I use BT and have done so for the past 3 years. Mainly for their reliability and the peace of mind that not all of the helpdesks are out of country. The only downside is that they are a Windows house.
The major problem I get though is contention but unfortunately that you'll get with any ISP that requires you to use a BT Land Line when they quote a maximum connection speed of 8 Mb. Where you see connection speeds above this quoted, that ISP has their own equipment in the local exchange so your traffic is routed directly to the ISP. That being said, unless you are transferring loads of info between users on the same ISP, I wouldn't go there for some time yet, as as soon as your traffic hits the www, it'll hit the same contention bottle necks that the 8 Mb users do, and really give you nothing extra. Unless you need the higher upload speeds of course. And continuing about contention, just because you have the ability to receive at 8 Mb does not mean that you may ever get to that speed reliably as the only place in the entiure route that doesn't suffer from contention is that from your home to the local exchange - no matter what the Sales literature may say. And just to stir it up some more, you could have two ADSL connections from the same ISP sitting side by side and there is no guarantee that they will operate at the same speeds either. I have seen extreme cases where a number of ADSL lines have been aggregated together to provide high bandwidth and the speeds on the actual ADSLs themselves have varied from 1.2 Mb to 6.8Mb consistently! Ian -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of TheVeech Sent: 19 April 2007 18:03 To: British Ubuntu Talk Subject: Re: [ubuntu-uk] Orange broadband On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 13:10 +0100, Dianne Reuby wrote: > I've had a good report on Orange broadband, from someone who uses it to > run his business. But the CD only list Windows, and website requirements > state Windows. I've asked about Linux, but while I wait for a reply, > does anyone else use Orange broadband with Ubuntu? I set up a connection with Orange and didn't bother with the CD - IMHO no-one should bother with these things, even if they were to work with Linux. Just remember the people who design those disks are only a few steps up in the same food chain as Customer Support people. Sorry I can't remember the specifics of the setup but, if I can dig something out, I'll get back to you ASAP. Accessing the settings is a doddle, though, via your web browser. Connect the Ethernet cable, get the page up (the address of this I can't recall, though have a look at the orange site for instructions for manual setup or call Orange), enter your username and password and you're in. In short, it can be done. The Orange site should have some info for securing your wireless connection. If you're unsure about this, though, post back. Quality-wise, I can't judge yet. I do know I kept getting an error message when trying to send email with my gmail account via Evolution, which wasn't happening with other connections that I use. Someone's mentioned the high quality of Virgin Media's broadband. This I definitely agree with. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/