The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Eusebius wrote:
Recommend you post the question to a broadband newsgroup,
such as uk.telecom.broadband.
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

Thanks for that, but I would also like to hear the experiences of this
newsgroup, since its members are pretty savvy about everything, and
obviously we all have experience with different ISPs.

Since in the vast majority of cases everything goes via BT anyway, there
isn't really a penny to choose between them. As far as the 'broadband''
bit goes.

Hmm. There's contention internal to the ISP but imho the most important
concerns are reliability & customer service for when things go wrong,
/even if a subsequent problem is BT's/. Having an ISP with good service
is essential as you have no direct contact with BT & rely on your ISP to
keep hassling them.

FWIW I always recommend Zen.

What you are really asking even if you don't know it, are issues that
are irrelevant to broadband, like news and mail servers, international
bandwidth and peering arrangements, customer service and so on.

here you need to refine the question into what you want to do with your
internet connection, and how savvy you are at fixing it.

An important question is estimated download requirements per month as
they'll vary much between users.

Any good ISP should meet reasonable requirements for mail & peering.
Similarly, if you want binary news provision, virtually every ISP will
fail to offer reasonable retention & completion - for binaries I'd
always go with a third party such as Giganews or a reseller (I'm
currently with PowerUsenet).

--
Michael
m r o z a t u k g a t e w a y d o t n e t