House of 7 laptops

Hey Guys,

I will be moving into a house of 7 all of us with laptops for next year. With so many laptops connected to one connection it needs to be fast. We will only actually need a connection for 9 months (as we are at uni) so any shorter term contract ISP's would be better.

AceInternet looks good as we can get a fast connection and have contract periods of 3 months.
Any other ISP's that anyone would recoment for a high load of 7 laptops?

The cost will be divided between 7 so anything up to

Don't you mean

One such program is Netlimiter. Gives you the ability to throttle the internet traffic on a PC.
That way they'll be able to divide the traffic evenly.
A bit crude, as it will not take account of unwanted bandwidth.
Maybe one of the ISPs will let you have a copy of their traffic shaping software!

Only problem with netlimiter is that you are relying on the user on said laptop not changing the limit

Put in the postcode of the property here:

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/checker2.php

And see whats available first.

If you want an unlimited and uncapped product why not look at one of the LLU providers if they are available to you.

Usually they offer much higher upload and down load speeds with lots of bandwidth, [important if all 7 laptops are running at the same time] Be* offers fast uploads i.e. to1.5Mbps and fast dowwloads, the speed of downloads depends on the length of your telephone line but most people see about 14-15Mbps download.

The LLU products are definately the best bet, but be careful with some of the LLU providers because you could find yourself lumbered with a minimum 12 month contract, and you also have to take their telephone service.

You can find out which services are available to you by entering your telephone number on the sam knows site link below.

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/phoneno.php

The only thing that may go against a Max adsl or Be*s adsl2+ product e.g. is the legnth of your telephone line, which could cuase a problem if you have a long line, and certainly if you are over 5 Km form your exchange Be* would not provision you.


The reason I went with Be* they are the only LLU provider that have a three month NO STRINGS notice period, and your telephone remains with BT so you can use the cheap providers such as 18866 etc for your calls. See the link below

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/01/be_unlimted_24meg_review/

If LLU products are not available to you, I think you could have a look at ACE internet which from reading the forum does look like an unlimited product & from the posts on here looks very good.

Or good old reliable Zen

Edited by rego (Fri 02-Jun-06 10:44:35)

"Or good old reliable Zen "

Nooooo... capped! capped! capped!

Not worth the premium nowadays for anyone who doesn't need a lot of technical support (ie. the vast majority). Don't touch them. I want to see them go under.

or you could go with zen & work out the overall usage then if required swap to another ISP

Bandwidth sharing is reasonably automatic, so long as all 7 laptops connect to one switch/wifi access point. If the ADSL router itself just has one incoming ethernet cable, or itself supports 7 users on its built-in wifi, then bandwidth gets distributed evenly between all active connections.

As for recommending an ISP, I've just migrated to Ace (this morning) from Zen. Speeds are good.

**EDIT** Actually, one point to make: If there are seven of you on the internet at once, you might struggle with any service that has 448Kbps or slower upload bandwidth. Just sending ACK packets whilst all of you are downloading can probably take up a large portion of your overall upload. Go with an office product rather than a home one. The extra upload will make a difference.

Edited by VinylPusher (Fri 09-Jun-06 16:06:14)