Leaving Talktalk Fibre

Hi

My 18 month contract with talktalk is coming to an end and I would like some recommendations about which ISP I should move to, I have talktalk fibre which gets me around 30mbps connection but suffer from traffic shaping every evening and poor customer service when things go wrong. My priorities are no traffic shaping, fast and also reliable. no long term contract and good customer service are desirable but not essential. In terms of cost im not that fussed, im prepared to pay good money for a good service.

Shortest contract will be 12 months.

Does it have to be unlimited?

unlimited isnt mandatory, i could live with 50/100gb

Maybe IDNet http://www.thinkbroadband.com/isp/idnet/package/1245...

Never thought I'd say this but *gulp* Sky fibre has been very good for me over the past month. I moved over from BT Infinity in March and the whole process was easy, and the Sky "switch squad" didn't even need a MAC code from me (despite the fact that I got one from BT anyway).

The most noticeable difference using Sky is their routing, and throughput of P2P application at peak times. My line was capped back down to 40Mbps (because of the Sky product I went for), and this seems to have completely turned off DLM interleaving. My pings to bbc.co.uk went from 31ms on BT to 7ms on Sky. Whereas BT would route me through Gloucester or even Preston and then back to my hometown (London), Sky seems to have fewer hops through Easynet, and they're more direct. I haven't been throttled once and things seem as stable as they were on BT Infinity for 18 months - but with a much lower latency.

I am a sky customer already, however the fibre pro from idnet also looks pretty good.

With the money you're saving on TT you could use a VPN to bypass any traffic shaping. If it ain't broke...

I tried that for awhile with HMA but lost about half of my speed. talktalk have been really poor with me at customer service, ive gone weeks without fibre when it goes down a few times.

I can recommend Sky Fibre Unlimited Pro, I've had it for about 11 months and there hasn't been any slow downs, I'm not sure if it would been the same in London though. I get full 80/20 sync.

Here are some speed tests:
http://speedtest.net/result/2665266279.png
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13671...

I also sometimes use a VPN (on my router), it's the OpenVPN type and it adds only about 1ms of ping and loses about a 'meg' or 2 (because lzo compression is used I suspect, not because they don't have enough bandwidth) of speed if using the London VPN, it's very good.

Edited by deleted (Sun 28-Apr-13 18:40:55)

out of interest, is it a personal VPN server or a service you offer? im thinking about doing this.