0.5Mb Connection - Broadband for second line

I live 4 km from this exchange: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php?q=turvey and have generally had a 0.5Mb connection. The house is prone to lightening strikes and the line to faults. This week we're at 120k (if we get a sync) following last weeks storms, and Zen seems really reluctant to get BT out to have a look despite me replacing the router and running off the test socket for them. I assume it costs them money to have BT look?

We have a second phone line in the house. I'm thinking of running a second adsl provider on it so if one line goes down again we have a backup.

Our total use per month is 10-15Gb. No gaming. The maximum connection speed we've ever had is 750k, and normally we have 500k, so I wonder if there's money saving in not paying for a 20Mb connection. I like to avoid ISPs that throttle as they throttle everyone evenly and our connection doesn't have the overhead to lose more.

I'm looking for suggestions for a provider on the second line. Reasonable support would be very useful as the line is prone to faults once every year or two. But cheaper than the current £24 would also be handy

Any ideas? Reading around these forums maybe a Be basic package might suit, though Plus Net look cheap enough for a backup line. Any experiences with support from those guys?

Unfortunately you cannot get Be on that exchange. You can only get BT Wholesale based ISPs.

Plusnet as a backup line may suit, but you are looking at an 18-month contract and £11.99pm after the first three months. (I'm not sure if you can get a 12-month contract if you provide your own router. That may only be for existing legacy-product customers re-grading).

Newnet are the next most cost-effective but the 3GB allowance on the cheaper package would mean you were literally looking at a backup service.

I recommend you look at AAISP on the second line and see how things go. Small daytime allowance, good off-peak, short unmetered time overnight.

Not cheap, but possibly if it you like it you could later migrate the Zen line to a cheaper smaller package somewhere and use the AAISP as line 1.

Importantly the two lines could have quite a different performance. You would only know after connection.

Have a look at these comparisons.

Thanks - I'd not noticed the charging policy from Plusnet there. I guess there's also an aspect of getting what you pay for (if lucky).

AAISP might be a bit marginal on daytime use - the recession hasn't been friendly to the household, and there are two of us likely to be using the internet during the day. Newnet might be an idea on one of the10Gb packages once I get my head around what they all are.

Might be worth taking one of the monthly contract packages out so we can cancel if the second line turns out to be worse than the first! If I can end up with a different £15 ish package on each line then that would only be a £6/month increase on the current charges with added redundancy.

Is there anyone else I ought to be looking at in that range?

Newnet do 3GB , 12GB or 20GB in your price area so I don't know where your 10GB comes from.

With the extra info you just gave I suggest your first step is to migrate to AAISP on Pro with the 4GB day-time allowance and try to fit in with it.

The reason I recommend that move is the AAISP money-back pledge on getting line problems sorted, and several users have reported that AAISP are successful in getting BT to fix things where even the other good ISPs have failed.

Again, with the new info from you I'm not sure Plusnet is suitable. See the traffic management/throttling on this page.

Your idea of getting another service on the second line would be a follow-up course of action if the above doesn't prove effective, or even get a mobile dongle for emergency use. Quite a few people do that. In that situation you could use MS connection sharing in network setup, assuming you are on Windows.

Zen and IDNet are the good ones we haven't discussed. I wouldn't bother looking for any others.

True enough it would make sense spending the extra to get the support. Two cheap ISPs on different lines could just mean 2 sets of off-shore call centres if things went wrong. Very good point there - many thanks for your advise.

Just for interest, I've just been speaking to our next door neighbours who have been having exactly the same problems since the storm. Suggests a second line here would have had the trouble too. I guess others sharing the exchange had the same problem as today it suddenly seems fixed for me and next door. I think the problem made it through to BT and the lightening damaged bit was swapped because we are both seeing a step change today.

To be fair on Zen they had reached the point of accepting that I'd done all I could and were at the point of contacting BT but constructing decent info was difficult as I couldn't sync.

I've probably answered my own question - it's ease of working with support that I seek, and a second line would probably not have been of benefit on this occasion.

The fact a second line would very possibly have the same problem was in my head as well, but I didn't say it as I expected you to see the sense of what I was suggesting in my second post instead. Which you did.

It didn't occur to me that exchange or green cabinet or whatever BT equipment was damaged could be the problem, as I would have thought that would have been sorted quite quickly.

Anyway, it's good it seems you are sorted. Good luck .

And you have useful info about other ISPs sitting here as well now.