IDNET are a great provider. You ring support and the phone is answered quickly by someone who really knows what they are doing and will try to sort the problem out (though as with any BT based ISP there is sometimes little they can do) rather than lie to you like the cheap and nasty ISPs do. They don't go in for this bullshit of selling unrealistically cheap unlimited packages and then trying to make them viable by throttling/shaping.

As for measuring usage I belive there are some apps that measure it but I don't know any off the top of my head. IIRC windows also tracks the traffic sent and received on a network connection but unfortunately that is only for the current windows session and includes all traffic over that network adaptor including local stuff. Also once you switch to a provider that charges based on usage they will almost certainly provide an easy way to keep an eye on your usage and switch to a higher/lower plan if appropriate.

The upside of the LLU providers is that they often use ADSL2 which can give better sync speeds for the same line than ADSL 1.. Also if you are in an area where the BT adsl backend network is badly contended then LLU bypasses that. Also BEs packages are much closer to genuinely unlimited than most BT based ISPs.

Unfortunately there are some big downsides to many LLU providers. Many of the ISPs are doing LLU primerally for cost reasons and have so much contention that you can't use the extra speed. Even those who generally provide fast unrestricted service (e.g. be) apparently have poor tech support/fault handling.

I looked into LLU for my parents house (and I belive they were on it briefly thanks to tiscalis steath migrations of pipex users) but checking out the providers found issues that made me reject all of thm:
sky didn't seem interested in selling anything but bundles.
easynet didn't seem interested in selling to consumers at all.
tiscali are sh*t
talktalk also have a reputation for being shitty
AOL have a reputation for not letting people quit (though that may be more the american branch than the british one).

LLU   :   This is where an ISP has equipment in the exchange to enable them to provide ADSL completely seperate from BT's back bone network.  They will only use BT's final copper pair of cable from exchange to house for their connection, and will use there own network from the exchange to the 'net' so to speak.

Other ISPs share the BT back bone network, and buy broadband access from BT at wholesale prices to resell to customers.

Most smaller exchanges still only have the BT back bone, and many only have a couple of LLU providers.

Your exchange shows as having TWO LLU providers, which is actually fairly good - mine has 1, and my surrounding exchanges have none.  

Yours are :

O2 / Be:  Enabled as of 30/04/2007
CPW / TalkTalk: Enabled as of 18/02/2008

I am not saying these are the best ISP's, but they will usually have the better connection in terms of speed and contention ratios.  They will also not throttle speed nearly as much as BT wholesale have to.  It all depends on how many people are dumped onto the connections.

As more and more LLU providers set up in exchanges, things should get better and better.

I'm with http://www.plus.net/

They recently won an award for customer service...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7279176.stm

Sky came second and Pipex came third so perhaps the standard overall wasn't high.

CWatters wrote on Mar 13^th, 2008, 7:13pm:

They only seem to list 10 ISPs, other than plusnet (who are from what I have heared pretty good) all I see in the list is the big names who are generally more interested in promising the world and not delivering than they are on giving a decent service at a fair price.

note: by the accounts virgin media aren't that bad if you have cable but are terrible if you have thier DSL service.

CWatters wrote on Mar 13^th, 2008, 7:21pm:


Yes, tested many times.  Some days it's not too bad (900+ for a 1 meg connection) but sometimes it's just over 200  

It's the lost emails that are annoying me.  I only find out by chance that some emails sent to me never arrive.  I could be losing business as it looks like I haven't bothered to reply to enquiries.

Not sure about their spam filter but if there is one it's total crap as I get about 20 spams emails a day.