Help me find some cheap ISP's

Hi,

I am looking to get up to 4 lines installed with differant providors.

Can anyone point me in the direction of ISP's who offer up to 12 month contracts, unlimited (or very high FUP ~100GB plus) with free install.

Must cost less than £25 including line rental. I am open to paying line rental upfront for a year.

Thanks!

Bit more information please...

Are all four lines to be in the same property?

Why four lines?

What exchange are you on?

Roughly how far from the exchange?

Do you have an existing broadband connection at the property (properties)?

Do you want any calls package with the line rental?

Do you have (or want) either TV from Sky or Virgin Media?

Edited by adebov (Sun 13-Jan-13 14:43:48)

Do the properties have existing working phone lines?

Free installation when the broadband is bundled with taking over a working line is not too difficult. Otherwise line installation/reactivation is almost certain to cost.

Have a look at Plusnet, where unlimited is either £9.99pm or £16.99pm depending on Market area of the premises.
_{Edit - £12.99 corrected to £16.99 as pointed out by XRaySpeX.}

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 13-Jan-13 22:48:19)

Are all four lines to be in the same property?

Yes, same place.

Why four lines?

I am load balancing.

What exchange are you on?

Basingstoke

Roughly how far from the exchange?

About 2KM

Do you have an existing broadband connection at the property (properties)?

I have 2 lines being installed by open reach. One is from a BE another is from Tesco. They are both installing the lines free (requires Open Reach engineer).

Do you want any calls package with the line rental?

Nope

Do you have (or want) either TV from Sky or Virgin Media?

No and no.

From your answers (requiring load balancing of four lines at a single property in Basingstoke) I assume you're either looking for redundancy or want high speed and are in an area of Basingstoke not covered by FTTC.

You mentioned you wanted a very high FUP (>100GB) or "proper" unlimited, so I assume you're going to be using a lot of data.

To be honest; £25 a month including line rental (typically £10 a month if you're with one of the four or five providers who offer discounted advance rental) isn't an awful lot for a high FUP product.

As you've already commissioned BE and Tesco to install a line each, you're pretty much stuck with them for a while on those two lines (although you may have made the right choice with BE).

Unfortunately it seems neither BE nor Tesco offer advance line rental discounts, so you're into;

£27/month for the cheapest BE unlimited + landline package (£17 for up to 10Mbps broadband, plus £10 line rental). This is the "BE value + landline" package.
If you wanted faster than 10Mbps (assuming your line will support it - unlikely at greater than 2km direct distance) it'll cost an extra £5 a month.

£20/month (well; £20.25) for Tesco's cheapest "unlimited" broadband + landline package, although at £6.50 a month it remains to be seen just how "unlimited" this will be (FUP, or "FUL" in Tesco-speak, seems to be 100GB) and they do admit to throttling of p2p, bit-torrent and "other file sharing".

I can see why you've chosen these two for starters, as they both fit into your 100GB FUP (which I assume is per connection) and £25 a month spec.

For the other two you may want to look at: -

Sky LLU, which is just shy of £25/month (for their cheapest "unlimited" broadband and line rental deal), even if you're going to take SkyTV (if you went for SkyTV, they give a £2.50/ month discount - hardly seems worth it just to get a bit of discount on your broadband).
Apparently Sky will do discounted advance line rental but it's not available over the web - you have to call them. This MSE link explains.

Talk-Talk (no, really!!). I say this as you'll then have three independent unbundled connections (for now - as BE/O2 seem to be looking to offload their UK land-line & broadband businesses, and God only knows who'll wind up buying or inheriting them) and one BT Wholesale connection (I believe Tesco still use BTW products, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong), so you'll have maximum redundancy!

All in all, I think you could get your four lines for a combined total of less than £100/month, by taking cheap or advance line rental where available.


Or you could just wait for your local cab to be enabled for FTTC and use just one of your existing (or the above) ADSL connections as a backup.
That way the FTTC will most likely give you a higher speed than the combined four ADSL products and you'll still have the redundancy.

Hope this helps.

Edited by adebov (Sun 13-Jan-13 20:45:14)

Unless I'm having one of my bad days, Tesco is C & W LLU.

I already suggested Plusnet Unlimited. So we have three. I agree not TalkTalk.

You may be right.
If Tesco is C&W LLU that eliminates the need for Talk-Talk LLU.
The OP can get his redundancy by using Plusnet, Sky, BE and Tesco.
He'll still have broadband sourced from four entirely different networks.

Consider EE Unlimited BB + Off-Peak Calls @ £21.50 pm =
£10 pm BB + £14 pm Line Rental - £30 Welcome Credit, equivalent to 3 months free.
Less £5 pm if you are an EE/Orange/T-Mobile mobile customer.

It is a BTw WBC network.

That would be the same network as Plusnet then.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

That would be the same network as Plusnet then.

