Whats the best broadband isp for Linux ?

I'm going to change ISP. What do you think is the best with Linux. If anyone
has used Bt Yahoo broadband, ntl, Tiscali or any other uk ISP please post
your opinion. I already have Freeserve but don't like the way wanadoo are
changing things and their support is awful.
regards Alex

I've seen this post twice tonight, in different forums.

If you're in Australia (not unthinkable) I'm with Bigpond, No support
from them as far as Linux is concerned, But the forums are quite good.
I generally get answers to probs within days. Which is better that most
Customer service/support anyway. (try aol or Packard-bell, lol)

It's good, but you have to do a lot of work you're self, No offence
intended as I'm a linux neub.

So, Unofficially, Bigpond cable is GOOD.


OOps, Just noticed, Quote "uk ISP". Heh, Heh. Now I've typed all that,
Gaday, mate.... I'm sending anyway....l;lol

Alex Mc Kever wrote:

> I'm going to change ISP. What do you think is the best with Linux. If anyone
> has used Bt Yahoo broadband, ntl, Tiscali or any other uk ISP please post
> your opinion. I already have Freeserve but don't like the way wanadoo are
> changing things and their support is awful.
> regards Alex
>
>

Alex Mc Kever wrote:

> I'm going to change ISP. What do you think is the best with Linux. If anyone
> has used Bt Yahoo broadband, ntl, Tiscali or any other uk ISP please post
> your opinion. I already have Freeserve but don't like the way wanadoo are
> changing things and their support is awful.
> regards Alex

I suggest you go with a small ISP. Your business will be more important to
them, they probably still do their own tech support (rather then putting
it in India) and, you're quite likely to give recommendations. Like I am
about to

I'm with Metronet: <http://www.metronet.co.uk/> who do a strange
Pay-As-You-Go service. You pay £10 a month, plus £0.0025 per MB
downloaded. Once you hit about 6GB, they stop charging per MB and you're
free to d/l as much as you want, no extra cost. This is perfect for me +
parents -- they don't use the net much, so it will be about £12/13/14 a
month whilst I'm at uni, when I'm back I have fast access.

Look at <http://www.adslguide.org.uk/> .


My friends' experiences:
o NTL suck. The service is erratic and overloaded.
o BT don't care for their customers. You're not important to them, so your
'different' software will be ignored. You won't get any help.

One other friend with with the *really* cheap ISP, offering 2MB ADSL for
pennies, £17 a month or something. I don't think he's got it sorted out
yet, and he ordered it about 2 months ago (part of this is BT's fault,
part the small ISP's fault)

--
Matt


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On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:15:15 +0100, Alex Mc Kever wrote:

> I'm going to change ISP. What do you think is the best with Linux. If
> anyone has used Bt Yahoo broadband, ntl, Tiscali or any other uk ISP
> please post your opinion. I already have Freeserve but don't like the way
> wanadoo are changing things and their support is awful. regards Alex

I'm using NTL. The service is pretty good, fast and reliable. Tech support
is bordering on the non existent but getting better, and isn't necessary
if you know what you are doing. The CM has an ethernet port and a DHCP
relay so connecting a *nix system is trivial (I actually use OpenBSD on
the router, but Linux will be no different). No messing about with drivers
for strange adapters. The Windows setup CD is completely unnecessary, I
have set up an NTL connection three times (once for a friend with Windows,
and my own twice because my CM broke and had to be replaced) and I have never
even seen one.

When the CM broke they replaced it very efficiently and promptly, the chap
came round the day after I reported it with the replacement ready in his
van and was quite knowledgeable, unlike most of the "help" line staff.

The real problems from my POV are their web and DNS proxies. These cause
two particular problems for me:

They make it impossible to use the NTL connection to do any sort of
diagnosis of problems on the Internet. As my work involves mail, DNS and
web server administration I want to be able to do this. The DNS proxy is
particularly evil. It prevents me from connecting directly to any remote
nameserver at all. It is blatantly not transparent and delivers different
answers to the real servers in many cases, especially where the real
servers are misconfigured, and it is only misconfigured servers which
interest me. I circumvent this by sshing into machines at work where the
connection is clean, but if I did not have this option it would be a real
problem. I could not set myself up as an independent networking consultant
using an NTL connection for instance.

