Moving house, no cable.... supplier advice?

For the last few years I've been really happy with Virgin broadband. I've had cable from them with TV / phone etc. I'd rather not have had my p2p traffic throttled, and their customer service has never been helpful - but I've hardly ever had to use it. The main things important to me have been:
- reliable, with only small fluctuations in speed. I never really notice any major slowdown. I've had only a few service interuptions in 3 years and always for only a few hours max.
- low latency. never notice any major fluctuations and connect reliably to uk gaming servers at around 20ms

So all's rosy. Except I'm moving house in a few weeks and I've discovered from the Virgin Media website about my new house:
"You're not in a fibre optic area, but can still get our brilliant broadband down your phone line."

Having been with Virgin for so long (and NTL before that) I'm back to step one as far as working out the quality of the other options.

My new exchange says "LLU services: no" on SamKnows, so that cuts down my options to
-Virgin broadband down a phoneline
- Sky
- BT (or resellers)

Is that right? Are there any other options I would do well to look at?

Does anyone know how the Virgin broadband down a phoneline compares to Virgin cable? If it was similar (with just a lower max d/l) I would be happy with that.

What scares me is all the threads I've found on this forum with gamers complaining about ping on bt / skybb. I've always enjoyed good pings and if I couldnt get a good ping I would be gutted. Gutted enough to regret moving house.

I also work from home quite regularly dealing with quite large files so a connection crawling at dial up speeds is just not an option. Even for just a small %age of the time...

I'm sorry if this is posted in the wrong place. I had a look round and couldnt decide...

Edited by cr0wn3r (Thu 13-Aug-09 10:52:47)

Just found a link to Zen and it seems they can do their service over any bt line.

I gave them a ring and they seem to swear by their own quality / support etc. They look the best option so far.

We can supply Broadband of a BT telephone line, a list of our home products can be found here
If you need any further information don't hesitate in giving us a call.

Kind regards

Just to reassure us, can you post the samknows link for your exchange?

But accepting what you say then every ADSL service you can get will be BT Wholesale Based - including Sky, Virgin and BT Retail.

All three of those are poor. The performance depends on three main things.

First your distance (or more correctly line length) from the exchange determines the maximum connection speed. So just watch out for that if you haven't already got the new property fixed. It is a good idea to try to establish connection not download speeds in the immediate vicinity though such figures aren't a guarantee. Two lines to the same premises can vary by thousands of kbps.

Second is something that tends to get corrected in time - congestion at the exchange. BT generally add capacity.

Third and extremely important is the capacity the ISP rents off BT Wholesale at the ISP end.

If adequate amounts are available then your connection will deliver a throughput close to the maximum on your line, with good pings. (The maximum throughput on a line is at least 15% lower than the connection speed but that is a whole different question. The explanation is irrelevant in this post).

If that provision is inadequate, so as to minimise costs and maximise profits per customer, then the performance can vary from good at 3am to medium during week days to poor or dire after 5pm and at weekends. See above re your list of three.

Such ISPs also nearly always impose undisclosed FUP usage limits and may throttle you severely for many days as a result, independent of their own congestion. (Same thing, heavy users make the congestion worse, so don't let them).

A few comparisons follow. Bear in mind that Sky ratings are a combination of LLU/cable and BT-based. So as Virgin Cable is good, and Sky LLU is good, the ratings for BT-based from them has to be lower. You mention a good one - Zen, so I include them in both comparisons to simplify things. Can only compare 6 at a time - but it is the main site for these forums so you can make up your own sets).

Poor but including the "good" Zen for comparison. Remember to reduce the Sky and Virgin readings.

Good. Some complex decisions to make between those though depending on your usage volume and pattern.

There are other smaller niche players such as one of the Entanet resellers (Entanet do not sell direct) and claranet.

Of the Entanet resellers I recommend ADSL24 and vivaciti. Vivaciti also offer a non-Enta package Surfwise 75 - which is an FUP not a fixed allowance so can be exceeded occasionally.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 13-Aug-09 13:31:39)

It's exactly the right place!

Thanks for the detailed info.

The exchange is this one
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/EMKGWOR

I'll have a second read through the post and check the comparisons.

I guess the main issue is that if it's all BT Wholesale anyway then even Zen can't improve the service..... apart from be friendlier on the phone. ?

As the crow flies the house is between 3 and 4 miles from the exchange. I'm guessing that doesnt bode particularly well either.

Just realised my comment about wholesale as being invalid, and already dealt with in your post by the fact that defferent resellers will sell different capacity etc to more / fewer users.

Theres a whole thread on the subject just down the page as well which I've spotted.

If its 3-4 miles as crow flies, thats 6km or so, which translates to 9km of telephone line, so expect around 0.5Mbps if lucky.

What does the checker say for the telephone number at the property now? Or if they have broadband now, find out what their connection speed is.

If your only expecting speeds of 0.5 mbps it's pointless in my opinion of getting e.g ADSL 24

Bt broadband unlimited lets you download 100 gb a month and if you exceed this they cap you to half a meg download during peak times. If your only getting half a meg in the 1st place - then it's hardly a cap is it!?

Just my two pence on it