ISP Reviews by qazx

i use the net after work and i cant get iplayer at all now, not even you tube works. if you dont mind using the internet in the middle of the night and early mornings o2 might be ok for you but it just doesnt work at any other time of day.

sky 'broadband' was in a house i moved in to in ascot. the speed wasnt that impressive to start with ~1.9mbps during the day. however after a few evenings of watching iplayer we came in to the sky useage radar and suddenly one day our peak time speed all evening until after midnight was throttled to between 0-0.1mbps. webpages take minutes to load, often timing out and of course anything else more intensive, ie. youtube is completely unuseable.

we know this is sky throttling as speed test sites show the upload speed as normal (~300kbps) but when uploading bittorrents the speed is limited to a steady 2kbps which is virtually nothing, so sky is blocking bittorrent protocol.
many others using sky also complain about this throttling.

not contacted sky about this as with all theses big isp's theyll just give you the run around and will solve nothing. best not to sign up in the first place.
if you use iplayer, tv streaming, youtube or upload anything be prepared to have throttling imposed and near unusable internet all evening.
AVOID

been with them for 14 months after migrating from the lamentable o2 which were giving less 0.2mbps evening speed on their access landline service.

macace are ok, reliable (only a few 20 minute drops outs in the year) and good personal support, quick to answer calls, no call centres, uk based and they seem to continue looking at your problem until you say its resolved. staff seemed to have technical knowledge too.
1 month contract, and the price of £25 for 50gb usage and unlimited at night is cheaper than rivals (ie fast.co.uk) but obviously not as cheap as the £5-10 deals out there (which ive found are so slow/oversubscribed or low download cap that theyre useless).


they claim not to oversubscribe their bandwidth, however im still not very happy with peak time speeds. i normally get 3-4mbps in the day (i only get 5-6mbps max from the exchange in my area - herne bay), but it falls to ~0.8 -1 mbps in the evenings and recently is dipping down to ~0.4-0.8 mbps (in an email they admitted the network is congested at the moment).
i did ask them what my peak time speed would be before i joined and to give them credit they did check and say it would be about 1mbps.
however i think the loss of more than 75% of your speed at peak time isnt really good enough, its always been like this and it means if you live in an area like mine that only gets 5mbps max. from the exchange, then at peak time (~7-11pm) its unlikely more than one person on the network will be able to watch iplayer or other internet tv and on a bad day video is constantly interrupted.

another not so great experience is they tried to charge me for extra usage (claiming it was double one month to what i normally use) until i queried it and they looked in to it and found their meter was recording it wrongly. im sure this was the case in a couple of other previous months but it didnt tip me over my limit. although since theyve noticed it its been ok.

overall its ok for the price but the big fall off in speed at peak time is pretty annoying and often stops me using video and radio streams so i cant really recommend them because of this....although i have been with alot worse isp's and not really satisfied with any of them.

edit: macace are about to impose peak time restriction on their business packages (just 10gb/month between 6pm-12) so it makes them uncompetitive. i will now be switching to another isp.