Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.

[Steff Davies]

Dave Cross wrote:
> 
> Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support 
> people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't 
> still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I 
> should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be 
> calling them later this morning to get a MAC.
> 
> But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open 
> to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror 
> stories or recommendations?

Be has been good to me. In central-ish London I get 18Mb/2Mb (both 
frequently realised in practice so contention is presumably good). 
Service is highly reliable apart from DNS occasionally dropping out for 
a few seconds, but running a local BIND and adding it to the resolvers 
list works well for me.

They do do more traffic molestation than I'd really like though: 
traceroutes pass through a mysterious 10.* private network and like all 
the mass market ISPs they use the IWF's CleanFeed nonsense. On the 
upside, they leave your packets alone sufficiently that IPSEC works 
well, unlike one or two others (I discovered this at a security-obsessed 
former orkplace).

The gold standard is Andrews and Arnold, who I used for years, but 
they're prohibitively pricey for daytime bandwidth use and don't (when 
last I looked) do ADSL2+.

S