Titan ADSL or Vivaciti or other?

Hi Everyone,

I'll soon be moving into my first house with my Fiance, and we're gonna need some ADSL.
I use bit torrent but nothing really silly, around 30Gb per month plus iplayer and web browsing.

Now, it's a rural location and the exchange is BTMax only, the current tennant tells me he gets 6.5Mbps with bell wires removed via Sky. There are no plans for LLU on the exchange according to Sam knows.

I'd like a static IP for VPN access to home.

I'm currently thinking Surfwise 75 is the way to go but i have also considered Titan, although their new website isn't easy if ADSL+ isn't any good to you.

Your thoughts?

Thanks Marc.

Edited by yoof (Sun 03-May-09 03:13:24)

Depends how much you want to pay. Idnet are an excellent company and have a number of packages available. Also free support and help lines.

Well to be honest i didn't want to be forking out loads, i'd say that £20 -£25pm + BT line rental was my comfort zone.

It depends on your usage.
If you're going to use more than 20-30GB and cannot get any (or any decent) LLU products, and you have a budget of £20 - £25; the Entanet resellers may be your only option.
At the end of the day it's a compromise.
You can get "unlimited" products for less than your budget, but they're not really unlimited (most, such as BT's "unlimited" product have a fair usage policy set around 30GB).
You can get unlimited products which will operate at close to full speed (with no busy period drops in speed), but you won't get a non-LLU one of these for much less than £75 to £100.
You can get a low daytime allowance, with unlimited (or very high) overnight usage (say after midnight), but can you keep to below 2-3GB during daytime & evenings?

The Entanet resellers offer a compromise (and it's more of a compromise than it used to be).
They'll give you a very good 30GB peak (8am to midnight weekdays) allowance, with unmetered (apparently) between midnight & 8am and all weekend.
They'll charge you around £19 for this.
But (and it's quite a big but these days); Entanet can suffer quite badly from speed drops during the busy times (weekday evenings, and weekend days), and for a while after each unmetered period starts.

So you have to ask yourself what's more important (keeping within your budget); High maintained speed and low usage allowance, or the chance of regular speed drops but having a massive usage allowance?

It's also worth pointing out Entanet's speed problems are often restricted to certain areas.
Their traffic is fed through "nodes" and sometimes one node will become overloaded sooner than another one.
For example (taking the 20CN IPstream Connect nodes - we'll assume, for now, if your exchange is too small to have LLU, it's probably too small to have been upgraded to 21CN by BT);
Birmingham node is at 93%, Sheffield is at 94% (both these nodes are probably resulting in Entanet capping user speeds, to keep the nodes from overloading).
Colindale is at 53% and Faraday (wherever the Hell that is) is at 71% (users on these two nodes are probably seeing full speeds right now).

EDIT: Faraday is somewhere in the City of London

Edited by adebov (Sun 03-May-09 20:34:08)

I appriciate it's a compromise, i'm just cost concious at the moment as i'm going to have to get used to paying my own utility bills lol.

I think i'll give Vivaciti a shot, it's an activation fee of £48 and then only a one month contract, it must be better then the BT business and AOL lines i currently use at each of my parents house (the AOL is never over 150k/sec on friday afternoon and the 5.5Mb BT line never give more then 350k these days.

Surely Vivaciti will be better then these?

Thanks marc.

P.S
Thanks for that useful site http://noc.enta.net/ipsc-interconnect-status/
but which is relevant if any to IPSream?

The link to Enta interconnects is relevant to Enta and no other ISP. ADSL Max customers with Enta are no longer on IPStream, they are on a thing called IPSC (IPStream Connect), which is a provision of roughly the same service from the user point of view but delivered by BT to 21CN 10 nodes around the country where it is picked up by Enta's 21CN equipment and non-BT backhaul - instead of BT delivering it to Enta's Centrals, which are all redundant and may have gone.

There are ways for an Enta user to find out which node they are connected to, I don't have the link(s) sorry.

Vivaciti Surfwise 75 is not an Enta product so the interconnects would be irrelevant if you went that way. Similarly Titan's current offerings are not Enta.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 03-May-09 23:05:38)

Based on previous experience/reputation, if you had to choose between Titan and Vivaciti who would you pick?

Until 2 days ago i hadn't heard of either.

Thanks
Marc.

As their non-Enta ADSL Max products are from different wholesalers I think, and we have seen very few reports of either except for mad adslmax, we don't know how the actual service will perform.

My view is based purely on their posting history on the forums as Enta resellers before Enta fell from its perch, and what has happened since in the Enta forum.

The prime example was where vivaciti had a thread running about their new packages, and in it made this post announcing their LLU product. Ninety-six minutes later (the third post after that) Titan posted in it saying they would be offering the same service from the same LLU wholesaler a pound cheaper. As if either can afford a price war.

Then when vivaciti responded by cutting theirs to match Titan came in with a "First 100 customers" special offer. You can follow the relevant bit by reading down the "It's here" posts in that sub-thread until the unbelievable weasel post by Titan at Wed 01-Apr-09 22:43:50.

As you can see, that upset a number of observers, including me though I didn't post at the time. Does that answer the question?

That doesn't seem terribly sporting.

I'll try vivaciti then.

Thanks

At least Titan ADSL have their address [on the website];

A House.
In the middle of a housing estate.
Somewhere in Derby.

Compare this to Vivaciti;
Above some shop.
In a business district.
Somewhere near Southend.

And before anyone asks; yes I have checked - both the above are quite accurate (thanks to the "Bird's eye" view on Multimap.com it's quite easy to see the type of building being used by each enterprise).

Kind of get the impression "Titan Computers" is run out of some guy's kitchen?
Not that a small office space (or using your accountant's office as your registered address - there seem to be a lot of companies run from the Vivaciti address; a Spa, a Badge Maker, a Games & Software shop, plus a few dissolved companies) is too expensive to run these days.
All power to their elbows (and all that), but do either seem like a company which can afford to start undercutting another one?

Company registration number, or not, which one would you rather go with?

Nice to see free enterprise (in the ability to run a very small business from your kitchen) is alive and well in Derby!