Off the Fence

Finally made a decision on my near future ADSL Broadband requirements. The recent flurry of announcements from BT, and just about every other ISP, about fantastical 2/4/8Mb speeds had got me thinking. My current provider (and have been for 8 years now), Demon, have generally been rock solid but these announcements from other companies coincided with a few shaky days of performance from Demon. The main worry I had with Demon was that they appear to be very conservative in their business thinking. They only rolled out an upgrade to a 1Mb connection for home users in December at £29.99 a month. By January BT announced they were doubling their customers speeds for free and everybody else seemed to do the same, the silence from Demon was not well received by a number of their customers (me included).

Now the dust has settled, and the announcements and claims from other ISPs are becoming clearer and reveal that, the actuality of delivering some of these promises is less clear-cut. Once you do a bit of digging you find that things are not as they first seemed. I’ll not go into the ins and outs of it all but the adslguide website is a good place to gather information on all the broadband providers and services in the UK. To this end I’ve decided to remain with Demon and opted for a re-grade to their 1Mb HomeOffice product at £29.99 per month with no caps of any kind. I know that general browsing will show little difference with the increased bandwidth but for long file downloads this will give a nice boost. I often listen to Radio 5 Live through the Internet, while upgrading my virus definitions and downloading various large files and now with the additional wireless network I have in place this upgrade should do nicely for sharing across the house.

I’m sure when Demon are good and ready they’ll increase their speeds further in line with the competition but won’t be forced into premature announcements that could lead to confusion and disappointment.

Update: 9/04/05 Fired up the computer this morning and noticed that exeem was fairly zipping along, nice. Painless experience of the upgrade, all went smoothly, didn't have to do anything at my end apart from filling out the regrade from and faxing it back. Hopefully Demon's account department won't bugger it up at this late stage..

Category:

• Demon
• ISP
• Broadband