[Anastasis]

Thanks for your helpful and courteous responses. I appreciate your patience with my confusion over this. Thanks too for the excellent links to information that you and others have available.

To answer JustAnotherN00b, my reason for considering leaving NTL BB is largely cost. In terms of the quality of the connection I have found it to be OK, and haven't had too much cause to complain really. It's just that now compared to others NTL's service is not very good value.

I have been with NTL for around 8 years (although when we first signed up it was Nynex then C&W). We had TV & telephone initially and waited patiently for them to provide the promised free dial-up internet access. As it turned out my area was one of the last to get it, so it wasn't long before it became £5 a month, then £10. By that time BB was getting more popular and as we were paying a fee for dial-up it seemed worth it to pay a little more to get an always on service and benefit from freeing up our telephone line to boot.

I have been on the 128k, then 150k, now 300k service for about 18 months and in that time of course the price has gone up. Although the speed has increased also, in my opinion NTL are no longer leaders when it comes to providing the best value.

We ditched NTL TV in favour of Sky about 3 years ago, but now it's likely that we will first ditch their phone service which again has lost its edge in an ever increasingly competitive market. Their 3-2-1 call charges were great at the time, but compared to the likes of 18866 and others now they are very over-priced.

Likewise, when you look around the market of ISP's and see PlusNet offering a 1mb service with 3gb limit (which should adequately cover my usage) for £18.49 compared to the £17.99 I pay for 300k with NTL, it doesn't take too much for me to think the grass is much greener over on the ADSL side of the fence. Whilst I like the convenience of my NTL cable modem, the actual costs of transferring over to ADSL seem reasonable compared to the other benefits.

I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise, but I seem to have read a lot of posts that concur with my thinking and very few that don't.

Thanks again for all of your feedback.