ah right - im a stonesthrow from irvine oldtown exchange (its behind the old post office) so should recieve full 18 if i got adsl2+

Grr. I used to live across the street from the exchange in Kilmarnock but moved to Glasgow for a few years.

Now i'm more or less as far away as it's possible to be, give or take a street or two. Grrr...

ouch. gotta be busy living across from the exchange in killie though, noisy part that in the centre of town.

.. if you lived in glasgow, at least you could get be

but hey.. its not all bad. im sure smallworld will expand the cable at some point.

I enquired about their cable broadband the other day (my area of Troon is cabled) but they have a minimum 18 month contract so that's a definite no go.

Uploads are disappointingly low as well, here is a quote from their reply when I asked what they were:

In reply to:

---

The upstream speeds are as follows
4mg � 256kps
18mg � 600kps
30mg � 1mb

---

Note that was also their way of representing line speed, not mine.


Pity....

In reply to:

---

I enquired about their cable broadband the other day (my area of Troon is cabled) but they have a minimum 18 month contract so that's a definite no go.

---

thats exactly why i was wary of going with them. 18month is a long time, you can however downgrade packages during that timeframe. e.g. if service is [censored], downgrade to their lowest product.

uploads have always been awful for them, they used to do faster upstream but cut it without warning to customers. 1mbit upstream on the 30mbit product would do me fine, but then again i would *prefer* to have 18meg down and 2-3meg up.

Yep - agree with all you have said, what (and how much) is the 'lowest product' though?

Here's all their guff.

http://www.smallworldmedia.com/default.aspx?page=prices

Yeah, one of the many reasons i regret moving back here

Update...

I've still literally received nothing in the post from SW since my original contract.

Two days ago a BT guy showed up to "install a new line", unannounced.

He was happy to have had his time wasted, since it was [censored] down, and he obviously didn't fancy tinkering with street furniture/going up the telegraph pole in that weather.

Yesterday, someone from SmallWorld came round with a router and two filters for me. Unannounced.

A one-port non-wireless router. That's a bit crappy. A BiPAC 5200 for anyone who cares.

I have a linksys already, so when I'm properly online with SW i'll see which syncs fastest, and use it. I'm hoping it's the linksys, or I'll have to do a little monkeying about to get wireless working while using the BiPAC. Not a massive problem either way.

ANYWAY, last night my DSL stopped working. Still had sync, just wasn't connecting.

I thought that maybe I'd had my wires at the exchange swapped over to SW hardware, and was now with them, but the lack of correspondence from them meant they hadn't sent me my username and password, hence no service.

Tried to phone to find out, but their offices shut at 7PM. I'd been trying since 6.30PM but to no avail.

This morning I tried them again, and got nowhere. "we're busy, give us your name and number and we'll phone you".

Which I did.

But they didn't.

An hour passes, and I decided to try them again.

I got someone! yay.

Unfortunately I'm not with them yet, and won't be until the 16th or so.

I'm putting my lack of broadband down to Piscali (Tipex? - nah, piscali described the new partnership much better) having sent me a letter telling me i was downloading too much (even though the pipex website specifically stated "hundreds of gigabytes per month" was fine), and they've cut off my broadband.

I'll phone them to make sure (it has a habit of breaking anyway), but I'm guessing that's what it is. I wouldn't like to think it was just broken, and I'm paying for broken internet...

I'm now back to my loophole free dialup, but it's painful. What am I going to do without broadband for a week and a half?

got your smallworld gear yet?