Re:
Thanks guys. At the moment, I'm swinging towards Zen: webspace available with package; 20GB cap as opposed to Fast's 15GB, although both seem pretty good.
Had a real mare of a time with Pipex. Probably not all entirely their fault and to be fair, their customer service has improved drastically of late and their people have been quite helpful. The days at the back end of last year when you literally would sit in a queue for an hour before you could get through to someone, thankfully seem to be over. BUT ....
I have some kind of inherent problem where 3 times in the last year my 8MB ADSLMax has plummetted down to 256K download speeds. The best I get is 4MB tops but normally it's around the 3.5MB mark. Then for no apparent reason the thing just plummets and that means a painful process of calling pipex, who call BT then an engineer comes out and says my connection's fine, then he buggers off and a tweak is made at the exchange and everything's hunky dory for about three months when it happens again.
Something affects my profile speed periodically and when that happens I drop right down to 256K.
Naturally I'm pissed off with this but no-one - pipex or BT can explain why this happens, so I'm taking drastic measures. To eliminate the possibility of it being my internal house wiring, I've had an additional phone line installed and I'm gonna use that exclusively for broadband. For the £11 line rental a month, it's worth it. Then, I'm going to change ISP. I want someone without cumbersome yearly tie-in contracts which is why zen look good because theirs is only a month. Fast is 3 months which is also good.
The downside is that my year with pipex is not up until September so I'll have to pay the balance under their terms and conditions, but again it's worth it. Typical of pipex, I asked that if I transferred my service to this other line, would this be included in my year's contract, ie. would it still run out in september? Well guess what? A new line would mean another year's contract starting from when the service began on the new line. No thanks!
Kind regards
YC