick "Randomise port each time uTorrent starts"
Untick "Enable UTP Bandwidth control / management" (something like that)
Force outgoing encryption
Disallow incoming legacy connections
Change the maximum concurrent connections to 256 and the max per torrent to 64
Limit upstream bandwidth accordingly
Change the "net max transp disposition" to 255
Change the "Max ports halfopen" to 255

I think that's it... seems to work pretty well with me.

Oh and use Peer Block.