They are a reseller, use Murphx to provide the service IIRC.

ADSL24 used to be Entanet resellers, but when there was a lot of trouble with Entanet 18 months ago they switched all their customers to identical packages on Murphx.

There have recently been a few complaints about that service as well.

Two other resellers, vivaciti.net and xilo/uno sell 50GB packages on Murphx at a higher price than the 30/unlimited one of ADSL24. They seem to get no complaints.

So my guess is they have a performance quality contract, ADSL24 has a volume contract.

TBB at the moment doesn't provide forums or ratings for resellers, only full ISPs. ADSL24 are mentioned at times in the Resellers and Other Providers forum. That's the place to ask about all three.

Many thanks to all contributors to this thread.

I will follow the suggestions up and post the final outcome when I reach it.

Cheers, Peter.

Probably not the final outcome but ...

Two weeks ago I contacted Pipex to ask for my MAC. They asked why and when I told them about my speed issues they suggested I speak to 2nd line support before making a final decision to move to another ISP.

I spent between an hour and an hour and a half on the 'phone that evening to an engineer who:

- Repeatedly told me about contention despite my having acknowledged that I understood it and how it might affect me.
- Promised me that Pipex/TalkTalk were rolling out exchange ugrades though he was unable to tell me when nor exactly what the upgrade might be. I asked whether it was related to LLU but got no answer.
- Offered no answer to what might have caused the sudden degradation when I had previously enjoyed acceptable speed.

Although he claimed not to have made any changes - since according to him the problems were outside Pipex's control - a series of speed tests at the end of the call (modem directly into the line's test socket, then the master socket and finally my router) recorded a download rate of 2.4M.

Although he all but guaranteed that contention issues would mean that I wouldn't, I have been getting a rate which varies from 1.7 to 2.4M (and mostly at the higher end of that range) consistently since then.

Perhaps I'm on the "Stroppy Customer" service.

I've been through a similar process with Pipex in the past so I'm still not expecting to spend the rest of my online life with them but for the moment I'm content.

Cheers, Peter.