Internet choices

[classic33]

Can you elaborate? I have a Tiscali/TalkTalk email address and I have been using other ISPs for the last couple of years. The Tiscali emails still seem to work fine.

A check show that the following go the end of this month
The addresses affected by the closure are:

• Orange.net
• Orangehome.co.uk
• Wanadoo.co.uk
• Freeserve.co.uk
• Fsbusiness.co.uk
• Fslife.co.uk
• Fsmail.net
• Fsworld.co.uk
• Fsnet.co.uk

 

[Flick of the Elbow]

Been with virgin media for 6 years, touch wood, very happy with their service, no problems at all.

 

[Roadhump]

• A check show that the following go the end of this month
  The addresses affected by the closure are:
  

  • Orange.net
  • Orangehome.co.uk
  • Wanadoo.co.uk
  • Freeserve.co.uk
  • Fsbusiness.co.uk
  • Fslife.co.uk
  • Fsmail.net
  • Fsworld.co.uk
  • Fsnet.co.uk

They all look like older ISPs that have probably suffered from the popularity of BT etc. Is it a case of linked email addresses being lost when they are discontinued?

Although my tiscali address still works, I rarely use it as I find it slow and less user friendly than others. That works even if I don't check it for months, but on the other hand some fall dormant after a certain length of time if you don't use them. I created a BT email address to run a second fantasy football team. I just happened to try to open it and it wouldn't play. I got a message to say that because I hadn't used it for a few months (6 I think), it had been de-activated, but I could reactivate if I wanted to. I didn't because I don't need it for email, I can still use it to log into my fantasy league account.

 

[GrumpyGregry]

I have BT Infinity. I walk past the exchange on my way to work, 500 metres away, each weekday morning.

BT don't know what the word Infinity means. No fibre here as it is an historic market town and thusly not a priority.

I have my hub/broadband router on a time switch which restarts it once a week in the wee small hours. This seems to bump the bandwidth. The signal to noise ratio on the circuit is appalling, latency is measured in seconds and the dropped packets on a ping can reach 50% but I gave up trying to get BT to do anything about any of that years ago. Because the folk in their call centres cannot deviate from their scripts.

Why do I stay? Because all the ISP's are as bad as each other, and they all rely on the same BT fabric.

 

[John the Monkey]

Everybody has different experiences with ISPs. Personally, I would rather eat my own right arm that return to the clutches of TalkTalk or PlusNet. They really didn't seem to give a monkey's when they screwed up and left us without a service for days on end. Currently I have BT Infinity. It's not cheap but it seems to be fairly reliable so far.

We were with Virgin (after they took over NTL) at our old place, and had no problems at all, until they were pointlessly obdurate when we moved house (about keeping our email addresses). We changed to BT then, and have found the service pretty reliable (I can't remember the last outage, and the kit seems ok).

The biggest problem is that they're a bit monolithic - when our BT Vision box packed up, I tested it by plugging into other, known working aerials, established that it was f***ed, and called to ask for a replacement (we'd been customers for about 7 years at that point). They wouldn't replace it without sending an engineer (meaning a day off for me) and if said engineer couldn't find a fault, would charge £150. I told them to get stuffed, and bought a Humax PVR (we were only using the service for recording TV in any case), cancelling the TV part of the subscription. They have their procedures, and don't make exceptions.

The phone support is terrible (ime), but their live chat is pretty good, and both times I've used that, have had good, knowledgeable service.

Plus Points: Reliability, no traffic management (or at least, none I've discerned), decent kit supplied.

Minus Points: cost, lack of flexibility, you'll pay for a lot of bundled extras that you may not use.

 

[Salad Dodger]

I have BT Infinity. Certainly not cheap, but it works pretty well, even with Mrs Salad watching Netflix on her tablet whilst I watch BT Sport on my tablet at the same time.