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Broadband provision and service in Shetland


Njugle
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We have Plusnet. Pretty good I suppose. Not a reliable as the services I've had on the UK mainland though, but thats to be expected. We have no service up here for about 6hrs a week on average.

 

£15 per month for completely unlimited bandwidth (they say) and 100mb server space. We're quite chuffed.

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Yep I'm wi PlusNet and the service here in the town is pretty good. Managed to get at least 5 other folk signed up as well for me referrals and had no complaints from any of them

 

ONly problem is that they have a peak time for services from am until midnight so if you want to download music, films etc using P2P, BitTorrent or ftp etc then you have to watch how much download or they will restrict your service.

 

Should be upgraded to 8Mb by May sometime s well which will be pretty damm good.

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I'm with Plusnet also. I'm very happy with the service on the whole. I have had to phone their support line a couple of times in the beginning after getting no service for 3 days. They told me that it was because BT had oversubscribed the network bandwidth. But they would say that, wouldn't they!

 

On the whole, I would recommend them

 

Hambone, do we automatically get the 8mb upgrade?

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I am we tiscali. £15 a month fir unlimited broadband. Its a 1meg connection, but fir an extra £2 a month you can get the unlimited 2meg connection. I can only get 575kbps at my hoose so da £15 een is fine fir me. They also have some deals on "free phone calls" with your broadband package fir really cheap, but I didna sign up fir that een, so I canna comment.

 

The customer support folk seemed tae be scottish, and they seemed tae be really nice, which is a huge advantage ower the wanadoo eens, who canna understand a word you say and, vise versa! It was also incredibly easy tae set up; one phone call, and a week later the modem arrived.

 

Oh, you also got a free modem and free setup with tiscali, which was a huge advantage fir me because wir phone line, at the time, was only set up to handle dial-up.....yey! I love broadband. I'm not gay

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Thanks to all so far for the feedback. Keep it coming. I'm surprised not to have seen BT or Homecall feature yet.

 

As a side issue, has anyone ever heard of anyone using the "onspeed" software? It poses the question that paying for 512k BB and £24.99 p/a for onspeed would give you the equivalent of 2Mb BB (?) :roll:

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I'm on BT at home but I've only just started with them so I'll have to reserve judgement. The deal is £21 a month for 2Mbs capped at 6GB per month, free connection and modem/router.

 

I know that doesn't seem tremendously good value compared to some of the offers out there, but the main reason we went with BT is that if anything goes wrong it's their problem, they can't blame anybody else's lines or exchanges or equipment. And that's worth a lot of cash pounds in my opinion.

 

I've heard some quite bad things about Tiscali customer services, and I think their "fair usage policy" stinks. Also, my Dad's got Tiscali and they keep disconnectnig him. If he leaves a file downloading for any length of time the download will stop and a dial-up style sign in box appears on screen. What's that all about?!

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but the main reason we went with BT is that if anything goes wrong it's their problem, they can't blame anybody else's lines or exchanges or equipment. And that's worth a lot of cash pounds in my opinion.

I quite agree. As Jim-jam said earlier, BT oversubscribed their bandwidth to 3rd parties in Shetland last year, resulting in several companies having to withdraw their services for over a week in some cases. The poor tech support guy at Plusnet was completely sick of having to explain the same thing to Shetlanders when I phoned him!

 

Although the problem was entirely BTs (I spoke to a BT engineer at the time), BT broadband customers were completely unaffected. BT just sold bandwidth they didn't have and switched everyone else off when they were caught out.

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I've heard some quite bad things about Tiscali customer services, and I think their "fair usage policy" stinks. Also, my Dad's got Tiscali and they keep disconnectnig him. If he leaves a file downloading for any length of time the download will stop and a dial-up style sign in box appears on screen. What's that all about?!

 

Da folk dat we spok tae all seemed really nice and helpful. And I don't think it was just wis. The idder folk that signed up for tiscali in Yell (because it's een o da few isp's we can actually get here) seemed tae think the customer service wis fine. (well, the eens that I spok tae)

Dy father has maybe just had a bad experience, all it wid tak wid be wan cock of a person (not a person's cock, a person who is a cock). Or It's maybe just wis dats been lucky? Maybe It's wir deep, sensual, Yell accents that make them do whatever we want?

 

Also, whats wrong with the fair usage policy!? :wink: The only restriction is that they ask you not to share large files during peak times, ie. 1800-2300, which is fine with me, that way you irna pinchin everybody else's bandwidth. Also, if you dunna really use p2p file sharing, it makes it much fairer for you.

Check oot the fair usage policy here: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/products/broadband/fair-usage-policy.html?code=ZZ-NL-12LW

 

As fir the logging out problem.....does he have dial-up? If so, it could just be a case of changing the settings in his computer. If a dial-up connection is idle for a set period of time, your computer will disconnect you. I had that problem when I had dial-up, but I canna mind how tae fix it. It even used tae happen when I was downloading things, which I widna exactly class as being idle......But anyway, I've got broadband now, and my never ending dial-up nightmare is over.

 

However, after all yin(!!), I will have to reserve judgment also (am I too late for that?) It's usually only when things go wrong that you really see how good the customer service is.

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Also, whats wrong with the fair usage policy!?

 

Actually, nothing. I hadn't read it properly before and I thought they permanently restricted bandwidth for "heavy users". Thanks for the link PoolHaddock.

 

Don't know about Dad's dial up settings, I'll have to ask him.

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Been with Tiscali broadband for 2 weeks having moved from Freeserve dial up. Ditched freeserve because their £14.99 package was capped at 2gig and I figured I would want more. So far I am happy with the service though the install disc that came with the modem would not autorun so I had to get all the software by using run/open commands. Both computers and both drives on the main computer so I am sure it was not a problem with my computer.

 

I suspect that in even of restrictions on bandwidth BT services will have first call on whatever is left probably followed by those with the biggest clout......AOL, Wanadoo etc. with smaller firms such as Plus Net getting cut off first.

 

Of course part of the problem is that discrimination against Shetland is legal as is well demonstrated by some mainland couriers who surcharge delivers to the extent that very few people will pay the surcharge which means they do not have to worry about providing a service.

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Yep I'm wi PlusNet

 

Looks like most of the Rumshackers are!

 

I have had no connection problems with PlusNet nor no abnormal disconnections... If you subscribe to the mailing list then they keep you more than well informed of any changes that are going to take place in the back end.

 

Probably the best bit of the service is that if you do have a problem, you get to talk to a human that actually resides in the same place as PlusNet. Not some peculiar call centre that has no idea of the workings. Talk to one of these guys and they tend to know what they are talking about. A rare thing in the ISP world (coming from one who knows).

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  • 1 month later...

I suppose I should feel special that we've even got broadband, but apparently on the 31st March BT is upgrading most exchanges over the UK to 8mb broadband. Plusnet are giving customers free upgrades.

 

Anyone know if this is happening to Shetland exchanges?

 

I'm still amazed I can get 2mb (I tend to get the full speed all the time too).

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