Fri
Apr
25
This audio recording is really funny! Why? Because it sums up how frustrating it can be to set up your internet.
In all fairness I don’t think BT should be singled out. My girlfriend waited for 6 months for Tiscali to connect her broadband, and in the end she gave up and went with Zen.
On the other hand I have friends that are with Tiscali and BT who say is it has worked perfectly for 3 years.
As a general rule:
- If you want good customer service, sign up with an ISP like Zen. They are expensive, but are a pleasure to deal with.
- If you want to save money, cheaper providers can offer broadband for just 1/3 the price of Zen. This could save you as much as ~£250 a year. If you can cope with lower quality support you could save a packet.
Clip: Audio only, no video. Taken from “The Now Show” - BBC Radio 4
Thu
Apr
3
The best place I have yet found to do an
internet speed check is
www.speedtest.net. The site has many great functions which I am going in explain in depth later on in a future blog post.
But first, I would like to answer the question, “Why is broadband speed important?” As far as I’m concerned one of the most important reasons to have a fast broadband connection is to be able to watch videos online. Watching videos online is revolutionizing the internet in my opinion – in January 2008 alone, a staggering 3,400,000,000 were watched on YouTube.
At the time of writing, the quality of videos on you tube is pretty rubbish compared to the picture on your tv. The reason for this has a lot to do with broadband speeds. Over the next few years I think that the quality of YouTube videos will rise as broadband speeds become faster.
Broadband speed can also make a difference to browsing ordinary web pages if they have lots of photos on the page. Flickr.com is a great example of a site that works much better the faster connection you have. When you view photos as a slide show there is an annoying delay even on a connection that is rated at 3.5 Meg.
Flickr and YouTube are two of the most amazingly brilliant websites around, and to enjoy them fully I think a fast connection is crucial. If you haven’t already done so, your first step should be to do an internet speed check on your connection - it’s free and only takes a minute.
