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I live in a rural area of the UK (my speed is 2.2 Mbps) and the issue is not being able to afford no better - that is all that is available down the end of a long copper line.

A&A can double that.

It'll cost extra, but you did say that the cost wasn't the issue...

Just use a decent ISP - at the risk of sounding like a shill/employee/investor - Andrews & Arnold are pretty good, plus they provide native IPv6.

But they don't advertise the cap, do they?

It depends on your ISP. As I said, iff they are advertising the cap, instead of saying "unlimited" then I see no problem. And indeed, this is what _most_ of the ISPs do here in the UK (certainly the smaller ISPs pretty much never say "unlimited" and advertise a cap.) Some of the ISPs that fall into the "big, cheap and crap" category do still sell dirt cheap "unlimited" accounts with hidden caps, but this is increasingly uncommon.

And a cap that can be consumed in 1-2 days of moderate usage is a fraudulent advertisement when you claim multiple megabits of capacity.

No, no it isn't. If the advertisement says "unlimited" then I would agree that capping it is fraudulent (unfortunately the ASA disagrees on this point); but my ISP says "up to 24Mbps capped at 15GB/month during peak hours" (and defines those "peak hours"), and there is nothing fraudulent about that: I'm absolutely happy with that advertising because I bought the account knowing full well what the cap was and how much it would cost me to increase the cap if necessary. This is good for me - I'm not a heavy downloader, I don't use more than 15GB/month during those peak hours, I don't want to be subsidising the people who thing that they have some kind of a god given right to max out their connection 24 hours a day.

Not that my ISP has caps. Nor that I'd ever sign on with an ISP that has them.

But that's because I'm not interested in getting conned.

I don't see how you can claim an ISP capping people at the advertised limit a "con" - if you can't read the terms of the contract you're signing then that's your own stupid fault, not an attempt to con you. Now, if the ISP is genuinely misadvertising and not explaining the caps in their literature, then that would be a con, but since you said you'd never sign on with an ISP that had caps, you presumably mean you'd know about them _before_ signing, so no, it wouldn't be a con.

Now if the ISPs were to advertise something like "260GB per month at up to 5mbit speed", then they'd be producing fair ads. Ditto if they sold different cap tiering levels and bundles without requiring you to pony up for a higher speed to get a higher cap.

Oh look, that's exactly what they do.

I'm likening these guys to Andrews and Arnold in the UK. The service they offer is second-to-none.

In the UK there's Andrews and Arnold. Native IPv6, excellect monitoring (I get an SMS when the line goes down and back up), and genuinely knowledgeable people. They cost extra, but for me it's well worth it.

Their opinions on filtering are quite interesting too (my emphasis):

...There is a lot of nasty stuff on the Internet as well as useful content. This is, however, your responsibility and not something we are offering. There are many packages available for various operating systems.

We do not have any black boxes designed to filter or monitor traffic and you are welcome to ask RevK on irc if this is still true at any time and take a lack of reply or evasive reply as you wish. Obviously we will ask if the law requires us to actually lie if ever we are subject to such legislation, and if not this statement would be removed. It is an interesting point as the statement that we are not filtering or monitoring is done for financial gain (to get customers) so if we were required to lie under RIPA we would be committing an offence under the Fraud Act. A debate to be had if ever it happens. You can probably get a clue if ever we dissolve the company and move all the contracts to a new company at any time...

In the UK there's Andrews and Arnold. Native IPv6, excellect monitoring (I get an SMS when the line goes down and back up), and genuinely knowledgeable people. They cost extra, but for me it's well worth it.

Their opinions on filtering are quite interesting too (my emphasis):

...There is a lot of nasty stuff on the Internet as well as useful content. This is, however, your responsibility and not something we are offering. There are many packages available for various operating systems.

We do not have any black boxes designed to filter or monitor traffic and you are welcome to ask RevK on irc if this is still true at any time and take a lack of reply or evasive reply as you wish. Obviously we will ask if the law requires us to actually lie if ever we are subject to such legislation, and if not this statement would be removed. It is an interesting point as the statement that we are not filtering or monitoring is done for financial gain (to get customers) so if we were required to lie under RIPA we would be committing an offence under the Fraud Act. A debate to be had if ever it happens. You can probably get a clue if ever we dissolve the company and move all the contracts to a new company at any time...

Andrews and Arnold in the UK. http://aaisp.net/.

