NewNet Home S ND or Be Unlimited

Hi,

A friend has just migrated to Newnet's Home S ND package.. no idea how he's going to get on, but I was wondering if anybody had any thoughts or advice comparing that with Be's "Unlimited" package...?

On the surface both ISPs seem to offer a similar deal for around the £20 a month price bracket - I know Be has quidco and other sign up incentives at the moment, but excluding the price factor are there any other consideriations?

It's worth looking at this thread.

Be charge extra for email - £2 per month. I presume Newnet still include it, but rubbish address format. I prefer ISP-independent email anyway. Costs me £1.14 per month with my own domain, 10 mailboxes and no hassle when migrating.

I'd be tempted to give NewNet a try if I was in one of their enabled exchanges. I would guess that they would be better than Be at the intangibles. That said Be have a very good reputation as well (notwithstanding the few exchanges with problems).

Thanks guys!

I've got my own domain etc. so email shouldn't be a problem (forwarding etc.) - that thread was interesting, but hopefully I won't get too many problems.. its mainly the advertised "Unlimited" usage and "No traffic shaping" but I wondered how they stacked up against Be* performance-wise as the packages look quite similar but people don't seem to be raving about it the way there are with Be (generally speaking)

EDIT:
Robertos, I noticed you posted in another thread that you were with Newnet previously - if you don't mind me asking, why did you migrate away?

Edited by deleted (Mon 16-Mar-09 18:50:33)

In reply to a post by jms_uk:

... I wondered how they stacked up against Be* performance-wise as the packages look quite similar but people don't seem to be raving about it the way there are with Be (generally speaking)

EDIT:
Robertos, I noticed you posted in another thread that you were with Newnet previously - if you don't mind me asking, why did you migrate away?

You won't see much comment about the Newnet ND service as it's only available on eleven exchanges in the South. Hardly a national service like Be, even though Be isn't in all exchanges.

From what I have seen all the ND users have been pleased, although I hadn't heard of that upstream profiling until that thread. But they seemed to fix it to that customer's satisfaction.

I left because I started hitting my 3GB (!! don't laugh !) allowance and pre-purchased extra allowance didn't carry forward at the time. I was very pleased with the service, but of course it was bog standard IPStream.

I was hoping that they would be offering national ADSL2+ over WBC/WBMC but it seemed anything they were going to do was well in the future, even though my exchange was WBC enabled in the first wave.

On O2 LLU Standard (my line cannot sync over about 7600kbps) I get higher download speeds 24/7 due to not having the BT profiling system so I can run closer to disconnection noise margins without worrying about being stuck with a low profile for 4-5 days. The speed consistency at any given sync is also better than Newnet IPStream, though I expect ND will be as good as O2.

And it costs me £7.34pm plus a quarterly mobile phone topup of £10. With that topup they "gift" you £1 for the first (and only) one every quarter, in that month I get 500 free minutes to landlines from my postcode. That kills my miniscule BT call charges for the month. Then in the other two months, as I already have the free evenings and weekend call plan on BT all day-time calls are done on the mobile. (There are 3 other plans for free texts and so on).

Since then my wife's T-mobile handset has gone on the blink. As she only used it occasionally, mostly to call the taxi service - me! - she takes the O2 one with her. We don't use all the £11 per quarter so far.

There's also a number of free texts from the computer. But I rarely text so only recently looked into that.

Thanks for the info.. as I live in one of the exchanges Newnet have enabled for their ND Service, its nice to have an alternative to Be*.. cost (with or without discounts) doesn't bother me too much - savings are always nice, but not a priority if the service is up to snuff

I'm going to give their tech support a call, as the list of "supported" routers is quite small (I'm hearing about problems with some versions of the Netgear DG834G, so I'd like to check if my newly purchased DG834N V1 with DGTeam firmware is going to be ok - I probably won't mention the DGTeam part)