ISP exp: which one we love and why

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I live and work in Italy, which is “discovering” FTTC/VDSL connections during last 2 years.
And now is pushed as retail connection for people, offices and small companies.

But also FTTH/FTTO is growing, only in not-so-small cities (over 50.000 inhabitants) and some “business interesting” boundaries.

So… which is your favourite connection? And ISP? Is it reliable? Has some kind of limitations?
CPE is easy to use/connect with your device?

Tell us which one you like and… why you dislike other ones :wink:

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I live in Belgium. Overhere there is a duo-poly from either the biggest telecom provider proximus, which delivers xDSL connections. I have a VDSL2 with 30/3 capacity. (and a 500GB per month data limit :rage: ) The other option is cable: in the Dutch speaking part there is Telenet and in the French speaking part there is VOO. I would like to switch to cable, but it is a lot more expensive since you can’t get cable Internet unless you also have cable TV.
Unfortunately Fibre Optical connections are next to non existent in Belgium.
Because of the duo-poly, prices of Internet connections are high and development and implementation of new techniques are not in the picture any time soon. Unless we all start rioting for better connections… :wink:

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There are quite a number of ISPs in the UK: BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Sky, Zen are some of the biggest.

The one I like the most (and I am quite biased on this choice) is Claranet. Claranet is actually an MSP (Managed Solution Provider) and not an ISP (Internet Service Provider), although they did start as an ISP.

Claranet is very reliable, especially the SOHO (Small Office Home Office) Team based out of the Warrington office near Manchester.

Claranet provide ADSL, FTTC, FTTH, FTTO and Leased Lines as well. And that is just their connectivity products.

A dislike would be cost - most of their connections cost a bit more than the other ISP; Claranet is very much aware of it and they freely admit that they are not out to compete on price, but prefer to be slightly more expensive and focus more on customer experience and satisfaction.

A limitation is that Claranet is somewhat dependent on OpenReach (as do all the other ISPs - kind of an open secret) and on the services OpenReach supply in that area. OpenReach pretty much have a complete monopoly on the telephone infrastructure. The only way to bypass using the OpenReach monopoly is to use Virgin Media’s infrastructure which is roughly 99% their own which supplies FTTC and coaxial from the Cabinet to the premises and they have been deploying 200Mb/20Mb connections (which actually deliver the speeds advertised). On occasion Virgin Media will use the OpenReach infrastructure for areas where they have not rolled out their own infrastructure.

For the CPE, you can purchase it directly from Claranet or supply your own. The equipment purchased from Claranet comes with standard preconfigured settings so its pretty much plug it in and it connects and works, straight out the box. If you wish to configure your own equipment and are struggling with the basic settings, the SOHO Technical Support team are able to help you configure it over the phone.

Whenever I have a technical issue, the waiting on the phone is short (anything from 15 seconds to 3-4 minutes) unless there is a major outage, then the wait time is anything from 4 minutes to 25 minutes although it would be exceptionally rare for it to be longer than 10 minutes and the outage is usually affecting services other than the broadband.

If anyone is looking for a really good ISP/MSP for a home or office internet connection, I would not hesitate to recommend Claranet.

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Interesting topic. @jim what happens in Brazil? @dnutan in Spain?
@GG_jr What about Romania? @EddieA U.S.A.?

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Which kind of device you can use?
FTTC/VDSL for TIM (one of biggest ISP of Italy) often costrain to use CPE of the ISP (VOIP services are provided only on their hardware) or for using a static ip address.
Obivously the firmware of the devices are “custom for ISP” and without full personalization of the settings (now you cannot use 172 private subnet). But seems to support a full port forwarding.

For residential connections, most of ISP now allow an user-provided CPE, unless there’s VOIP/Telephone service on the connection.
Except a couple of WISPs (Eolo and CheapNet) which allow you to use SIP client or devices, from DECT-SIP enabled phones to FXS/FXO adapters.

Another provider until few months ago (Wind) provided AVM ADSL routers as CPE, but without admin access for the customer.

Until now, i have no direct experience of IPv6 public connections.

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I have an FTTC connection through Claranet.

During installation, OpenReach supplied the VDSL Modem (its pretty much d dumb model which only provides the VDSL modem connection and nothing else - no pppoe, no routing or anything like that).
I connected the VDSL Modem to my NethServer box with an RJ25 cable (100Mb connection although the cable and Nethserver can do 1Gb)

NethServer does the PPPoE authentication and I use the Gateway feature.

For Claranet, there is list of approved VDSL modems/routers for FTTC/FTTH connections and this is down to the requirements set by OpenReach.

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USA here, in my area we have spectrum, which offers 60/6 where I am, but will be moving to 100/6 at some point. WOW is another ISP coming shortly which offers 1000/50, so that will be nice. There is also ATT and Verizon which offer DSL and cable internet, mostly to businesses and slower speeds. In the rural areas they have a couple providers which beam internet off of grain bins (we have a lot of farms where I am), so that people in remote areas can have internet. This is more expensive and slow (only max of 20/2 or so), but it covers people who wouldn’t have coverage otherwise. Of course some people are offering 1000/1000 (google fiber for one) but they are not in my area. We do not have data caps for the most part unless its satellite internet but I don’t think many people use that unless they have no other options.

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Yeah, I’m Spectrum cable also, but only because there is no other option that offers anything similar in speed, so they have you over a barrel in terms of cost. The area I’m in also offers 200 and 300 downloads.

Cheers.

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Hi,

In the place I.m living there’s few ISP, and only one wich work with the ADSL technologie… I’m using this one.
The name is Oi

I’ve got the impression to live again in the early 2000…it was the begining of the adsl technology in France :joy::joy:

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If I ever feel the need to complain about broadband speed, I consider the ADSL only options for South Africa - 256kb-512kb with a data cap is the standard. Yes - that number is correct - less than 1Mb. One can get a 1Mb connection, but its usually for small businesses who take up the faster speeds due to the cost.

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I’m not complain so much…

To not suffer a lot… I’m using Nethserver for:
Cache DNS and limit DNS request.
Proxy cachng… to save broadband
To filter ads… to save broadband too…

Finally, I’m trying to maximize my avalaible broadband :rofl:

With a certain success cause I can assist Netflix :joy::joy:

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I saw the same in Senegal. VERY slow connections. The fastest connection available was a 10Mb down/512Kb up. But it costed like EUR80,- a month. (to place in context: average monthly income in Senegal is EUR100,- to EUR120,-)
Other internet connections were similar to what @bwdjames mentions in South Africa.

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Well not the most fancy ISP, but I just changed from ‘sfr’ to ‘orange’ and I’m really surprised that I did not waste time without Internet. It just works…now I need time to test it

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hi,

In Germany we’ve got this expression “Perlen vor die Säue werfen” - Deutsche Glasfaser with 200/200. But me and DualStack-lite…Ipv6to4 tunneling…we’ll see - should have stayed with ADSL!

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In Colombia the best is EPM, in Bogota ETB (fiber conn is amazing) The rest of the country is Timofonica, (Spain). we are just a colony again.

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