Sky Broadband

No disco's pay the money

had sky for two yrs. biggest pile of ** ever used to get cut off like 3-4 times a week. pay the money if u want a good connection.

Newnet = great.

had sky 3 yrs+ .. never a single problem.

I believe Sky Broadband use traffic shaping which should be a big negative if you do a lot of downloading.

the difference is when you have a problem they are useless.

ISP's are constantly managing lines, (which are shared), by tweaking settings. you will not know that your neighbour has had a problem and your line has been tweaked, resulting in a change in your service. As a poker user, you require continuity more than high volume and these things have opposite optimum settings. When this does occur SKY/BT/VIRGIN etc are all just groping in the dark to help you. A good ISP with good service will get it right fairly quickly and painlessly.

Jim, so what do you recommend? Are there actually any ISP's that will be good for everyone? I've always thought it's just hit and miss. I have a BT phone line that (according to my I.T. mate) I can't get more than 2.5MB through. So is there anything at all I can do? Virgin not around here either :(

the line capacity is fixed by your location, but there is more to it than just capacity. quite techy tbh. there are a number of settings that can be changed on your line, and indeed your shared line too. from the ISP point of view it is all about optimisation for everyone. from your point of view it is about what is important to you. some people want high volume, which does not matter about the occasional dropout, whereas poker it does.

I now use newnet. the point being they are a small (ish) company and a good personal service. I got connected exaclty as per plan in the 7 days as stated, then they state that your line is monitored for a week and adjusted to suit your usage. After a week all was ok except for occasional lags when streaming charts etc, and playing poker, (though not full on disco's). I phoned them spoke to a normal person with a normal name who spoke English as a native language, and he listened to what I had to say. he checked through half a dozen things and explained that it was one of two things, one at his end one at mine. we changed both and he gave me his direct number to get back to him if it did not improve. It did and have had no problems with it. He did state that they cannot guarentee that it would not need tweaking again as other users change there settings up/downstream, but at least I know that I can get it solved in a 20 minute phonecall and not feel someone is guessing at solving it.

The funny thing is they are not even dear really. I pay £15 per month for 8Mb, (I think), and if it runs out I get email alerts from 80% out and can top up for one month only.

I think the faster lines roll out next year though. then again where you live yoghurt pots and string would be seen as a revolution ;-)

Are you still in retirement?

bethere.co.uk

No traffic shaping and low contention ratio.

The max download speed listed online by BT is not always accurate. They report a max download speed of 6.Mb on my line whereas in reality I get about 14Mb on a 24Mb connection.

PS the most common thing is to change the channel on your wireless modem. since they all come preset to the same one, you are basically interfering with all your neighbours. next was to do with how the data is carried, ie volume or continuity priority. and some other stuff which was too dull to take in then, let alone recall now. lol

what is traffic shaping, is that the volume/continuity thing.

At peak times, a lot of ISPs will cap the download speeds of the heavy users. This is bandwidth throttling and is due to traffic shaping.

Contention ratio is also important as it refers to the number of other users sharing your connection.

thx. I think it was interleaving that was the continuity/volume priority thing. could be wrong though.

Bring on the yogurt pots please lolol.

Yeah still in retirement. Not played for about 4 months now. Not missing it all and don't think I'll ever play like before again. Will still go to any meetups I can though, always enjoyed them despite usuall feeling like cr ap and being unsociable by the time Saturday came around (after Thu and Fri's exploits) :)

on sky and is nearly unusable at peak times

going back to virgin in 5 days

I pay for the BT top package and touch wood have had no problems at all.

I was with AOHELL for years and their service detiorated to the point of being unusable and I have never regretted switching.

I personally think any poker player who switches for the price reason is utterly mental as one disco in an MTT can cost you what you might save many fold. the key is dependency of service and if you are happy with the service you are getting I would advise against changing.

Oh, to the OP, I have Sky and never had a problem with it. Though I agree that if you play poker and have a great connection, it just isn't worth the risk changing it for a slightly cheaper one. You could end up with a pile of dog poo that disconnects 20 times a night if you were unlucky.
If you must change, try one of the month-long contract ISP's.

I have been with blueyonder/NTL/Virginmedia through all the takeovers for the past 8 years.
I cannot recommend them highly enough.
You get what you pay for in this day and age.
Sadly it breaks my heart that I am now lining that**o Branson`s pocket... but hey ho.

I personally think any poker player who switches for the price reason is utterly mental

Good point!