I think I'd rather go down the Plusnet route than go with EE/Orange (especially considering the feedback on forums).

Yes, but managed entirely by BTw.

From what I read here, I would say that PN's 1st line support is far superior.

However OP did ask for cheap and EE can be cheaper than PN. Depends how necessary support is to OP.

But different routing out of the BT Cloud.

Another possibility is one of the TalkTalk Business Wholesael providers, who use the TalkTalk DSLAM but non-TalkTalk backhaul. Vivaciti and xilo spring to mind. Aquiss?

Not sure on the pricing for such though. May be OK with the 100GB rather than unlimited.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

However OP did ask for cheap and EE can be cheaper than PN.

The OP is after four different suppliers, over four different voice lines (as I type this I realise the stupidity of stating that four ADSL connections requires four voice lines, yet I'm continuing to type ).
There are normally only three reasons for this (higher download speed required, higher upload speed required, redundancy) and all of these, coupled with a requirement for cheapness, probably require a certain amount of give & take between cheapness and quality of connection.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Have a look at Plusnet, where unlimited is either £9.99pm or £12.99pm depending on Market area of the premises.

Shouldn't that be:
unlimited is either £9.99pm or £16.99pm depending on Market area of the premises?

However there is a current offer till 7 Feb of either £4.99pm or £8.49pm when you take their home phone.

I'm a bit surprised at the specification to be honest. But that's what the OP wants. If he wants to achieve load-balancing across all four, or even two pairs of two, I would imagine there will be a hairy setup and maintenance task. But not my subject, so maybe it's easy if you're used to it.

In reply to a post by adebov:

The OP is after four different suppliers

And I'm suggesting one of them. Just answering the OP Q!

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

. If he wants to achieve load-balancing across all four, or even two pairs of two, I would imagine there will be a hairy setup and maintenance task. But not my subject, so maybe it's easy if you're used to it.

It may even end up being hardware dependent.
If one, or more, of the DSL suppliers insist on providing ADSL routers which cannot (or cannot easily) be set to bridge mode, the OP may struggle with load-balancing hardware.
In this case something more ingenious would be called for.
Ever tried overriding that sort of thing using the clunky user interface in something like the HomeHub, or the kiddy cartoon user interface in a Speedtouch/Thomson ADSL router?

Yes. Fixed, thanks.

My eyes jumped up a block instead of a line in this section after typing the £9.99 and going back for the Market 1 price.

Well, in the office we have three lines, normally requests are NAT-ed out to one or the other depending on what they are (e.g. VOIP goes via 1 line so the rest of the traffic doesn't make the sales team complain about voice quality). But if a line is down I can quickly change what goes to which line. Or could have a round-robin arrangement (in fact we have that on the two non-VOIP lines at present).
Not really hard to maintain, and people have been known to be able to follow my simple instruction to change which line does what when I was out on the hills and they had a line fault.
If gets a bit more complicated because we have incoming connections too, but nothing really difficult.
But I'm sure the OP have decided how they are using the lines, and the request is who to get them from.

In reply to a post by adebov:

Ever tried overriding that sort of thing using the clunky user interface in something like the HomeHub, or the kiddy cartoon user interface in a Speedtouch/Thomson ADSL router?

It's easy enough on a Speedtouch/Thomson/Technocolor - telnet to it, set it up and ignore the infantile GUI.

In reply to a post by Uilebheist:

It's easy enough on a Speedtouch/Thomson/Technocolor - telnet to it, set it up and ignore the infantile GUI.

That's pretty much how I did anything on my Speedtouch

Thanks for all the replied guys. Esp thanks to Ade.

I have gone with Plusnet, Sky, BE and Tesco.

Load Balancing will be managed by a pfSense running as a VM. The DSL modems provided will be or be swapped for Techi colors (Of which I have four!).

In reply to a post by sparkphase:

Load Balancing will be managed by a pfSense running as a VM.

Fairly similar to the "something more ingenious" approach I was talking about (basically a Linux PC running as a router/load balancer). Pretty power hungry if you use a PC running 24/7 but if you're using a VM and the PC/server was going to be running anyway that's not really an issue.
Technicolor ADSL modem/routers (aka Speedtouch, aka Thomson) can be set to bridge mode (rather than router mode) and they're pretty good routers (apart from the kiddie cartoon GUI) so good choices all round.

I wonder if there's an ARM build for pfSense - would be great to get it running on a £25 Raspberry Pi with the 700MHz ARM11 CPU, although you'd need to get four Ethernet ports into the thing via USB (which may well slow it down a little)!

Edited by adebov (Fri 25-Jan-13 20:49:13)

FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi is being worked on, but it's some way from being a finished product at present. However, Raspberry Pi will never make a good pfSense box as it has one Ethernet port, which is a USB Ethernet controller.

If you want a low power pfSense box, there's several embedded x86 boards available.