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Welcome to Mumsnet's shopping board. Whether you are after a new family car or a great new coffee machine this is the board for you. Share product recommendations and reviews here. Related: Discuss clothes and fashion on our Style and beauty forum. Check out Swears By to find the products Mumsnetters love and our reviews section to see the best baby and child products put through their paces.
Shopping
What Broadband?
tallulah · 03/10/2004 12:49
I'm so fed up with my internet connection, (& of ringing home for a lift to get 1571 on) that we are thinking of getting Broadband. There seems to be so much to consider, as well as cost ,& I'm totally confused! Doesn't help that we have Mac OSX & not Windows, which seems to be a problem for some ISP.
So far we are comparing Tiscali, Wanadoo, BT, Virgin & Tesco. All have plus & minus points like limits & speed & connection charges.
Can anyone assist?! Anyone give me additional plus/minus. Are you with one of these & love/hate them, or with someone else? What do I need to think about & what difference does the speed/limits make?
pixiefish · 03/10/2004 14:20
I'm with Wanadoo and I've got the option 1 package which is limited in usage but only costs £18 pm which is £3 more than I was paying for dial up... I've only just had it and still not used to the phone r9inging when I'm on the net!!!
One real disadvantage is that I used to leave the net on when I didn't want to be disturbed as no one could get through... that doesn't work anymore Quite happy with Wanadoo ( BUT it took them 10 working days to enable the line- it was a horror waiting)
JanH · 03/10/2004 14:27
We have AOL, it's £25 a month now I think; as we used to have a separate line with dial-up, and paid £11 (?) line rental for that plus £15 for non-broadband AOL, it was no extra at all.
Service is good and reliable, no connection charge and they provide 3 of those dangly boxes you have to plug into the phone sockets as well as the modem. We have had no probs.
Here is a comparison table...doesn't include AOL though for some reason!
Dizzylizzy · 03/10/2004 14:27
I have bt yahoo, and I am more than happy with it, I pay £29.99 per month and we have been with them 12 months, the customer service is BRILLIANT and we have never had a problem, although it is one of the most expensive packages I wouldn't change to a cheaper one purely because its so good.
KangaMummy · 03/10/2004 16:10
I am with TISCALI and have had nothing but problems their call centre is in India they just take you through screens and flowcharts, they do not return phone calls. I have had BT engineers here about 9 times to try to solve the vas number of problems I have had.
TISCALI have tried to provide me with a 2 MEG connection but will not admit that I am too far from the exchange for that speed.
BTW all I wanted was 150 kbps or 3x service for £15.99
Everyone says that I shouyld have 512 service but TISCALI will not do that. Anyway rant over just schoose TISCALI if you want to spend ages talking to INDIA if you have a problem.
moomina · 03/10/2004 16:25
Am using Wanadoo and have had no probs so far. Paying £17.99 a month and didn't know there was a limit - I haven't reached it yet but then I don't download very much so maybe that's it. It's certainly fast enough for me.
I would recommend them - they're cheap, seem reliable and if it's just for normal home use then I think it's a good deal. The only downside was the long wait to get it set up - it took 10 working days like for pixiefish and it was a PITA. Apart from that, pretty good!
Flip · 03/10/2004 16:30
I'm with NTL and it costs £17.99 a month. The connection is pretty good and very rarely has any down time. The band width is split between three computers on our home network and is still pretty fast. I'm happy with them.
Beccles · 03/10/2004 19:09
This reply has been deleted
Message withdrawn
SofiaAmes · 03/10/2004 22:26
I have ZEN and think they are great. We have them at work too. In 2 years we haven't had a minute of trouble. This website is a non-partisan site with loads of good info and reviews about all the providers (and equipment).
tallulah · 04/10/2004 17:30
Thanks for all your help. I'm looking at the basic bogstandard cheapest Broadband. Kangamummy perhaps I'll knock Tiscali off my list.
pupuce · 04/10/2004 17:34
And just checked performance versus AOL and Tiscali.... Vispa does much better !
MUMINAMILLION · 04/10/2004 17:34
We are also with Wanadoo - £17.99/mth and free connection. Very fast and reliable. Would definately recommend it.
pupuce · 04/10/2004 17:41
Sofia- great website.... makes me really happy with our choice... but Zen seems to be the best overall...
The bigger names : AOL, Wanadoo, Tiscali don't perform very well according to your website!
fee77 · 04/10/2004 17:43
I have to disagree with Flip, i am with NTL and they are useless - just waiting for the contract to run out. DH was on hold for 40mins the other day and internet lost for 48 hours, with no explanation. i was going stir crazy!!!!!!!!
lou33 · 04/10/2004 17:52
We have bt broadband , but i disagree with their customer service being any good.
SofiaAmes · 04/10/2004 22:26
Yes I picked zen because of the website and because we had them at work too. I am not exagerating when I say we haven't had a minute of trouble. In fact the one time I thought I had trouble, I called up zen and they poiltely walked me through all my setting and it turned out to be a wrong setting on my modem and nothing to do with them. (It didn't cost me anything to have them sort this out for me, by the way)
GeorginaA · 04/10/2004 22:32
We have Nildram who I would recommend to anyone.
*Extremely good service (we used them in our last property too). They did all the chasing with BT for us both times and were very good at getting us up and running very quickly.
*We pay £22.99 a month for unlimited broadband.
*Very stable. We play (or at least used to!) a lot of online games, and it was quite amazing how much downtime some of the other big broadband suppliers seemed to have so we do seem to have picked one of the better ones.
GeorginaA · 04/10/2004 22:34
Meant to say they also do a £15.99 pay as you go (i.e. a limit on how much you download then you pay extra) but asked dh and he said he catagorically wouldn't recommend a non-unlimited broadband package to anyone.
HelloMama · 04/10/2004 22:39
We use PIPEX which is great because you pay a set amount every month and you have no minimum downloads, or time online or whatever. Can't comment on the customer service because we have not had a single problem with it. They were very quick to connect us and send us our modem, etc (all free of charge). My whole family use this service and both my brothers do something to do with computers / IT so they recommended it to us (they don't work for PIPEX though)!
marz · 05/10/2004 12:39
May I add a question here....should you just get a basic package or get one with filters, firewalls etc like the more expensive BT ones? Is it better to get your own antivirus and firewall packages? Advantages /disadvantages please??
teadrinker · 05/10/2004 13:01
Personally would say get your own security software. Much cheaper and they are practically foolproof to set up nowadays. Stick disc in and answer questions on the screen kinda thing.
My dh is software engineer so I live with this sort of thing.
If it was ever a toss-up between getting rid of computer or me I'd be out.....
teadrinker · 05/10/2004 13:02
p.s. forgot to say
must consider cost of updates on any software
marz · 05/10/2004 20:14
teadrinker, I would take you in if you were to be ousted in favour of the computer!! so...to pick your brains further....which is best software? I always used Symantec but is this best for firewall too?
Tissy · 05/10/2004 21:05
Pipex here, too. 19.99 permonth, no problems at all.
An excellent free Firewall is Zonealarm.
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