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Nildram problems

I've been with Nildram for the last 4-5 years and they were a great provider. While I'm still on a rather outdated 256/512 package I had a generous 50gb usage capacity, and 50gb webspace. I don't download movies, most of my stuff is web browsing, online gaming and so on, however I feel I need a decent usage allowance.

Over the last few weeks I've been more dissatisfied with Nildram, the connection has been getting ever slower and now I'm experiencing continuous random connection dropouts, sometimes up to 6 times or more in an hour. Obviously when downloading patches, or playing games this can be irritating.

I've decided to look elsewhere, someone I know advised either BT or Virgin Media, but I can see from a look here last night that there are a lot of horror stories about Virgin. I've been offered free broadband from Talk Talk which I instantly rejected as I know there's no such thing as 'free'.

Before I was reluctant to change packages as although it wasn't the cheapest or the fastest Nildram was reliable, but now even that advantage seems to be going.

Anyone have any advice on alternatives. I'm on about a £20 a month budget, I want a decent usage cap, I'm not under any illusions with the so called unlimited, though I suppose under companies like Virgin I might not be affected by bandwidth throttling as I dont do a lot of downloading, but I'd like advice. I see BE mentioned here a lot, but I've checked and I'm not in an available area.
 
At that kind of price point, you could take a look at our offerings. But before you do that, are you sure the drop outs aren't a change in the state of the line in your house?

Can you get at the attenuation and SNR (or margin) stats from your router and post them here? If you don't know how to or where they are, post the make and model of your router and we can tell you.
 
It's a USB ADSL modem I use, a Zoom Model 5510B.

I don't know about the state of the line, but before I was playing COD4, BF2, BF2142 etc with reasonable gameplay. BF2142 would occasionally drop but that I'm sure is the game, because the connection was fine.

I've been pondering a better connection for a while as I'm still on the old dslsurf500 package that Nildram don't even sell anymore. Besides, I'm seeing stories of people migrating now that they're under the Tiscali umbrella.
 
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Well thanks, but I've guessed that. :)

I'm looking for decent alternatives though, I don't need the 50gb cap, though obviously if I can get it....looking at my usage on Nildrams sites I think I usually use a lot less.
 
The first thing you should try Jade is to plug into the test socket behind the BT faceplate to see if your connection quality/stability improves. It's no.4 on this page for more details:

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/articles/adsltips/01.shtml

It might also be worth trying to connect with the PPP_o_E auth type instead of PPP_o_A that Nildram uses, this may or may not help but it's worth a try. However, as I haven't used a USB Modem in awhile I can't recall how easy it is to do this, on a router you'd just flick the setting but modems sometimes need a driver reinstall.

Either way it's unusual for 512/256 connections to run into these sorts of problems as they're standard model lines and performance was usually quite stable with them. So failing that and assuming the problems don't go away then for the money your best bet is perhaps a quality provider like Zen, IDNet, Fast or an Entanet ISP like Aquiss, TitanADSL, ADSL24 or CSS Leeds (above) etc.

If you have SkyTV then Sky Broadband's service might be worth a shot too, but don't expect wonders from their free broadband option.
 
Well as I've said, I wouldn't mind a faster connection, the 30gb peak allocation that some providers listed here use seems adaquete for me. Most of my internet time is spent on BBS's, some videos from youtube and the like but not a huge amount. I don't download bittorent stuff, and usually the biggest files I download are patches. I need a decent but not huge allowance. The Nildram package I have as well is rather outdated and quite limited in terms of speed.

I'm not with Sky and as I don't really watch that much TV I've no real desire to get it.
 
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