For UK residents - need ISP advice

I used Tiscali business broadband with a 1mb connection with a 20:1 contention ratio (standard broadband is minimum 50:1) as most business shuts down after 6pm, I had a great connection, that was for almost a year... that was until they swapped me over to 'domestic 50:1 ratio' without informing me or dropping the price, then swapped their European servers to Germany and put me through 5 days of hell, rewiring my telephone line, installing a new router, altering OS settings, restoring to 2 weeks previous settings, finally reinstalling all my software and OS, harrassing BT engineers blaming them (as instructed) that their exchange was faulty, paying £75 engineer callout, without any result.

THEN despite displaying a 100% clean bill of health to their systems for the duration, they released a small note stating they had 'minor issues' with their main European servers, but all was now fine! 19 hours of phone calls with their so called 'Help and Support' alone, all for nothing. Their 'forums' were 'offline' for those 5 days, I guess so no one could swamp their forums with complaints. All I was offered was a reduce cost dial up alternative @ 3p per minute for the duration of the 'problem'. Whenever I hear their name, I break out into a cold sweat.

Took me a further 4 months to get a MAC number to leave them. I'm now with BT Broadband 8mb service. I don't care that there are minor shortfalls in the 8mb service where I can only get 1mb+ now and again... least I sleep at night.

I'm on BT Option 3, which technically has the same rules as Tiscali regarding usage. However, I have been using it for nearly a year and have not had an unfair usage warning yet. SL uses very little bandwidth when you compare it to things like downloading torrents. My fiance is agorophobic and suffers depression, so spends something like 12-14 hours a day on SL too, with no problems whatsoever so far.

Also, I have a theoretical 8mbs connection - obviously it will vary from time to time, but it averages out at 7.5mbs, so it's pretty damn good actually

"Age of Conan" by any chance? I am wildly excited about AoC, I have to say. October 30th, can't wait.

Totally off topic, but had to be asked.

Unless you're running a small - medium sized business, you're unlikely to reach that limit (unless you are downloading illegal movies, and then you deserve whatever is coming to you since it's basically theft and makes you no better than a common burglar). I have been on option 3 for a while, since before it became "unlimited" (used to have a 40gb limit, and I still didn't even approach that despite using SL for about 8 hours a day as well as regular browsing).

65gb is a huge amount of downloading to be doing within a 30 day period. To put it in perspective, that equates to something like 2 and a half movies a day, or about 200 music tracks a day too.

I know it's splitting hairs, but it is technically unlimited. You see, if you reach the 65gb limit, they don't turn off your connection, they just reduce the bandwidth. So they're not limiting HOW MUCH you can download, just the speed you can do it at. They have never claimed to offer unlimited bandwidth, merely given a guide to average speeds experienced by other customers in your area - the connection speed they quote is never a promise. So technically, they're not advertising falsely, just creatively.

One issue I do have with the BT Home Hub is that my (rather old) laptop sometimes looses it's internet gateway. My main desktop is also on wireless, and has no problems. But from time to time the laptop stops being able to connect. Oddly, it can connect to the router, but fails to get a connection from the router to the internet - even while the desktop is working fine at the same time. Perhaps it's the laptop itself, since it is ageing somewhat. I find the only way to correct this when it happens is to physically turn off the power to the Home Hub and turn it back on again.

Anyone else have this trouble with the BT Home Hub (or any other wireless router for that matter)?

I'm hooked to my RL agency via BT broadband and it has never had any problems associated with long time on line. When I'm not being snooped and being given things to do from RL, other RLs who don't do Second Life are playing horrible combat games and they seem to be online for hours on end without probs.

I disagree. We have Secondlife on two pcs here and one of them (mine) only is on SL about 5 hours a week, the other one say 5 hours a day and it generates a massive 1.5GB a day. This is with movies turned off, and apart from this only regular browsing.
This means monthly I'm using probably 40GB on SL only.

Any advice on compressing sl content or any other way of limiting bandwidth would therefore be much appreciated.

I'm with Virgin, they can limit your speed but that hasn't happened to me yet. I'm far happier with this service than I was with my previous BT service.

Me too and I've had no problems. Just as a guideline, I monitored my downloads tonight, and for an hour of trying on clothes, sorting my inventory and general TPing to a range of sims I downloaded about 110 kB of data. With my 4Mb link which is capped at 750 kB, that's almost 7 hours of peak time SL. That's plenty for me, and if the worst comes to the worst, all that happens is my link drops to 2Mb. Seems like a good deal to me.

Love Suzi

If your laptop keeps loosing connectivity, make sure your power saving settings are checked to allow the system to shutdown or hybernate the network card, to save power drain. If your router has UpnP, turn that on, so your wireless card can control the router to maintain its connection.

Hooo Adec!

BT's Option 3 - been with BT since 2000 and rarely had any trouble with them whatsoever. Not the cheapest but you get what you pay for.

mel

Yes, in a household where multiple people share the same internet connection via a router, it's very easy to bypass a 65GB monthly limit. If you live alone or your household internet connection is used mostly by yourself, I'm sure it wouldn't be such a problem.

As it is, I not only use my internet connection for SL, but also other MMORPGs, VOIP telephony, downloading maybe three/four films a week (torrents), lots of web browsing, email, watching YouTube far too much, etc., etc. Add onto that the rest of my household's usage and a 65GB limit is easily hit.

That's why we went with Be*. 24Mbps. Genuinely unlimited. Relatively uncontended so no slow downs during peak usage hours. Fastpath connection (means <10ms ping which is perfect for MMORPGs ). Perfect for Second Life.

It's also worth nothing that one person's bandwidth usage in SL isn't typical of another's. If you max out all the LOD sliders, have a high draw distance (as I do because my gfx card rocks), attend music/video events/presentations a lot, and teleport into different sims frequently (teleporting results in nasty bandwidth hits), the amount of bandwidth used by SL is actually pretty disturbing. If you don't do most of the above, then I'm sure it'll seem quite reasonable.