Internet Service Providers

[dcolagirl]

Hi guys, Am about to (finally) get a PC at home and am considering different ISP's. I am in the UK. BT seem v.expensive, Tiscali seem OK, NTL have a terrible reputation, V21 has been recommended but the cheapest one I have found is Highstream. Anyone heard of them? Anyone using them - successfully or otherwise? I will be signing up in about 7 days so if anyone is currently using them and is prepared to give me some feedback, I will put your e-mail as a referral and you will get a months free service

DC - how are you?

I'm interested too/ Since getting my home PC back up and running a couple of months ago I have spent alot of time on the net, but Idon't have a monthly subscription! Therefore, I'm in for a horrible shock when I see my phone bill!

I am curious... if I sign up for a monthly subscription wil that really be the only charge I pay even if a surf 4 hours every evening ??

We have BT anytime at the moment until we get broadband. It's about £17 a month and you get 150 hours of surfing time for that. Most of the time I get through first go, except sometimes on the after school period. They have a cut off period after about 2 hours at busy times I think, so you have to reconnect if you are on longer. Never had any real trouble with them so I can't tell you what customer service is like sorry.

We have AOL at £15.99 per month with unlimited time online for that. So there's no extra on the phone bill at all and we spend a lot of time online, including overnight sometimes if dp is downloading something. It also seems reliable in terms of not disconnecting you if you're idle for a while - we had Supanet before and that was terrible - it often took 50 attempts to log on and then would disconnect you whenever it felt like it. That was an anytime deal too but was definitley not worth it.

Hi M2T - fine thanks, still not pg! You OK?

This Highstream deal is £8.99 a month for unlimited time online, no additional phone bills and you can go on anytime. After 2 hours you get kicked off and have to go back in and after 20 minutes of no mouse movement it shuts up too. Other than that, it seems fine.

AOL and BT seem to be the 2 most expensive and freeserve seems very popular although not as cheap as Highstream. The other thing I should mention is that there is only 1 month notice for cancellation too with Highstream. Sounds like a bargain and I can't resist one of those.....

I have no personal experience of any of the ISPs you list dcolagirl (DH is a broadband addict), but there are some reviews of Highstream here . There are a few good reviews but then some that say you get what you pay for and that they have very bad customer service.

In general, though it costs more I would usually go with a company that has experience and stability. There are so many reasons why an ISP can go bust, and they go very quickly.

This might be helpful, or not.

We have the same AOL deal as www - there was a bad patch a year or so ago when the connection hung or broke annoyingly often but it hasn't for ages now. Their tech help is excellent.

We are about to connect broadband, also with them - I had an ex-BT engineer come to fit a new socket this week (30 quid - BT charge over 100!!!!) and he said he would go with BT for broadband too, but never mind, we've done it now (and AOL are giving away the modem etc until the end of June.)

Now I've got a question, if anyone knows, please - is the AOL broadband charge of 27.99 on top of the 15.99 or instead? (If it's instead then it won't cost us any extra at all because we have had a second BT phone line for the internet which we will be cancelling.)

The charge in instead of.

Oh, goody, thanks, pie!

UK Online - £13.99 a month for unlimited access, very reliable, almost never unable to log on, good customer service. Logs you off after 2 hours, but I'm rarely on that long.

We are on Virgin 24/7 for £13.49 a month, they are very reliable. DH is looking into Broadband as he needs it for his business and I was recently sent an e-mail from Tiscali offering all the bits that you need to get you up and running on Broadband for free and £40 voucher for virgin wines. Unfortunately I don't think we can take this deal up as it would cause alot of problems for DH to change e-mail address so we may go Broadband with Virgin instead.