*goes to hammer his parents in to subscribing to it

When PIPEX having 1Mb ?

No i dont work for NTL, but i do have some intelligence to realise a red apple and a green apple arent the same, even though they're both apples (a metaphor for you simple people out there).

The service fast24 offer cant be compaired equally to NTL unless you take into account all the features. at 50:1 you could potentially have 50 people sharing your 1mbit downstream. thats 0.02mbit/s max which you cant complain about, because you signed up for it, the company looks a bit fly by night, so i expect fun to be had with em in time... price increases, outages etc.

well ive never had any problems with my 2mb ADSL service with regards to speed or outages. Ive had it for about 4 or 5 months now! :)

What utter tosh! At present time there are not enough users in the UK to cause contention issues. BT are not contending anyone on the PVC's.

Contention on ADSL refers to the total bandwidth on the PVC not the bandwidth of your connection. The PVC has a bandwidth of 10Mb and this is what will be contended at 50:1. Even if another 50 users are connected to the same PVC at your exchange (which currently does not happen - only 3 IPS's will share one PVC) you will still get around 20 - 25KBps as worst case would be 200Kb.

It is on the PVC that BT will apply the contention and not between blocks of 50 users.

Loads of cheap dialup ISPs came and went - their technical support was poor and trying to get through to customer services was a joke, but they were happy to take the money. A bit like ntl then :rolleyes:

Surprised that cheap ADSL providers are popping up ?. I'm not - some of them will be here today gone tomorrow. Stay with a reputable company :)

Well not quite! I don't know where you get your info from, but the 100% free ntl:world dial-up service was the only "unmetered" dial-up internet service to survive out of about 50 planned services from such companies as breathe and altavista. Oh and their customer services have recently been awarded 5 stars, ahead of the likes of Sky and BT in a recent report! :rolleyes:

Have you thought of applying for NTL still trying to work out the differences you suggest it could be NTL:D