Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.

[James Laver]

On 1 Oct 2009, at 09:18, Avi Greenbury wrote:

> I've just spent a very happy year with Be, which only ended because I
> upped and moved to somewhere already with a connection. I only had one
> issue, which was the microfilter dying, so I've no first-hand  
> experience
> of their tech support, but I've heard quite lovely tales of a tech
> support IRC channel with genuine techies in it.
> Whenever I cared to measure the speed, it was pretty close to that
> advertises (16Mb), and I never had cause to doubt it.

I've mixed feeling about Be (current supplier). On the one hand, you  
have to sit through the basic crap when you call up the helpline ("are  
you sure it's plugged in?" etc.), but if they can't solve your  
problem, they might put you through to someone with actual clue. As my  
flatmate told them he's a network engineer, they eventually let him  
tune the parameters of the connection and delegated reverse dns etc.

Also, they don't seem to have shaped the connection, despite the fact  
we must go well over any fair use policy. I could be wrong, but it  
seems good enough. Of course being miles from the exchange, we can  
only get 8mb anyway. We've not had an outage either, which is quite  
impressive.

> I spent the previous year with Virgin Media, which was basically
> electronic masochism.

Don't. Just really don't.

> My dad's also had a long (~15 year) reliable relationship with BT,
> though this doesn't appear to be the norm.

It's not.

I'd say Be have provided a perfectly acceptable service, but I'd still  
recommend WebTapestry. There's something nice about being able to pick  
up the phone and talk to someone who understands what "RADIUS is  
fucked" means and knows how to fix it.

--James