ISP Needed for student house

Hi. Moving into new house so need to set up an internet connection.

We're on the Broomhill exchange (SLBH), and there's going to be 4-5 people on the net so it needs to be unlimited downloads and preferably capable of running torrents and a bit of gaming.

Need a degree of value, so can't just go for BE Unlimited - need the most basic line rental possible as we don't plan on using a home phone line for anything other than internet.

What would y'all recommend?

Thanks all.

In terms of choice you have

FTTC
Virgin Media - potentially 100Mbps if willing to pay
Digital Region
Sky
Be

Sky would be cheaper than Be Unlimited, if you took all their bundles, but then total price might be too high.

NOTE In a shared house if one person fills up the connection with downloads this will cause gaming problems.

Thanks for the reply. More looking for recommendations and such. Sky seems to be rated quite highly on here.

Don't expect miracles. Obviously if 4 people are torrenting at once it will be really slow but just need the capability to torrent so no throttling, or less throttling i guess if it isnt available at a reasonable price point

you only have three options , Be , Sky and a C&W reseller . All others with in your budget range , traffic manage , slow your speed at peak times if you used to much , or have usage caps .

I personally feel a ISP that traffic manage P2P is a good option on a shared line , but as i have a shared line and don't use P2P and do game , i guess i would think that .

Edited by deleted (Tue 30-Aug-11 22:33:53)

Sky broadband is £12.50 a month even if you don't take TV and line rental/sky talk. Not bad for an unlimited service. I would say BT are more technically capable but Sky for the price are difficult to beat (on an unbundled exchange).

Obviously if 4 people are torrenting at once it will be really slow but just need the capability to torrent so no throttling, or less throttling

You might actually be better off with an ISP that throttles/shapes P2P traffic - that way the P2P traffic won't affect interactive traffic as much!

For the "unlimited with little or no throttling/shaping" Be would be my general recommendation for ADSL for £17/month if you can live with "up to 12mbit" (or your line is too long to support much more) or £22 for potentially faster.

For FTTC the only unlimited option I know of is the £28/month BT package though that does come with shaping/throttling, and IIRC you have to take an 18 month contract which may make it unsuitable for a student house.

In both those cases you are going to need to pay line rental on top of that price.

One important thing to note with regard to P2P activity is that saturating your link upstream can severely throttle both downstream bandwidth and interactive performance, so try to limit uploading to something like 90% of your lines maximum rate. You may need to enforce this (getting other people to co-operate with bandwidth management never works well IMO, as people tend to assume "oh it'll be fine not to bother this once" every time) by sitting a small Linux box between the router and the rest of the network and implementing a little upstream traffic shaping there.