Ukfsn, Vivaciti, Adsl24? What's the difference?

Hi everyone!

I'm currently with Eclipse and they are absolutely atrocious. I want out. I'm just not sure who to go with.

From looking at DSL Zone UK I can tell that Vivaciti, Ukfsn, and Adsl24 are the top three at the moment. The thing is... what's the difference between them? They all have the exact same packages!

I quite like the look of ukfsn, as they have had brilliant reviews, and I haven't heard anything bad about them. The only thing that is putting me off is their basic website and the fact they aren't a large company (who are they anway?). They have got loads of good reviews though, and I haven't heard a single bad thing about them.

I don't download too heavily, but I do use my fair amount of P2P every week. Unfortunately I'm not online at all outside of peak hours during the week, so all three of these ISPs aren't going to benefit me with their off-peak usage. I would leave the PC on overnight, but it's in my bedroom so I wouldn't be able to sleep. However, I'm not too worried about this, as 30GB for

They're all Entanet resellers and can be found posting on the Entanet forum here.

The packages are similar since:
a) All 3 resell the services provided by entanet (as do a few others).
b) Entanet provide most/all of the service directly. I believe you can raise support issues with either enta or the reseller in most cases.
c) Some resellers do their own billing and/or support. This can be a good or a bad thing.
d) As resellers they are quite small companies. Arguably they do not need to be more than a one man band if they do not provide any of the service directly.
e) Some resellers provide other services themselves - eg. hosting - either as added value or as paid extras.

Without having used their services I have to say that all three have made useful contributions to these message boards. They do appear to help as well as sell/promote their services. All the resellers appear to have the odd annoyed person who casts doubt on them - it is unclear if they deserve this either in the specific case or overall.

From outside their services - analysing posts here there are a few other points -
a) Enta packages have been generous to P2P users and 24 hour downloaders.
b) These users eat bandwidth to death.
c) Enta have finally had to do some load management to try and share things better.
d) Unusually (uniquely?) among UK ISPs Enta have told customers about this, and said how it works. It even appears to work the way they have said!
e) The throttling appears simple. It appears that: every one gets the same share once the service is busy, the maximum transfer rate drops to the same level for all users and all types of traffic.
f) This throttling is not to everyones taste and is most annoying if you are not a downloader or p2p user. It is far fairer if say you are a user of linux torrents etc as you do not get targetted as a film dvd cloner.

They are the firms I would evaluate at the moment IF I expected to make use of p2p (even linux torrents), subscription usenet or heavy use of HTTP/FTP downloads. A few others might be suitable/better if I was staying away from torrents and usenet and keeping under say 20-30gb of traffic.

The actual broadband service will be the same from any of the three of us you mention.

We differ slightly in the extras each of us offers - ie the hosting and other services.

As to your specific questions:

All weekend is offpeak.

There is no port blocking of traffic shaping however there is a system in place to manage congestion during very busy periods. It works as follows:

When usage on a given central pipe exceeds 96% all customers on that pipe whose speed is greater than 2.5Mb have their download speed reduced by 500kb/s. This happens until either usage on the pipe drops below 96% or download speeds are dropped to 2Mb (it wont push speeds below 2Mb).

once usage drops below 91% download speeds should rise in 200kb/s increments.

This is intended to prevent latency (high ping times) and packet loss so as to ensure that the connections continue to work for those using latency sensitive applications such as VoIP and online gaming rather than to prevent p2p and other users from grabbing bandwidth.

We don't have our own forum here as we are resellers of Entanet services for broadband. You can find our customers (and those of vivacity and adsl24) in the Entanet forum here on tb.

Hi, the newsgroup access is the same with all 3 of us, but is only text based, and does not carry binaries, although the ports are not blocked, and most people who use newgroups, use third party carriers.

Thanks for the info! DSL Zone UK really needs to update their information.

It's really nice to see the actual ISP replying to posts here! Eclipse never do that. Thank you.

Thanks for the reply! It's very nice to see the actual ISP replying to posts here. I appreciate it.

The congestion management sounds very fair to me. With Eclipse I am only getting 30kB/s, which is awful. Anything above that would really make me happy! I've been having to download lots of different linux distributions (Fedora and SuSE mainly) for College, and Eclipse are just not making that possible. It would be so nice to see my BitTorrent speeds reach their potential.

And that's brilliant to hear that the entire weekend is off-peak! Is it fair to schedule your downloads for then?

Thanks for the reply.

I have absolutely no idea who to go with now, lol! I'll keep reading up and make a decision.

I don't actually ever heavily download. I just use BitTorrent now and again, sometimes for a linux distribution. My usage during peak hours is definitely below 30GB, which is why the

Thank you! I'll go take a look.

Can anyone provide some screenshots of the control panels of each ISP please? Are they all the same and provide the same features?