yay!

That does sound inviting! Although how much difference there would be between any of them I don't know, can't imagine BTW being worse so it's probably a safe bet.

Here ya go https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/15191521751...

Sexy right, look at those curves!

That test is a bit slower than I get on any one of a dozen servers from speedtest.net where I consistently get a 7-10ms ping (rather than the 18 here) and it flies straight up to 220 and stays there. Still looks pretty good to me. This was at peak-ish time at 6.45pm today.

speedtest.net is misleading from the perspective:
1) Providers often ensure peering to this service is as good as it can be, whilst neglecting other things. Hence why the pings are likely better here, but in reality, you are likely experiencing higher pings on day-to-day tasks.
2) It uses multi-threads ie it combines multiple downloads at once, which hides congestion, whereas a video stream does not work this way and will experience the congestion.

This is why some ISPs only accept speedtests from certain sites, which usually are favorable to them.

The spikes on the single-thread are not ideal and the separation of the two lines indicates a slight amount of congestion, but certainly, at those speeds you will not experience any issues. These spikes could also indicate some sort of QOS setup internally, or similar.

Certainly speed-wise you will be taking a cut during your switch, but hopefully the quality will remain as good, or better.

Worth mentioning not all backhaul is the same e.g one ISP may use TalkTalk backhaul, but due to their agreement with TalkTalk, not purchase adequate capacity and hence lead to congestion whereas another customer using TalkTalk retail may notice no congestion, same underlying backhaul provider but very different end-user experience.

Oh I don't use that to test my pings properly anyway, I have an old tool from my Ultima Online days called UOTRACE which allows me to put an address or IP in there and poll it with pings with whatever delay I want to set (I have it on 10ms but I don't think it's actually sending them out quite that fast). So I can send a crapload of pings and monitor both the ping AND the variation in it to watch for spikes. I use it when I am testing different VPN's to see what kind of quality the ping is and not just the raw number. Funnily enough I usually use www.adslguide.org.uk as my main test site to point it at but also a few others like bbc.

Yeah I might get lucky and the total bandwidth will be lower but the quality might be higher. Although a lot more people here will have BT than VM and checking speed test guides for the area suggests very bad speeds of 26mb at most (of course I have no idea what package these people are on and there were not many test results shown on the map).

Don't IDNET charge £150 to switch your standard phone line over from Virgin?

In reply to a post by BoyGroucho:

Don't IDNET charge £150 to switch your standard phone line over from Virgin?

Indeed, they do. That may well prove a little little off putting for Ewok.

I am not switching form Virgin, I am moving house and Virgin do not cover my new address (which is literally in the next road!). There is a BT ADSL socket already in the new place (I don't know if its new or old but whoever was there before has clearly had some sort of dsl) so I expect it will just be a case of re-activating it (although IDNET might still charge £75 just for that??).

What is putting me off IDNET is the cost. I will have to go for the 55mb package since my line will apparently go to 60mb at best. It is going to cost £45 on IDNET plus the cost of the hardware. On BT, taking into account discounts, it may be as low as £22 (£150 mastercard, £90 cashback if I get away with having both) and on top of that I get the hardware and tv (even though its basically just freeview plus bt sport that I dont care about, its still a nice perk). I am struggling to justify double the cost for what I suspect has got to be virtually the same quality of connection.

The only advantages IDNET seem to have are 1 month contract, and no censoring (the 'big 6' block certain sites).

Edited by Ewok (Tue 20-Feb-18 21:40:48)

There have been 108 replies in this thread so far and you still seem to be dithering over the choice of Isp. You seem to want the moon on a stick i.e. everything, and pay very little for it, if you don't want to pay much go for BT with all the offers as has been suggested, if you have to cancel the contract for whatever reason it is hardly a huge financial loss.