Buyers's Guide to Broadband in UK

A few ideas about broadband buying decissions from the theinquirer might be worth comparing with the adslguide TCO list.

Auric

 

I'm currently looking into this as I'm planning to move over to broadband in a month or so. I'm finding it hard to work out which companies have a download restriction - I believe some limit you to 1gb per month, but which ones?

Tony.

 

Of the two cable companies only NTL have a download restriction on their Broadband service, (the 1Gb that you've heard). Telewest have no such restrictions and have no plans to impliment one, though they don't rule it out completely for the future.

As far as I know, of the ADSL providers only the "cheap" options have download restrictions in place. This is so more people can access Broadband. Most people don't actually do very much downloading and mostly just want quick browsing speeds. I believe that most ADSL providers still have the "full cost" option without restrictions for those willing to pay.

To be honest for just browsing the net, 128kb/s is more than fast enough. It's only when you start to want to watch video on-line etc that quicker speeds are useful. Even then most on-line video is only streamed at 300kb/s so a 512kb/s service is more than adequate for 99% of anything most people want to do.

Of course these restrictions are the result of P2P. Because a minority of internet users are breaking thier T&Cs of their service and downloading huge amounts of data everyone is suffering because companies can't police P2P so their only option is to restrict everybodies dowloads.


GTM