How the hell are you supposed to be able to send IPv6 traffic when your ISP can't be arsed to provide it. We pay BT £1,079 pcm for a leased line at work and they can't provide it. Whereas at home I use Andrews & Arnold who provide native IPv6. So far I've been mightily impressed by them.

Sure there's tunneling, but it means my IPv6 traffic ends up coming out of a PoP in Holland. Then there's the issue with routers - I'm currently using a 7 year old WRT54g with OpenWRT on it, though it's far more stable than any ISP router I've had.

DPI of your internet connection at twice the maximum speed currently available on their network!

I'll stick with my favoured LLU ADSL ISP (Andrews and Arnold - No filtering, no shaping, almost constantly get max connection speed in my area (8Mb/s), first line support is an engineer, not a child with a script).

My recommendation - if you want decent broadband and don't mind paying for it, go with AAISP. These are the guys who wrote the blog entry that the article is based on. They use BT wholesale but actually know their stuff inside out, and when there's an issue they sort it out promptly and usually explain exactly what happened, hence this blog entry.

On the two occasions I've had to use their helpdesk during office hours, the phone hasn't actually rung - I've dialed the number, heard a little 'click' then speaking directly with an engineer. Scared the life out of me.

No, I don't work for them but I have been a satisfied customer for seven years. BTW they do landline+ADSL packages which can mean you have to deal with BT less because you're buying the phone line through AAISP's wholesale contract. They are expensive but you definitely get what you pay for. They even do a degree of monitoring for free - I manage a friend's small business IT and get a text message if the ADSL goes down (usually a power cut).

So go find an honest ISP like this one. Yes they have some limits on how much data you can use in a month but they don't secretly block or throttle stuff are completely up front and honest about it and don't pretend you can get unlimited usage when it's a complete lie like most ISPs.

PIPEX are looking to be bought out. Maybe by tiscali.

Get a real ISP, like Black Cat Networks or Andrews and Arnold Ltd. Alternatively, UKFSN (an Enta.net reseller) are pretty good, if you're tighter around the pocket.

[Captcha: protests]

> The 6bone dying means the last ipv6 broker I know of just went out of commission...

Just google for 'IPv6 tunnel broker', there are several out there.

> In some ways it's a pity that ISPs never deployed it

Mine did :-)

I've had the reverse experience. I've tried using Cisco 700 and 800 series ADSL routers, and had very poor service (dropped packets, and dropped connections). I've used Belkin and Netgear routers on the same line, which performed without any visible problems. My ISP () provides very good instrumentation for the connection, so it's possible to get a graph of dropouts over time.

That may be a joke, but in reality IPv6 is ready. My UK ADSL provider, Andrews & Arnold, provide me with an entire block of IPv6 addresses. They will even route it to you natively if your router will support it, otherwise you have to use a 6-over-4 tunnel. My network uses it by default over IPv4; it's kind of neat when e-mail has IPv6 addresses in the headers. ;-)

But the 55 megs of web space they give you is broken -- it doesn't interpret PHP, and execution of CGI scripts is disabled. Yes, even if you try using a .htaccess file to turn it back on -- they have put AllowOverride none in their httpd.conf. Oh, and their DHCP server goes T.U. at inconvenient times. And the modem is combined in with my CATV receiver {they put the ADSL over the TV cable} so unplugging it to get my channel guide back messes up the internet.

That being said, I have kept the same IP address long enough to dare to register a domain name to point at it {though not the MX, which is set to a different ISP's POP3 server; I don't mind losing inbound web/ftp for 48 hours while the changes propagate through DNS, but not my e-mail}. And I suppose I should be grateful that they follow vaguely-RFC-compliant standards, unlike some ISPs who only provide software for Windows. Still, if they annoy me one more time, I'm going to go with Andrews and Arnold and get a /29 to myself.

Like my ISP? Slightly less than 28 of your Earth pounds a month for the 500kb/s connection, and I've got a couple of /28 networks hanging off it.

Well after reading many of the comments, I'm starting to feel rather lucky. My ADSL connection, provided by Andrews & Arnold only gives me 512kbit downlink, 256kbit uplink, but with it comes a block of IP addresses (as many as I can justify having), and no restrictions on what I run. On top of that, they're Linux friendly (and own the domain name sod.ms to prove it) and have been happy to help me out with any problems that I've had. They are one of the more expensive providers in the UK (I pay 70UKP/month), but it really is worth the cash.