Moving home

Hello.

It is my first thread&post on this forum.
I have been ntl/virgin media customer for 7 years.
Right now, I have 20M/756K/£29 line.
Stable line. No throttling on eMule or binaries/usenet. Don't know about torrents. Unlimited downloads.

Unfortunately, I am moving home and VM is not present in the new area. I have googled a bit and found 2 reasonable packages.

BE
# up to 24Mb download speed
# up to 1.3 Mb upload speed
# only £17.50 a month on a 12 month contract and no connection fee

and

02 Premium Broadband
# superfast broadband with up to 20Mb download speed
# only £14.68 a month for non-02 mobile customers
# up to 1.3Mb upload speed
# unlimited downloads subject to fair use policy

Both seem like good packages. Both "advertise" unlimited downloads.
What I would like to know whether their service is good? Do they deliver promised speeds? Do they throttle any kind of traffic? Binaries is very important for me, I am paying for external usenet SP (astraweb (has nothing to do with my nick though ))

What would you say about the aforementioned deals?
Do you have any better suggestions/advices?
Thank you in advance,
A.

A few more things I forgot to mention.
I will have to subscribe to BT phone line, correct?

I have found that VM have some ADSL 8M and 16M packages but I am not sure how good they are and what upload speed is.

Either Be or O2 LLU are the flavour of the year. You probably won't do better. Search for user MKD who references a comparison document he has done.

Can you get Be/O2 LLU? See http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php

Virgin ADSL is among the poorer ISPs.

You will need a phone line from BT and the speeds you get will depend upon your line distance to the exchange and unless you are very close will not be the maximums quoted.

As far as I am aware neither Be nor O2 throttle or traffic shape currently.

Thanks a lot.

How do I use the link you provided?
I entered post code, it told me:

Bedford SMBF Bedfordshire East

What does it mean? If click on Bedford, it gives me info about whole town, not just my post code...I think.

That means your post code should be served by exchange

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/SMBF

which does have Be/O2 LLU.

(page down, LLU Operator presence on right of screen)

Another decent choice is Sky LLU, if and only if, you want to subscribe to Sky TV.

O2 and Be are both owned by Telefonica SA and both run at the exchange end on Be's equipment.

Be is normally regarded as the province of geeks (non-insultingly) and gamers. Users on the top two products can alter settings via their control panel such as target noise margin options and setting gaming mode.

Though in my opinion those aren't as good as using your own router and tweaking the noise margin, and phoning support to get interleaving turned of is more effective than gaming mode, as although that turns off interleaving, (so FECs), other error correction routines remain in place that support also remove.

If you are merely a normal or even heavy user and not gaming then O2 is probably the better choice.

The link to MKD's excellent document.

It is worth noting that BE's T & Cs changed in the last couple of days and by the sound of it are less favourable to customers. I haven't read them yet.

O2 T & Cs I don't think have changed. As they will have a much higher proportion of low-usage users I think it possible things will stay OK with them. Unless there is a mass exodus of heavy users from Be to O2 .

Thank you all for your replies. Very helpful!

Be is normally regarded as the province of geeks (non-insultingly) and gamers. Users on the top two products can alter settings via their control panel such as target noise margin options and setting gaming mode.

This bit is way over what I understand. Although, I m not a total noob, I didn't deal with ADSL up until now. I will get a good ADSL Linsys wireless router for myself but I am not going to tweak settings for the line itself. I don't understand them.

I will read through T&Cs of both of them before I choose any.

I found something very confusing today.

Exchange: Bedford (2196m away)
Availability checks
ADSL available at ~3Mbps
ADSL2+ available at ~3Mbps
Cable services not available

3M? only? What is a point for paying for 24M?
3M is nothing nowdays

ADSL bandwidth depends on distance, shorter lines are better.
If that really is your line length you should get around 15Mb downstream.
3Mb indicates a much longer line or perhaps aluminium instead of copper.

Yeah, I know it depends on distance. But the house is in the town. 15M would just fine. Is there any way to check it?