[ Paul Doherty ] Choosing an Internet Service Provider

Choosing an Internet Service Provider

If you have a BT phone line and you want to get broadband, you can choose your broadband supplier (ISP) from many dozens of organisations, including BT itself (although BT's offerings may not be the best).

How to choose an ISP

Almost everyone does the basics pretty well these days. So you're down to deciding which of the fringe aspects are important to you.

These are the things which you should consider:

Do they have a usage cap? ADSL suppliers used to allow unlimited usage, and a few ISPs still do, but BT's ISP products all now impose a monthly usage limit, and most other ISPs have followed suit, even if they advertise their product as "unlimited"; the limit is often called a "fair usage policy" – read it and see if it seems clear and open.
What speed is it? The word "broadband" is not well defined, and not all suppliers offer the same speeds. The usual ADSL speed is "up to" 8 Mbps (Mbps = Mega Bits Per Second, where "mega" is roughly a million) but no-one gets the full 8 Mbps. (2M services can be more reliable, and sometimes faster than "up to 8M" services) but some providers advertise a headline price which turns out to be for a 1 Mbps service. Contention ratio may also be relevant: it's a bit complicated to explain here, but 50:1 is usual for home connections and paying more for a "better" ratio such as 20:1 is unlikely to be worthwhile.
Do they provide e-mail and webspace? Some BT offerings have been poor in the past, but have got better (in April 2005). But BT doesn't have a good record in this area: its products have caused problems for users in the past (and have been expensive) and some people doubt whether BT has really changed. It still has some very poor products, such as BT Webworld.
Ability to sort out cock-ups in the ordering and provisioning processes within BT (which are quite common). Surprisingly, BT-the-ISP is worse at sorting out problems with BT-the-phone-company than other ISPs are, in my experience. The bigger ISPs with call centres and suchlike tend to be less good at this than the best small ISPs, but the worst small ISPs can be hopeless. Personal recommendation counts for a lot here.
Quality and mode of support. Some have good phone support but no useful support web pages, others vice versa. Which way do you like it? Personally, I hate phoning for support, but what do you do when your e-mail stops working? (With V21 recently, the answer was to look in their support forum, where a change of name for their mail servers was announced. Better if they'd left them alone, of course!) Other people hate searching out info, they just want to phone a number and get it dealt with.

Sometimes you just have to use phone support. I wanted to arrange a line test for someone whose ADSL with AOL wasn't working at all; I spent over an hour on the phone to AOL first-line support who made me do lots of pointless things (like re-install all the software) before they would put me through to AOL second-line support who are the only people who can arrange a line test with BT for AOL customers. I waited in the phone queue for AOL second-line support for an hour exactly, and then the queue terminated the call. For this reason I don't recommend AOL to anyone; sometimes you just need efficient support, and AOL, on that occasion at least, simply weren't able to provide it.
E-mail. Some allow unlimited e-mail addresses, some don't. Personally I always go for the unlimited ones, because I like to use a new address each time I sign up for something, other people only want one or two.

Price; consider avoiding the very cheapest offers because they may attract more customers than they can afford to support. On the other hand, I signed my father-in-law up with the cheapest I could find (because he won't care if it's down for a week or two and doesn't need support, he's got me) and it has been fine.

Fixed or dynamic IP, and a proper reverse DNS. Technical things like this generally don't matter to people – if you don't know what they are, you probably don't need them – but it can be worth checking. Some suppliers give you a fixed IP address and reverse DNS as a matter of course, some do it as a cheap or low-cost option, some charge quite a lot.

Web hosting. How much space, FrontPage extensions, all that stuff.

Minimum contract period. A month? A year? How easy will it be to change if you move house or a better offer comes along? And avoid anyone who wants you to pay for a year's (or more) connectivity in advance. In the past, many of these types of companies have gone bust after a few months, taking your money with them.

Likelihood of future changes. Tricky one this, BT are infamous for changing things without warning (and unknown to their call centres), other ISPs go bust (also, of course, without warning). How confident to you feel that any given supplier will (a) be around in a couple of years and (b) stay as good as they are now? For example, will they keep up with newer products and lower prices? Conversely, if everything's OK, will the try to "fix" it? Almost impossible to assess, of course, but the ISP's record has a part to play here.

Do you have to buy any equipment (ADSL modem?) from them to get the lowest rate – often this equipment is overpriced. Conversely, do they provide any "free" equipment? (But note that many "free modem" offers are not worth much – ADSL modems are very cheap, and anyway, you'd be much better off with a router.)

What is their upstream connectivity like? This will affect the overall speed of your connection to the Internet, but can be hard to establish. Experience and word-of-mouth are important here.

Links to other sites (will open in a new window)

I like Metronet, who have an interesting pricing scheme: you pay less if you use it less, more if you use it more. If you hardly use it (perhaps while you're on holiday) you pay £11.75 (incl VAT) per month, if you use it a lot you pay a capped monthly amount of £22.75 (incl VAT) for unlimited use. They bill you appropriately each month in arrears.

Metronet is part of Plusnet, which was bought by BT in early 2007. It (so far) still seems good, although there were some initial teething problems after the takeover.

If you want personal service from a small and good supplier, I can recommend Merula, with whom I've always had excellent dealings; if you want to speak to someone knowledgeable who knows all about you and your account because he dealt with you before, you'd find them hard to beat. I find I can e-mail them and get a sensible helpful response, from someone running the business (not just an agent in a call centre), usually within minutes, even sometimes in the middle of the night. That level of personal service doesn't come quite as cheap as the mass suppliers, though.