ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Broadband

I know this, technically, belongs in the IT area, but it's specifically aimed at the UK.

Do any of my Brit colleagues have broadband? If so, is it worth it? What have you had to do to get/use it?

I am considering having it in for Xmas - BT say it's now possible here. But I am not totally convinced....

"Foreigners" please feel free to comment too!!

uk,

I'm on cable broadband in Denver and could not think about going back to dial-up. It is a different world. Normally I get in excess of 1.5 Mbps and sometimes > 3.2 Mbps.

My advice - if you can get it - go for it!

Merry Christmas!


[This message has been edited by Hutch (edited 12-06-2004).]

UKSparky,

I got broadband for Christmas last year and it has been Christmas all year this year! I too went for BT and have had excellent service (the system has not been down once - or that I know of at least). Being a fault analysis consultant, I get sent rather large databases of power quality recordings without being asked if I can take a 10MB file by email - but am I worried now? Nope! Until then, I must admit I would want to throttle the sender as it made dial-up rather expensive and tedious.

I concur with Hutch, you'll never look back. Have a Very Blessed Christmas.

M.

UK, I have cable Broadband (Telewest) would never consider anything else. Service is great. Even has an added virus/security wall. Have received quite a few edited e-mails that have been checked and quarantined prior to reciept. That alone has been a worthy reason to subscribe. Good luck and enjoy. Alan

I'm on AOL platinum. Up to 1.1Mb download speed and costs me £29.99 a month. They also have a gold and silver service which are 512K and 250K respectively, I think the silver is only £10 or £15 a month. I only use the AOL dialer to log on then use my normal browser and email.

No problems yet. Couldn't imagine going back to dial up.

SimonUK

Just got BT Broadband up and running. After a few very irritating start-up problems, my inital reaction is wow!! Hopefully the speed of connection and download will enhance my continued enjoyment of superb sites like this!

Lyle,

Once you get it there's no going back! You should try adding WiFi! --- broadband access from anywhere in the house ... surf the web on a deck chair in the garden if you like

Few weeks ago our cable broadband went down and I had to go back to 56k dial-up... yuck! It's a different world! The phone cord that ran across the hallway at ankle height was a really nice extra... my brother managed to run into it and rip the phone socket off the wall.

Why are your broadband connections that fast?

We again are behind...

Our standard is 1024 kbps down and 128 up.

Which makes 120 KB/sec down and incredible 16 up.

Upstream is always that slow here.

Andy, the ADSL is assymetric by nature. Other types of broadband connections may offer higher upstream rates. I think broadband over the cable-TV-network has technically always been a 10 mbps (downstream) link. The companies have limited the bandwith for various reasons. The ADSL is slower, typically 256 kbps to 8 Mbps. Upstreams is of course much slower. For experimental purposes, half a dozen homes will have 1 Gbps via fiber soon... Not even the geekiest of geeks have figured out what to do with all that bandwidth.

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 12-27-2004).]