They mess up attempts to connect to systems at work over our firewall. I
authenticate my router to the firewall, but of course the proxies aren't
authenticated, and although my nameserver knows about the company's
private DNS their proxies don't. This isn't insurmountable, I make a great
deal of use of SSH tunnels and VNC.

As you will notice I also have a Demon account, which is ISDN dialup, as a
backup and for when I need a connection which does not suffer from the
above problems. Demon are very good for totally unmolested connections,
with a fixed IP too. But I have not used their broadband service.

If neither of these is important to you NTL are a reasonable bet. Their
maximum rate is going up to 1.5Mb shortly, that's a CD in an hour. I have
never noticed any sort of contention problem. With the current 1Mb I can
reliably get a CD in about an hour and a half. I havn't experienced any
capping either, I downloaded 6 Debian CDs over a 24 hour period recently
without trouble.

Regards, Ian

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:15:15 +0100, Alex Mc Kever wrote:

> I'm going to change ISP. What do you think is the best with Linux. If
> anyone has used Bt Yahoo broadband, ntl, Tiscali or any other uk ISP
> please post your opinion. I already have Freeserve but don't like the way
> wanadoo are changing things and their support is awful. regards Alex

I think you might get a bit more response if you put your question in
uk.comp.os.linux rather than this international group. But do google for
previous answers first, I think it's been discussed quite a bit already.

Regards, Ian

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:15:15 +0100, Alex Mc Kever wrote:

> I'm going to change ISP. What do you think is the best with Linux. If anyone
> has used Bt Yahoo broadband, ntl, Tiscali or any other uk ISP please post
> your opinion. I already have Freeserve but don't like the way wanadoo are
> changing things and their support is awful.
> regards Alex

I'd really be surprised if you could find anyone who actually supports
linux - mostly you're on your own.

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>,
"ray" <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:
>
>
> On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:15:15 +0100, Alex Mc Kever wrote:
>
>> I'm going to change ISP. What do you think is the best with Linux. If anyone
>> has used Bt Yahoo broadband, ntl, Tiscali or any other uk ISP please post
>> your opinion. I already have Freeserve but don't like the way wanadoo are
>> changing things and their support is awful.
>> regards Alex
>
> I'd really be surprised if you could find anyone who actually supports
> linux - mostly you're on your own.

That's the real advantage of using an ISP which doesn't support Linux -
you're never tempted to waste time and money listening to ring tone for
ages followed by advice of dubious quality.

I'm in the UK too (the topic would have been more appropriate in a UK
group) and use ntl. They don't support Linux. Some have complained about
the time ntl support take to answer the phone. I have never had to wait
for them to answer the phone - because I've never rung them.

--
Tim Clark

The best part of linux is that you don't need support, true, guys ...
cause I never cared of anything like linux support back home,
Bangladesh. Like when I was doing PPPoE, my ISP was supporting only
windows clients, they had a point too, cause they were running windows
version of PPPoE server.

Still running linux in my place in Bangladesh was never a problem when
you have access to such a huge newsgroup on linux!

--
raqueeb hassan
kinshasa, drc

On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 06:21:40 +0000, Raqueeb Hassan wrote:

> The best part of linux is that you don't need support, true, guys ...
> cause I never cared of anything like linux support back home,
> Bangladesh. Like when I was doing PPPoE, my ISP was supporting only
> windows clients, they had a point too, cause they were running windows
> version of PPPoE server.
>
> Still running linux in my place in Bangladesh was never a problem when
> you have access to such a huge newsgroup on linux!
>
> --
> raqueeb hassan
> kinshasa, drc

It's nice to have an ISP who at least knows that linux exists. In my past
experience, if they have MS and MAC support, you're probably going to be
OK. I used to use a local ISP in New Mexico (USA), who actually had setup
instructions for RedHat. In truth, I never really needed their support
services for linux; it was nice having a local ISP who had real people
answering the phone - there were a few times I had issues with their web
hosting, and other items - they were very responsive.