Telewest Blueyonder vs BTnet 2M leased line

BTnet have a special offer on till the end of March - free install with
their BTnet Premium product with a 1 year contract. Annual cost for a
2M line is therefore GBP8,250.

I'd contacted Telewest for a quote some weeks ago. They rang back
recently to offer free install on a 2 year term but when they heard of
the BT offer they managed to match the free install and want GBP7,000
on a 1 year term.

My gut feeling is to stick to BT. I don't think much of the customer
support that the cable companies offer.

Anyone here had any experience of Telewest's leased line offerings?

"Paul Welsh" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Anyone here had any experience of Telewest's leased line offerings?

More likely in uk.net.providers where some ISPs and others lurk

"Paul Welsh" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) oups.com...
> BTnet have a special offer on till the end of March - free install with
> their BTnet Premium product with a 1 year contract. Annual cost for a
> 2M line is therefore GBP8,250.
>
> I'd contacted Telewest for a quote some weeks ago. They rang back
> recently to offer free install on a 2 year term but when they heard of
> the BT offer they managed to match the free install and want GBP7,000
> on a 1 year term.
>
> My gut feeling is to stick to BT. I don't think much of the customer
> support that the cable companies offer.
>
> Anyone here had any experience of Telewest's leased line offerings?

Last year before I was a residential TW customer, one of our clients had a 2
meg private circuit between two solicitors offices in Liverpool installed.
TW failed to install on time and it still wasn't ready when I turned up on
the day the link was needed for a data transfer. Then they nearly left it
terminated at BNC connectors when we'd specifically asked for X21
termination and had this confirmed. Then the line didn't work. Our routers
were blamed but they were Cisco's which had been preconfigured with a leased
line simulation box we had back at the office. The practice manager at the
solicitors went mad over the phone with her TW contact and i think the on
site engineers were told to get it working or else! Suddenly they were back
off up to the other end of the link and found a problem with the termination
of the fibre. Finally I could ping accross the link and everything was OK
from there. Apart from the fact that it was now 6pm on Monday night and both
offices expected to be up and running for 9am the next morning. Let's just
say that I didn't manage to get many beers in at the hotel bar that night
:-)

To be honest, I think some of the mess ups were made by contractors not TW
staff and the guy on site that day was very helpful and did drive accross
liverpool to take a look at the other end which he had no reason to believe
was faulty. Once it was up and running the ping times were excellent;
somwehere in the order of 10-15ms I think. It was also fast and reliable. We
only wanted it for a thin client solution so for us the low latency was more
important than the speed. As I remember the firm considered many options
including a VPN over a bonded ADSL line from Nildram. That costs about
£80-100 a month roughly speaking and I think the TW line was even cheaper!
Obviously yours will connect to the net and so is likely to cost more.

I would cautiously recommend them but make sure you leave plenty of slack
time in your schedule around the install!

Rob

In article <(E-Mail Removed) .com>,
Paul Welsh <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>BTnet have a special offer on till the end of March - free install with
>their BTnet Premium product with a 1 year contract. Annual cost for a
>2M line is therefore GBP8,250.
>
>I'd contacted Telewest for a quote some weeks ago. They rang back
>recently to offer free install on a 2 year term but when they heard of
>the BT offer they managed to match the free install and want GBP7,000
>on a 1 year term.
>
>My gut feeling is to stick to BT. I don't think much of the customer
>support that the cable companies offer.
>
>Anyone here had any experience of Telewest's leased line offerings?

Are you just buying (renting) the leased line, or are you after Internet
bandwidth as well?

If the latter, then you have 100's of ISPs to choose from, BT and TW
are just 2. The deals you will get with the various ISPs vary enormously
depending on the distance they line they need to run, whether they use
BT, TW, C&W, NTL, Surf, etc. to run their leased lines back to their
data centre. They can usually get a good deal with the underlying telco,
and some ISPs insist that they are responsible for the line, as well as
the data. (then you only get one bill)

If you are just after a leased line to (eg) connect 2 offices together,
then, again you'll have choices, but it'll be much more limiting. In
general, BT has fibre and copper everywhere, and everyone else hasn't
- unless you are lucky to be in the middle of a big city. Sometimes a
carrier will sub-contract the "last mile" to BT (and can sometimes still
get you a price cheaper than BT can!)

I've used both BT and TW for leased lines (thats pure lines, no Internet
data) and both have been as bad as the other, however, I've not really
had any issues with 2Mb lines via TW running over a city entre (Bristol
in my case) running them either office to office, or office to an ISPs
POP.

Gordon

Sorry, I didn't make it clear that I've looked at loads of ISPs and the
BT offering was the least expensive leased line. The BT line is half
the price of the existing UUNET 2Mb line I inherited.

"Paul Welsh" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) oups.com...
> Sorry, I didn't make it clear that I've looked at loads of ISPs and the
> BT offering was the least expensive leased line. The BT line is half
> the price of the existing UUNET 2Mb line I inherited.
>

A previous workplace of mine were keen on using Eclipse as they were
apparently really cheap for good reliability. That was 3 years ago and I
had nothing to do with that side of things - just know from having to do
quotes for work that users wanted doing and I never saw the prices as it was
just put down as Leased Line. Might be totally different now.