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ISP for a student house.
Created 21st May 2010 @ 09:40
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Since I know many of you are students, I thought I’d ask you all if you know of any good internet packages you’d recommend.
Needs to be:
– As cheap as possible (but I’m willing to pay more for a good service)
– Fast enough to run TF2 and likely some other usage from skype xbox360 and so on.
– Reliable, cba faffing around with timeouts if I can avoid it.
There will be 6 of us in the house so we’ll probably need a good fair usage policy but it also means we can pay more for it since the price is shared. Would be great if some of you who are already living in a student house could share your experience with me.
Thanks
20 or 50meg virgin media broadband, both packages are fairly cheap and I’ve never had any problems with their service or customer servive if something was to go wrong. Don’t go with BT, real crappy connection at peak times and they are unreliable as shit.
Edit: As I’m not living in a student house, I’ll try and get Biohazard in here to post something, he should be able to explain abit more for you.
Last edited by Greg,
We use virgin media, and it can be really good then you get the bad week when it times out every 15 min especially when everyones using it
Hey dude
Me and ExcessiveEvil use Virgin Media where we live. It’s a 20Mb download but only about 0.7 upload (low upload = forget playing online games is someone is using skype or other video calling tools at the same time, 2nd case is when one of us is uploading maps/ demos/ other bullshit to the server – just whenever you send something rather than recieve it – downloading should not cause you lag – but uploading stuff while playing will make your game unplayable). Second downfall is that if you download a lot during peek hours, they will cut your speed in half and then half again etc every hour until you stop excessive usage (they will however re-set it around midnight back to default speed). This is their “fair usage policy”. They only way around it is download at night (between midnight and 10 am).
Any ISP you will go for will have the same/ similar bullshit policies, but be careful – some of them will put monthly download limit on you.
Don’t go for Tiscali (if they still exist) – they tend to lie to their customers and like to hide things they charge additionally. BT – same as virgin media – solid ISP until something goes wrong (I took me around 2 hrs to call them – VM – once).
Personally I would not recommend ADSL (read: phone line) internet (you would need a good – read:expensive – router to keep it stable. Cable Internet (coaxial cable) is probably they best way to go for now.
Msg me on steam if you have any more questions, but imo no matter how shit virgin media is – it is still one of the best options. Oh and you might want to google for prices of it (they change every month when they make some offers).
Thanks for the info mate.
I live in a 5 person student house with Virgin 20mb
you can forget about playing any game when someone is on skype or bbc iplayer! It times out probably once a week, but not that often for me.
Only good thing is its soo cheap, because dividing by 5 etc, but yeah, when nobody is on skype or anything, its great…….
if Virgin media cable is an option and funding allows go for the 50mb package, as currently there is no fair usage limits on that package
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
If cable is not an option and you need to pick an ADSL ISP you don’t need an expensive router, but the routers chipset is important.
Avoid everything with a speedtouch brand (including BT hubs), unless you want to manually make changes to the router.
cisco/linksys (modern units), netgear, belkin, & us robotics routers I have had very few problems with
good experience with http://www.bethere.co.uk
bethere’s broadband is great but the routers they use (Speedtouch) are utter shit, especially if there are multiple people sharing the connection. So you may need to consider the additional investment in hardware.
Can’t fault them for their download speeds of linux ISOs or online gaming stability though :)
i have never used the router supplied so :/
I might go with bethere in september, have heard lots of good things, so if the router is shit, can someone recommend a decent one, pref not too pricey :)
Ask people who live near the student house of possible. The level of service from ISP’s will vary wildly depending on where you live.
Quoted from GibbZ
Just quit now before you continue playing through a year of agony.
It’s going to be really shit since I’ve had amazing internet for this whole year in halls.
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