No traffic shaping, port blocking, throttling unlimited ISP

Currently have a Digital Region connection on the Cantley exchange: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/SLCLY. Before that we were with ADSL24 for a couple of years and before that AOL for 10+ years.

With these news that Digital Region is falling apart we're looking for a new ISP. We need one that doesn't traffic shape, port block, throttle or any of that rubbish. Also would need some form of unlimited, the 8PM to 8AM unlimited with ADSL24 worked well although obviously 24/7 unlimited would be even better. Monthly usage will be 2 to 3TB a month.

The best option at the moment is looking ADSL24 but other options I've found are ClaranetSOLO and Vivaciti. Presumably all the big names (BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Plusnet) are to be avoid? Others like AAISP are too expensive!

Do people have any suggestions?

Sky no traffic management, BT have relented to the point no-one complains, and even TalkTalk seems to be fairly light on it.

If this FTTC or a move back to ADSL2+?

Would like to stay FTTC. So Sky has zero traffic managemnet, ie: they don't slow down torrents?

In reply to a post by unhappyaoluser:

Monthly usage will be 2 to 3TB a month.

what a complete joke how the hell can someone use so much

In reply to a post by unhappyaoluser:

Others like AAISP are too expensive!
Do people have any suggestions?

yes pay the correct charge for your usage people like you make me sick expect to get everything for next to nothing too expensive DON'T DOWNLOAD SO MUCH

Please copy & paste what this checker says about your phone number. Remember to blank out the number on the output .

Correct

Do the maths. You are using almost the full capacity of a 10 Mbps leased line. As other threads point out the internet connection & traffic charges will cost an ISP of the order of £100 per month plus infrastructure costs, etc. Any small ISP that knowingly accepts your business is operating a unviable business model unless they charge for bandwidth.

Large ISPs can survive by pooling extreme users with hundreds of others who use much less capacity. However, it is clear that this model can't survive in the longer term as average usage increases and bandwidth costs come to dominate infrastructure costs. So in practice you are going to be rationed sooner or later - either by queuing (congestion) or by contract terms.

Advertising "unlimited" contracts is a form of Gresham's Law - bad money drives out good. It works for a while but eventually you attract too many extreme users and you have no incentive to upgrade capacity, so that everyone suffers from congestion. Any user with any understanding of how these things work should avoid any ISP that offers unlimited contracts if they have any real choice.

Any user with any understanding of how these things work should avoid any ISP that offers unlimited contracts if they have any real choice.

Which is one of the reasons I went with AAISP. The other being that they charge proportionally to your usage (use more, pay more). So 2-3TB a month (per the OP's initial post) is going to work out insanely expensive with them (by my calculations, 60 off-peak units a month which comes in at £234 a month, just on units alone, not including line rental or any provisioned ADSL/FTTC service charge). But the plus side is that there is very little chance he/she will opt to go with AAISP due to this, so AAISP will not have to deal with 2-3TB per month on their network, or indeed any other users like that - leaving their network uncongested and running at full speed for everyone else.

Which is what I will quite happily pay them for.

To the OP: Do not take this personally, but 2-3TB a month is obscene. For laughs, I worked out how you could sensibly fit that onto an AAISP provisioned service. So, AAISP have 4 hours every morning which they class as night-time special. This is charged at a rate of 1TB/unit. 3TB is approx 100GB per day. So to download 100GB a day with AAISP at the cheapest possible rate, you'd have to fit that into this 4 hour window. That means you would need to be downloading at 7MB/sec solidly, from 2am-6am every day. So you would need at least a 80/20 FTTC service and be yards away from your nearest cabinet for a start, to even get that. Assuming not to use the connection outwith this time slot, that means you'd be chomping through 3 units a month just from using the AAISP night-time special rate at 7Mb/sec constant download.

I've had a quick look at my bandwidth records for the previous 12 months and I clock in at about 1.5-2TB per year. So if Sky/TalkTalk and the others are happy to take on customers like you, I'm staying well clear of them.

Edited by deleted (Thu 22-Aug-13 13:41:35)

You must download a lot of Linux ISO's!!!!!!

In reply to a post by unhappyaoluser:

. Monthly usage will be 2 to 3TB a month.

Do you have a market stall or do you punt your dodgy DVDs pub to pub?