What do you actually do on the net? In particular what sort of bandwidth usage, up and down total?

My brother recently went from die-hard dialup on Orange to TalkTalk International 3, purely because the monthly cost is about the same as his BT phone bill was. His wife rings family in Australia frequently.

He thinks TT is wonderful and can't understand why he resisted broadband for so long. But he isn't a big downloader, obviously.

Hi Bob
I am retired and spend a lot of time online, my hobby is photography I use Adobe Photoshop and download quite a lot of related material.
I would say my download usage would average about 4gb a month and upload about 1 to 2gb.

Like your brother what attracted me to TT and Tiscali in the first place were the free international phone calls as I have 2 daughters one in Australia and the other in Canada and I ring them on a regular basis. For these calls I use one of the cheaper phone companies 1p a minute but you still have the Virgin connection charge and I am on quite a while so it soon mounts up.
jack

you could convert them to using a VoIP service like that from Tesco and many other places where you can talk to each other for free without a monthly fee.

Hi Phil
I had looked at Tesco a while ago a\nd all I could see was a full package for uk and international calls at about

you were looking at the phone line packages. Look at the internet phone packages instead.
http://www.tescointernetphone.com/

calls between internet phones are free. There are many internet telephony (VoIP) services that you could use for this, if you want to be free of the PC then there is a one-off hardware cost.

TalkTalk support looks to be pretty ropey from what we see here, but my brother hasn't needed to contact them. How good his speeds are I don't know - just after connection he was getting mid-5000s kbps, which was around what TT sales forecast. Whether it slumps dramatically is unknown, as it is for 90% of users.

He won't be doing the same amount of upload/download as you, but a total of 6-10GB a month is about in the middle of the "allowance packages" on offer from most ISPs. As the TT allowance I think is 40GB I can't see they would target you as a heavy user, so any degradation would be down to lack of capacity. I would imagine any shortages are being addressed - a lot of the problem was the dramatic take-up in the early days. They won't want to get a long-term bad reputation.

But it isn't me that is looking at an 18-month(?) contract if it isn't satisfactory.

I would certainly steer clear of Tiscali though - the whole setup seems dire.

Economically TalkTalk can't be beaten for the sort of use the OP is looking for. If you are not a whizz kid with computers then their support leaves much to be desired. However you may not need support and the TalkTalk forum on this site has lurking CS bods who seem to be happy to provide assistance. You do have to sign up for 18 months though otherwise they cannot balance their books. The trade off is CS versus cost.

In reply to:

---

If you are not a whizz kid with computers then their support leaves much to be desired.

---

If you don't have your own relationships with BT it leaves much to be desired as well.

I would avoid TalkTalk, they just aint worth the grief.

I've just moved house and thought it was bad enough clearing my Be* line at the old place for the new occupants.

Sadly, the house I have moved into had TalkTalk and the end result is I can't order a phoneline or broadband as TalkTalk are blocking the line. The previous owners can't order a line with their previous number as TalkTalk are squatting at my place with no sight of a cease order.

In short, you just can't shake them off and the best bet is to avoid them in the first place.

Thanks guys for all the replies, I am taking the cowardly way out and staying with Virgin.
I will take there offer of free calls with my 4mb broadband.
I have been with them 6year and had no problems, just the price seemed a bit steep compared with a few others.
jack