Any "best ADSL service" recommendations?

[Steve Last]

Having just been advised that we have ADSL available in the village at last, can anyone recommend a good value provider for periodic usage, i.e. 3 - 4 weeks steady use and then 3-6 weeks away with no usage at all?  

Tried searching the forum but result is sooooo sloooooow on dialup.... so if there is a thread to point me to??

Steve L.

[Deimos]

One thing you need to check is which ISPs will offer what speeds to you. You use the word “village” (and I assume thus rural’ish). As ADSL is installed, not all ISPs offer service (or have may limited speed offerings). For example, I got ADSL last Sept and Wanadoo were the only people offering any service at all for the 1st 7 or 8 months. Now one other ISP is offering service with a choice of two speeds. The distinction is whether or not you are degrouped. You can check (maybe only after the ADSL is installed) on http://www.degrouptest.com/. It is not always completely up to date but may help.

I use Wanadoo (the only company offering me service when ADSL was installed), but I was with them pre-ADSL. I would not recommend them as “best” but most of my problems have been with the phone line cable (and trees) rather than Wanadoo itself. Don’t like (and don’t use) their software and also don’t like paying premium rate numbers for telephone support. They also ignore every e-mail I have sent them However, when paying relatively low amounts of money per month, you cannot expect free “everything else”. For me Wanadoo have been OK.

Ian

[Ron Avery]

Similar experiences to Ian, with Wanadoo pre ADSL and no problems now with Wanadoo Live box, total unmimited access for 30€ a month.

I would go with them, but you will get recommendations for all sorts and a lot of people will tell you wanadoo is wanadont, but I have used Free and Tiscali here and both were awful in terms of connection and service support. 

[Steve Last]

Thanks for the comments, I used Free.fr for a couple of years on dial-up but found the service degraded greatly in the last year so switched to Tiscali which is what I am using now. I will check out the suggestions. Ideally, it would be great to have a company which served both the K and France and you could use the same account in either, but then I see aviating pork occasionaly too!

Thanks again

Steve  

[tjsgifan]

I've used Cegetel ADSL since March and apart from a couple of configuration issues initially, i've found it all very good, most problems being related to weather conditions.  Even though I pay for an upto 8Mb service though, due to exchange issues, I think it's "only" running at 1600Kbps (Sympathy go's to all those 56k modem users.....) They offered a decent all inclusive rate at the time compared with Wanadoo and a couple of others and I must admit, even with the thick stone walls we have here, the Wireless connection still works very well - I can easily sit in a sunny spot in the garden!!  Visit http://www.cegetel.net to see if they work in your town.

Good luck!

Toby.