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Choosing an ISP
03/03/2006 posted by Kevin S
Heres a quick rundown of my opinion of the best ISPs in the UK at the moment.

Choosing an ISP can be based on a few factors, Price, Bandwidth ( how much you can download in a month), Service level and Reliability.

The following ISP are probably the best value and also best service level. Clearly choosing from these four is quite hard, they are all pretty much of a muchness, Zen have been the best over the past few years, due to their Real Unlimited download poilcy ( unlike others in the bottom list which market as unlimited by have 'fair usuage policies' )

Some provide Webspace with PHP, MySQL databases, others do not. However if you choose one of these I don't think you will be disappointed.

Zen
Freedom2 Surf
Force9
Eclipse

Next onto the "Not so good ISPs". These are listed here due the fact that in my opion these ISP are not that good. Simply they are the mass market ISP that are choosen by people because they don't know what else to choose. Also their customer support tends to leave alot to be desired, since they are call centre driven where the 'technical' people usually aren't particularily technical!

Unfortunately these ISP tend to block ports and prevent P2P sharing by using a technique know as 'Packet Shaping'. Essentially this process stops File Sharing, however they do have some benefits such as protecting the uninitiated in computers from themselves, namely by preventing them from becoming an Open Relay or a Zombie PC by blocking ports i.e port 25 for SMTP ( Simple mail transfer protocol ).

Also because they are the 'popular' choice, they tend to have the most contention, that is, too many users trying to fit down the same pipe.

Plusnet
Pipex
Demon
Wanadoo
BT Yahoo
AOL

This is just a small selction there may be other ISP that are good or not so good.