ISP Reviews by scottish Avanti

Under the scottish gov. contract there should be enough capacity at the start of the project and throughout. I don't believe there is!

Connection speeds should be 512K they vary from 23K (no that is not a typing error)- half what you might expect from dial-up up, to 2-300K.

That is problem No.1

Other problems are due to data handling/processing. Web pages take over 5 minutes to load or simply time out, downloads may terminate prematurely but look 100%. VoIP is not possible. Video conferencing is even worse. Online gaming is impossible due to latency (although to be fair there is a "hidden" web page on their site that states this. Some web sites appear to be blocked for periods of time (dodgy sites like TESCO home shopping). Last three months have seen three crashes of their servers. Oh and the BBC watch again streaming video won't work. You have to download using the BBCiPlayer which they (Avanti) tell me is P2P - about 12 hours for the last episode of No.1 Ladies Detective Agency!

Why do I rate their support so highly? Because Renee has a cute Australian voice AND they can seem to have a magic button that prioritises your connection when you phone them. (OK so it doesn't last) They can show you that you can download a redundant 5Mb bin file really quickly from THEIR computers, or maybe even a 10Mb redundant bin file - whoopee doop! I didn't sign up for a broadband connection to download redundant bin files!!!!

My wife and I sat with out two laptops. Gun fight at the OK Coral - 30K dial-up v 512K Broadband! It was a draw - 30K had the edge over text, 512K had a slight advantage over graphics.

Add in all the problems above and 30K wins on points!

If you want to download redundant bin files from Avanti - this is the service to beat all others.