Internet ISPs - Horses For Courses

If all you want from the Internet is occasional Email and casual browsing, then perhaps you should ignore what follows, as well as the pages on The Internet, Beyond Browsing. UseNet, P2P, and Buying Stuff.

For the others, you might like to look at the facilities that are provided by your ISP (whether the ISP you're with or one that you might move to) as well as the type of contract you've signed up to (or might sign up to in the future).

Indeed the ISP you choose, as well as the package you select, may well restrict your use of the Internet. As this section says... Horses for Courses....

First of all, the cheapest is rarely the best, and conversely, the most expensive is sometimes not the best.

Don't Wear Handcuffs

The first and most important thing to consider is what will you do if your ISP doesn't live up to expectations? If you HAVE signed up for a 12 month contract, then the answer is NOTHING! You could of course choose to pay up the balance of your 12-month contract charges to escape. I know someone who signed up for a 12-month contract and even now, six-months into his year, STILL hasn't got a working Email from his ISP - and has had to make do with a free Google Email arrangement. Like many free email accounts, this is likely to result in increasing amounts of spam emails to everyone to whom that person sends emails to. Nothing is really free, and revenue is raised by selling on the long list of email destination addresses garnered from these so-called "free" email accounts.

Would you sign a contract when buying a car, television, or refridgerator which prevented you from taking it back if it was defective? No? It beats me why, but a lot of people do so with their Internet facility.

It seems common sense that if an ISP has to lock you into a 12-month contract, that ISP must be worried about you wanting to leave. Why would you want to leave? The obvous answer is that the ISP knows full well that he'll deliver a poor service, so he doesn't want to give you the opportunity to escape before he's made his money.

Conversely, if an ISP offers a monthly contract, then it seems obvious that the ISP is committed to providing you with a good service. OFTEL decree that your ISP MUST provide the necessary information (MAC code) to allow you to switch seamlessly to another ISP, but if you're on a yearly then expect to receive a summons to pay up for the remainder of your 12 months. If you are on a monthly contract then the move is without further charge; normally such a change-over occurs overnight. If you refuse to pay-up for the balance of your year's payments that are due, it is likely to result in your credit rating being compromised, with all sorts of knock-on effects.

So how can you tell if an ISP is any good? I have been asked many times which ISP I would recommend - but now instead of recommending any particular one (what's the use of ONE person's opinion anyway?), I point them here, where 36 of the largest ISPs as well as 17 of the smaller ISP are rated NOT by ONE person, but by a sizeable number of users of each of the ISPs. As well as a very usefull "ranking-table" you can inspect the comments of each of the people who have chosed to endorse or condemn their own particular ISP. The results cannot be fixed or influenced in any way because only if you are connected via a particular ISP can you give your score for that ISP. So there cannot be any "cooking the books" here. By clicking on each ISPs logo, you will be linked to that ISPs site so that you can inspect their costs as well as the contract term, and the facilities that they provide.

Perhaps before moving on, I should mention something about bandwidth. All ADSL connections are made via BT's cables, exchanges and infrastructure - so the bottom line is that your speed (sometimes called "bandwidth") depends on BT's part of your connection. If you have a bad or noisy line then that is down to BT and NOT your ISP. Also, because the ISP service that you buy is rated at 8Mbps (megabits per second) then unless you live on top of your local BT exchange you will NOT get the full 8Mbps speed. The speed (for you) depends on how far you are from BT's local exchange. Another thing that can influence your speed is your telephone extension wiring, type of cable and how near it's run to mains cables - but that's something to cover another time.

Capping, Traffic Shaping and Contention

One thing that ISPs are coy about is whether or not they employ "capping" or "traffic-shaping".

Capping is where an absolute limit on download speed is applied at certain times of the day or nght. Traffic Shaping is adjustment of your maximum download speed, depending on the load on that particular ISP's servers. Traffic shaping is more insideous than is capping, and is sometimes applied dependent on just what you are doing (e.g. on-line games, downloading binary files or P2P downloads). Some ISPs sell a particular service which they call "Unlimited" (at a premium price) where capping and traffic-shaping mean that your account is anything BUT Unlimited. So If you do see the word "Unlimited" describing an account you are considering - steer well clear.

Contention is another thing that can seriously affect your download speed, but in this case it is down to BT and NOT your ISP. Domestic Internet accounts have a contention rate of 50:1, business anc office accounts usually have a contention rate of 20:1. This means that the 8Mbps (or less - depending on how far you are from your BT exchange) is divided between 50 other Internet subscribers. If everyone in your "group" of subscribers is on-line and downloading large binary files, then at best your speed will be 8,000,000 divided by 50 giving you only 160Kbps - slower than the old dial-up. Most domestic users are on-line in the evening, so it is at the very time that you might be using the Internet, your speed lis likely to be fairly low. Waiting to the daytime when most people are at work, then your speed should be considerably higher.

Office (or Business) accounts have a different pattern. Most businesses are on-line during the day, but NOT in the evening, so if you've invested in an "Office" account then not only do you benefit through the 20:1 contention, there's unlikely to be any businesses on-line in the evening when you most need the speed.

Browsing and email, though, don't visibly suffer from these speed restrictive effect (much). You may experience a slowdown if you're expecting a web-page with a lot of graphics on it, or if Aunty Daisy is sending you a picture of her new pussy as an email attachment.

Absolute Limits

All ISPs do impose limits on the total amount of data you can download in one month (often called your "allowance"). The better ISPs promise two different allowances, one for peak-times, and one for off-peak-times. Peak times are usually from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Friday. The rest of the times are categorised "off-peak". The better ISPs will also provide a Control Panel where you can check the amount of your peak and off-peak allowance that you have so far used in the current month.

What ISP Do I Use?

Well, that's academic because if my ISP fails to give good service and since I'm on a monthly contract - I'll be off. ISPs sometimes improve, others go from "OK" to bloody diabolical. But since my ISP has been in the top five continually over the last year I don't expect to have to move.

But if I give you some details, the more astute can work out which ISP/account I'm with [1].

No prizes for working out which ISP/Account :-)

[1] I've recently upgraded to the equivalent Business account with the same ISP which raises my peak allowance to 45 GBpm and gives me 20:1 contention.

Things You Can Do

Here's a few of the things you can do, and what follows are the things you should be looking for when selecting an ISP (I'll try to build up this part of Rhyl Online web-site to cover these in more detail).

E-Mail

 Enough accounts for everyone in your family.

Your Own Website

Provision of 250MB webspace

P2P (BitTorrent) for free movies/MP3 Music/Games/Software

Better than:

  • 10 GB Peak allowance
  • 200 GB Off-Peak Allowance
  • No Capping or Traffic-Shaping

Usenet (News) for free movies/MP3 Music/Games/Programs

On-line games

Support

 

 Free or Non-Premium Rate Support. UK-Based Support.

30 notice of termination/transfer

 

If an ISP is any good whatsover, freedom to move on if you are dissatisfied should be EXPECTED.

 

  

 

 

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