We are due to have broadband in the village next January.

I currently have BT Midband which has worked well and on a
couple of occasions when I needed technical support BT were
incredibly helpful - I guess they don't have much to do!

However, I got really fed up with trying to get help/support for
BT Yahoo mail - only a minor thing but they insist on sending
admin emails in HTML and Agent is set up to wrap them up and put
them in the 'Trash' bin. It took me three months to get Yahoo to
finally understand my question and state that all emails are
sent in HTML, they don't have the facility to send in plain
text.

In anticipation of broadband I signed up with Demon - they were
my first ISP and their tech support was good and they have their
own news groups. I still dial up mainly using my BT Midband
account because that's flat rate but I can get my mail from
Demon this way.

I am a bit concerned about the amount of moaning in the Demon
groups - although I guess that you will only usually see the
problems in such groups and rarely the compliments.

So in this 'independent' group what is the view of Demon for
broadband?

Any others I should consider (BT's line tester suggest I will be
limited to a 512 connection)?

What I need is:

A managed install (to convert ISDN to POTS)
Good, preferably local call cost, tech support - I hope I won't
need it but this will be new to me and most of the village
cables are either under water or on overhead lines so I don't
know what to expect.
I would like to start using the ISP now so that I can get email
addresses etc. set up and keep them on transfer.


I have been lurking in here for a while but the only fairly
positive mentions seem to be for PlusNet and fairly negative
mentions of BT/Yahoo. I have also looked at ISP web sites and
Demon mention a managed install whereas I can't seem to find
that elsewhere.

Many thanks.
--
Jeff Gaines - Damerham Hampshire UK

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 12:32:25 +0100, Jeff Gaines wrote:

I was with Demon for (6?) years, but the mail and DNS servers were getting dead
slow, the accounts departments needed things to be told to them several
times and my accounts was being over-burdened with SPAM. When I asked
about ISP-based spam-filtering they said they couldn't possibly do that
due to privacy issues. We now know this to be complete bullshit. In
fact, it seemed to be all downhill since Thus took them over.

Joined Plus.net 18 months with first (abortive) attempt to get Broadband,
finally met criteria a year ago - been fine since. I particulaly like
Plus' customer web portal giving you access to loads of stuff about your
account, connection, mailboxes etc and the Ticket system for contacting
support works very well. You also have Dial-up access to your account as
back-up - I didn't think Demon offered this when I looked, unless you
paid for a dial account as well.

Naturally, if you felt like signing up with
Plus I'd be only too grateful for a referral (kick-back) as "sentry".

As for mananged migration from ISDN - sounds like a job for Andrews &
Arnold (AAISP) - but they're not cheap.

HTH

Eric Lee

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 12:32:25 +0100, Jeff Gaines
<whitedragon101@hotmail.com> wrote:

When I first got a dial up connection with NetDirect in 1996 Demon
seemed to represent the vast majority of the home user market. Oh how
things change.

In this strange world I have now finally ended up with a Demon ADSL
account. The service has been near flawless. My router shows the up
time on my internet connection as over 600 hours. Whatever caused the
blip in connection must have been brief as it didn't affect anything I
was trying to do. I've not had to call their support for any reason
and I have no encounters with their admin, except to set up my DD and
that was sorted without any problems.

My connection speed levels off to between 58-62kbps at any time. This
can be any time of the day or night, there does not seem to be any
variability caused by popular usage times or anything.

So if you want a recommendation, take it from me - they are good.

and their 'Brightmail' spam filtering works...

(They're 'solid', just not as innovative as they used to be - eg I'd
love a service like Eclipse's Flex...)

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 14:32:50 +0100, robert w hall
<bobh@n-cantrell.demon.co.uk> wrote:

And you can usually get through to a rep on the phone, which is always
a plus.

--
steve AT steveevans DOT org

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 13:22:57 +0100, in uk.telecom.broadband,
Eric Lee <eric__lee.nospam@yahoo.com> wrote:

Other ISPs also offer this, but I don't know if Demon is among them.