Darren O'Neill

When I moved a little under 2 years ago now I was faced with having to pay BT £125 to come out and fit a telephone line for me so I could purchase an ADSL internet connection or switch to Virgin Media. I never thought I would go for a cable connection as I’d always looked down on the service, mainly due to the terrible reputation NTL had. Looking back it was the right decision and I urge anyone who has cable services in their area to do the same. With Virgin recently having announced their 50Mb connection it is hard to see how ADSL will compete unless BT sort themselves out quickly.

The best thing about cable is you get what you pay for: when I was on ADSL I would pay for a 2Mb connection and get 512Kb. The reasons ISPs give for this common problem are varied but usually they end up saying “you live too far away from the exchange”. Whenever I attempted any serious dialogue as to why I wasn’t receiving what I was paying for with my ISP (I won’t name them) they always rolled out that familiar mantra. That, the terrible usage allowance and a peak hours time frame spanning from 9am to 10pm left me constantly annoyed. I found the service patchy and unreliable and wouldn’t want to go back.

I must say not all ADSL providers are bad and there are many good ones out there and if you live close to a telephone exchange you’ll probably get great speeds. As Virgin use a fibre optic cable you don’t suffer from this issue as the line won’t be affected by noise and local interference.

Tags: ADSL, BT, cable, internet, Virgin Media