In Search of a Provider (ISP).

OK, so I’m basically fed up with my current Internet Service Provider (Demon.net).  There’s nothing specifically wrong with their service, in fact, Id still recommend them to anyone who asked – stable, reliable and reasonably quick, but they’re no longer fulfilling my requirements.

Currently I pay £22 per month for an ‘upto 8mb’ service, which gives me about 3.5mb download, 448k upload, a static IP address and no traffic shaping or restrictions.  Or at least, it used to.  But over the last couple of months, I’ve been embracing lots more video over the web services as well as doing a few linux installs across the net.  This has meant that I have exceeded Demon’s Fair Usage Policy of 60GB in 30days, and therefore, they’ve started restricting my service to 128k download (256k upload) between 9am and 11pm every day.  Now, 60gb may seem like a lot of traffic, and upto 12 months ago, I would agree.  However, in these days of high definition video over the internet. combined with sites with ever more graphics, video, sound and interactivity, its very easy to burn through your allowance.  For example, if you watch a HD programme from the BBC iPlayer, these can be upto 2GB for an hour’s show – 30 of these and that’s your lot.  With the amount of Internet services I use,  the allowance disappears like sand through a colander.   I do have to question why they chose 128k as a limit – this is a pitiful amount and makes everything painful – even loading a webpage takes a number of seconds, so I’ve had to fall back to my 3G 3 dongle for general browsing activities.   I don’t know why they can’t set it to 512k to limit usage, but keep usage times reasonable, but then I guess that's not much of an incentive is it? 

Anyway,  I’ve been scouting around for a true ‘unlimited’ package, rather than an unlimited but.. provider and my choices are few and far between.  My 3 key requirements are:-

• True, unlimited internet usage.
• Static IP address
• <=£25 per month.

I require a decent internet service, and don’t mind paying for it, but I don’t believe its worth more than £25 for a standard ADSL service.

So having a look around, what I want can’t be achieved.   I had narrowed it down to o2 who seem to get excellent reviews, are reasonably priced, and .  However,  you have to be one of their enabled exchanges.  And as seems to be the way these days,  I’m not.  I live in a major conurbation and am connected to THIS exchange, but the only 3rd party provider is TalkTalk.  And they don’t do unlimited utilisation.  It seems that BT must charge so much for traffic, or perhaps its the pipes in the background, that the only economical way for an ISP to offer unlimited traffic is to offer local loop unbundling (LLU) service.  Now I wouldn’t mind this lack of LLU, if it weren't for the fact that EVERY exchange in a circle around me has a variety of providers available,  and is scheduled to be an early fibre to the cabinet exchange, whereas I’m still stuck in the early 21st century stuck on plain old ADSL, and as a techy, this just isn’t good enough!! Grr.   I’m just hoping that LTE wireless becomes quickly popular (4G mobile technology offering very high speed data).

So, if anyone knows of a decent, quality ISP that matches my requirements above, and will work on a standard BT Wholesale service, let me know, because I’m seriously struggling.