No, I have not been ignoring you, Afterdawners (oh, bollocks, he hasn't died, he is still here, I hear from the backrows!)
It is just that, although I reported a fault on my phone line, which spread to infect my ISDN2 and Fax line also to British Telecom on Friday morning, it has taken until now for them to fix it.
I gave up hope with BT six months after I moved to this country -- maybe I learn faster than others or Joe U K Citizen doesn't know about anything better :-)
I use mobile to make my phone calls, all of them (habit that people found extremely weird when I lived in States.. ahwell..) -- like a true Finn does and dropped the landline totally about a year ago. I use eFax for faxing and Telewest 1MB cable for Net and I'm happy with that.
Yes, but BT provides the backbone everywhere, unless there is cable in your area (I have no cable in my area) so whichever card/code or whatever you use, it is always BT licenced lines. Like you, I use my mobile for outgoing calls, between my wife and I we have 3600 minutes free every month! Whether I use AOL broadband, or BT digital Highway, or any other combination, it is still in conjunction with a BT line and this I can't stand, effectively they still run a monopoly.
BT always cut me off whenever I get through (after holding invariably 47 minutes) and that really peeves me also.
Telewest 1MB cable would be excellent when I have cable locally. Long live leased lines!
This country is in jurassic era when speaking of broadband connections -- even the idea that the maximum that "normal users" can get is somewhere around 1MB/256k is ridiculous. Even that my friends in Finland whine about occassional netsplits, they still have 10/10 connections at home, paying £50-70 a month..
Telewest's biggest problem, IMHO, is the 256k upstream which is NOT enough for anything, specially not for running any personal FTP server or transferring anything slightly larger over the Net. And try downloading something seriously big with 1M and you understand that it is really the entry-level when speaking of broadband (such as 2disc DVD-R backups -- takes about a week or so to download one, faster to use Royal Mail -- if they don't lose your packages ;-).
But maybe one day, once OFTEL gets its act together and realizes that BT still has monopoly in this country. Or actually, I think that the final decision will come from EU at some point, OFTEL seems to be just bunch of whiners who give reasonable speeches but don't do anything.
Loaded just a suggestion, but if you are getting booted off every 47 minutes, there are little apps out on the net that can prevent that. Years ago when I was on dial up AOL (thank god those days are over with)while playing Halflife online I always got dropped due to the fact AOL saw me is inactive, but I then came accross an app called Keep it Alive that would send out a ping command every few minutes and that was enough to fool AOL and keep me playing as long as my little heart desired.
Again since I live in the states Im not sure exactly what your setup is but I hope the info helps ;) I will say though judging by the options you guys have you really are gettin the shaft. i pay 35 bucks a month for cable (up to 1m download 128 upload) and I just downloaded a 2 gig demo in 30 min. I will say though the upload blows ass. I tried running a game server and could only hold 4 people. Then the lag would just spike through the roof and I was using a dual P3 1ghz server with 4 gigs of RAM, so I know it was the connection.
Lol here is the best part though, Cox sells a business service which is "supposedly" faster. I figured I would pay the extra 50 bucks a month for 512 upload and up to 3m down load, but it turns out I paid 50 bucks more a month just for a static ip, the speeds were the same as residential...bastards!
I get 1.5m down, 256k up. I concur, this is not fast enough for upload, but it nice when I can get the full 150 KB/s downloads.. curious enough, I usually get those downloads when I hit servers in France or Germany.. and I am in the USA.. amazing.
