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Broadband provision and service in Shetland


Njugle
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I've just seen an article on the BBC news saying carphone Warehouse are about to start a broadband price war by offering free broadband to it's land line customers.

 

Theres nothing about it on their website. Maybe a case of watch this space.

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I'm wi Bulldog 2meg unlimited 2499p, (pound sign dont work) with no fair usage policy which is good as I download a lot. their customer service was pretty hellish to start with, sometimes on hold for 45mins. They were just a small company who were growing too fast. No bother now though, phoned them yesterday and got right through.

 

Haven't had any problems with them at all, I've always been able to connect first time and have never been disconnected.

 

I done a speed test and the true download speed is 1664Kbps and 251Kbps upload. I checked it here:-

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp

 

They are going to upgrade me to 8meg in a month or two, although I reckon it will only be 6.5.

 

I would reccomend them to anybody who uses p2p or just downloads a lot, otherwise there are cheaper connections out there as mentioned in previous posts.

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My partner is on Freeserve (Wanadoo). She gets 2mbps with a 2gb limit for £17 per month. There are regular disconnections but chances are that is a firmware issue in her wireless router.

 

I wouldn't pay them a penny if they were the last internet company on the face of the earth. When I was using them as a dial up customer they would keep changing their access numbers on their any time service. When you rang their tech support they would deny it and eventually they would give you a list of numbers to try. One you would eventually get through to. I worked for over 6 years in IT support so I knew that they were either dishonest or didn't know a thing about their own system, nor would they understand/believe what I was teling them. By using this method I know that many Shetlanders switched to broadband rather than pay the 50p per minute support fees.

 

I don't have a phone line at home and I have no wish to go back to BT for a year before I can go to a company that charges reasonable rates.

 

I was looking at http://www.moneysavingexpert.com and there is interesting coverage on phone and broadband services and their costs. In fact there any many items on the site that are worth a read.

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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:

 

Read the small print for onspeed.

 

Basically, it speeds up your browsing on dial up by running everything through their own servers that do various compression things on large images/text. However it makes no difference to downloads whatsoever.

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I tried Onspeed when I had dialup.

 

If you put it on, it did speed it up "a little", but made all the graphics on web pages look rubbish.

 

Plus I wasnt really bothered about the speed it took pages to load, I wanted faster downloads and more bandwidth to stream with, something Onspeed couldn't do, as downloading an MP3 for example, it's already compressed.

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I'm wi Bulldog 2meg unlimited 2499p, (pound sign dont work) with no fair usage policy which is good as I download a lot.

 

I done a speed test and the true download speed is 1664Kbps and 251Kbps upload. I checked it here:-

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp

Pipex 2meg unlimited. Seems reliable in the 6mths we've had it. Download 1623 upload 260 according to link above.
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Yeah Ive been with Pipex for about 6 months now.. and fully recommend them.. I have the 1meg connection but due to the lack of use on my line I'm getting 2meg. never not been able to dial up ( erm if you can still use that term with BB :P )

 

and from what i have seen read and heard there sister company Nildram is as reliable too.

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I wouldn't get too carried away with the Faroese link as the council knocked this back when the last cable laid from Iceland via Faroe was laid about 4 years ago.

 

http://www.farice.is/

 

The above is link to maps of the existing cables going past Shetland.

 

Nobody has asked for money from Shetland Islands Council for the Faroese cable. They have to lay a cable for their own requirements and if they make landfall in Shetland then they can use an unrepeated system which is cheaper.

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if they make landfall in Shetland then they can use an unrepeated system which is cheaper.

 

Do you mean that the cable won't be terminated in at all Shetland and just pass straight through? i.e. it'll be of no use to us

 

No. Shetland will have its own POP if all goes to plan.

 

There are two types of system - Unrepeated and repeated. A repeated system can cover longer distances but it is seriously expensive. The unrepeated systems have been improving until it is now possible to go between Faroe and Shetland unrepeated and Shetland to the mainland. When the last cable was planned it would have all had to have been repeated. So it will work out cheaper for the Faroese to land the cable in Shetland. They also know that they can pick up a fair bit of business (oil companies mostly).

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apparently i'm "connected" at 100Mbps, juist ran a few speed tests and was getting onything atween 780 and 2300kbps, don't know what any of this means but i do know i'll miss my connection when i leave DK :(

 

better fill up my ext. HD afore i go :wink:

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As far as I know, at the moment you can sign up for 8meg on the BT site from an existing package.

 

However, from reading the BT forum on ADSlguide.org.uk, I think I will wait til they get some of the problems sorted out. There was a guy apparently told that CHRISTMAS LIGHTS could be affecting his speed.

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