Broadband service

[Dave2002]

They can be tempting, but wouldn't that involve the hassle of having a new email address, something which seems to permeate everything we do, with not only contacts but so many usernames etc?

Email addresses can be a pain, as also the way that some email addresses are bundled with other services. I am still paying for a broadband service which I no longer use because I've been reluctant to give up an email address, which has on occasion even now been useful. The charges are disproportionate, but I've not got round to rationalising this.

I've noticed that so many things are linked to email that considerable care would be needed for some of us to discontinue with a particular email provider.

I also use google mail - which is free, and mostly reliable, but that opens up yet another can of worms re privacy etc.

[Risorgimento]

I am curious to know what level of service people get from their ISP's.

I use John Lewis. I have unlimited broadband and land line calls,which is just under £40 PM..There was a fault on the network this week, and JL would only promise to look at it in " Up to 72 hours", which turns out to be "at the end of the working day in which the 72 hour window ends"..effectively 80 hours. This seems pretty slow, just to look at the problem.

Anybody get better or worse service? I live in a rural area. We get fairly frequent short drop outs, and pretty sluggish download times, I would think, not that this too much of an issue.
All thoughts welcome.

Cheers

TS.

Does that £40 include line rental? Curious to know. We also are rural but pay the BT line rental yearly in advance. The difference in price between their competitors is marginal and TBH not worth the hassle of changing. We also use the BT call bundle but again TBH since we make so few outgoing calls I really ought to revisit the whole thing again and so your post has prompted me to do so. For which my thanks.

As for broadband, we have used Zen for many many years. An excellent company and most importantly a UK based superb technical support team. Not that I have anything against India or its citizens as I love the country and visit regularly. However Indian call centre technical support has been, in my experience, very much hit and miss.

[mercia]

in answer to someone above who said it would be a hassle to move away from BT because of the need to change email address, I received an email from BT this morning (because I have recently moved away from them) informing me that I could keep my BT email address free for a month and thereafter still keep it for a fee of £1.60 per month, called "BT Premium Mail" even with a new broadband provider (not that I personally wish to do that because I never used my BT email address anyway).

[Don Petter]

in answer to someone above who said it would be a hassle to move away from BT because of the need to change email address, I received an email from BT this morning (because I have recently moved away from them) informing me that I could keep my BT email address free for a month and thereafter still keep it for a fee of £1.60 per month, called "BT Premium Mail" even with a new broadband provider (not that I personally wish to do that because I never used my BT email address anyway).

Could have been me. Thanks - Useful to know, and worth it, I should think.

[Risorgimento]

Help please!

I am suddenly getting substantial dropouts on sound only (radio and Player and tv) and/or on both sound and vision.

I seem to have noticed lately that websites are loading more slowly, but it wasn't something that had bothered me much. Only 24 hours earlier I had watched a whole film on iPlayer without a problem.

I phoned my provider (Utility Warehouse) last night and the helpline person said that he couldn't see any reason why this was to do with their broadband service.

Tests for download speeds last night and this morning reported 14.39 - 15.75mbps. The helpline man said they deliver 20mbps. A geographical check reported that my service was second best locally only to BT.

My kit is getting a bit elderly: six year old MacBook, running OSX 10.6.8. So I'm wondering if that needs looking at.

Any suggestions please?

BW, kb

kb, there are several reasons why this might be happening.

1) You have an intermittent connection either internal or external to your house. If external then a good ISP will be able to look at the connection log at quite a low level that will tell whether or not this is happening. I have no experience of Utility Warehouse. We have used Zen for many many years and their service is faultless as is their technical support. Not the cheapest on the block but not far off.

2) Does this happen at certain times of the day? When the schools get out? Could be that you are simply suffering from something called contention and the available bandwidth is being shared with kids playing games etc.

3) Are you on wifi internally ? There's another possible source of problem. Also is it locked down ? If not then someone (depending where you live) could be 'sharing' your wifi connection unbeknownst to you. If you are on wifi then I'd get that locked down ASAP if it isn't already.

4) Routers can play up. The only real way to eliminate that source is to replace it.

5) Could be the BBC server or whatever server you are accessing is overloaded.

6) Unlikely to be your Mac unless you have a hardware problem giving you a bad connection to your network/router.

[Dave2002]

Thought I'd report that I'm now virtually certain this was a problem with BBC iPlayer, which went offline the following day for several hours.

Glad it seems to be fixed. However it is possible that some other programs or processes could have, or could in the future, disturb audio playback.
I have, on occasions, noticed a periodic problem - with a period of around 1-3 seconds.

If it happens again, run Activity Monitor, and look at the processes running. If you can figure out what might be causing the problem then do a Force Quit, and see if the problem goes away. You might have to guess more than one process or program, but sometimes this can highlight the problem.

Anyway, glad it's fixed for now. There really isn't much wrong with 10.6.8 - I'm still running it on one of my machines. I know someone who is still using a Macbook which is, apparently, quite a bit older than yours - though the battery doesn't hold charge. I don't think there is likely to be much wrong with either your OS or your kit based on what you have written.