Deciding On An Internet Service Provider For Home Use
Finding the next broadband deals for business is a veritable minefield, each having different figures for speed and download amounts. Some will offer you combined phone and broadband and some even throwing in some form of TV service in as well. Not everyone can afford business leased lines, so this may be useful to read.
If you have an existing phone line it is most likely a BT line, but you may also be in a cable area. There are several websites that can tell you exactly what is available. But just because you have a BT phone line doesn’t mean that you are just restricted to providers that resell BT backhaul. LLU or local loop unbundling is where a service provider installs their own hardware in an exchange with a link back to their routers and so you do not share the same service as everyone else. This is considered to be a lot better as you will normally get a much better connection speed and find that at peak times the level of service will still remain good and can quite often be cheaper. Again there are places on the internet that you can put in your phone number and postcode and they will tell you who has LLU services in your exchange. If your area only has one LLU or does not have any at all, don’t panic- it just means that you will mainly use BT’s services until it reaches your ISP.
The speed you see in an advertisement and what you end up with are two vastly different things, the large 8 or 24mb that will catch your eye will have a very small “up to” at the front of it. This is because unlike ADSL 1 where the speed was fixed, ADSL2 and ADSL2+ are designed to obtain the most stable speed your line can handle. Normally the closer you are to the main BT exchange the better the speed you will get. If you require the speed and availability you might consider business SDSL
The bandwidth allowance is the other important figure to look at and this is how much stuff you can get from the internet. If you just look at your emails every other day and read some news sites, then you should not require much. However if you are a busy family all wanting to be doing everything online, then look for a package with plenty of bandwidth. Look at the small print as to what times they class on and off peek download times, for some this can be 0800 to 0000 and so can be a big surprise but others can be 1600 to 2200 which is a lot better if you are quite often home in the day.
Free or cheap hardware may be offered if you sign up for a certain length of time, again like most things in life that are offered free with a product or service might not be all that great for anything beyond a basic home user so just keep this in mind. Ensure you read everything twice, both the contract and the small print on advertisements. You do not want to be left starting by paying 5 pounds a month only for three months later it become 35 pounds because you didn’t check everything out. When making any form of comparison you need to ensure your comparing it exactly and so may need to do some maths to convert all the money, bandwidth and speed into figures that are all represented the same.
