Be careful about Virgin Media.

I used to live in Thornaby, while I was at Durham University, and the service provided by Virgin Media was appalling.

My area was suffering with a utilisation fault, and it took Virgin Media a grand total of 13 months to fix the fault. I had a 120mbit internet connection service from them, and I would get speeds in the evenings of 0.05mbit at best. It was mainly evenings and weekends that were the problem with speeds. If I used my connection at 2am or at some other ridiculously unsociable time, I'd get 120mbit or around 13/14mb/s download speed.

But it was just terrible. High pings, packet loss, unable to stream anything - BBC iPlayer, Youtube, Netflix, Sky GO. You name it, it didn't work.

I'm not sure whether they increased the capacity so that the problem won't occur again as my tenancy ran out before they'd repaired it.

Unfortauntely, Stockton-on-Tees is pretty poor for any ADSL provider - I was quoted 2mbit from BT when I was looking from a provider, and I don't think the Stockton exchange is enabled for FTTC either.

If you can ask some of your neighbours what Virgin Media is like, if they have a broadband service from them, then that could be your best bet.