Thinking of moving to Telewest cable in Exeter - good plan or not?

[TerminatorUK]

Hello all

Introduction

I currently have a 2 Meg ADSL service from freedom2surf with a 10GB cap for £19.99.

However, they have recently just been bought out by Pipex and I am already seeing speed drops and higher latencies. I play a lot of online games so ping times are one of the most important factors for me.

Also the limitations on downloading always concerns me, not because I often get anywhere near 10GB of data in a month, it's more the fact that I have to say "Hmmm do I really need this download?" before I click the button which I don't like doing.


Question 1 : Ping times

Currently I get an average of around 25ms in the command prompt from UK servers which is great but sometimes spike to around 30-50ms in the later evenings.

I remember when I was in London on Telewest (in 2003) I had a really nice 10-15ms ping which was fantastic.

In my final year at uni (2004) in Plymouth I had Telewest 1meg cable but had an aweful experience. No end of problems....rarely got anywhere near 120 KB/sec (always about 80-90 KB/sec) but more to the point the ping times varied massively....30-100ms....not good at all.

Telewest bought out Eurobell's network down here in the South West and I'm wondering if that has any effect on the sub-par service I experienced?

Queston: Could I expect pings < 20ms in Exeter? Does anyone else have pings for this area?


Question 2 : Upsteam ID / Registered MAC addresses

As a cable novice (only used it for 2 years in separate places and I wasn't the account holder) can anyone shine any light on my following experiences:

Upsteam ID - changing this in Plymouth did sort some of my ping and speed issues but not entirely. I did this on the Cable Modem itself; should this have been done Telewest's end to work properly or do they just change it on your cable modem for the same effect?

Registered MAC Addresses - I intend to plug the Cable modem into a Linksys WRT54G wireless router. When I was in London (2003) you had to register the MAC address of any device that was connected to the modem and the installation engineer usually asked for NIC of your computer. I think this is obselete now because I could use any device in Plymouth (2004) and it worked fine; is this always the case from now on?


Question 3 : Speeds

Download - I'm looking to get the 4MB service for £24.99 a month but this is 'subject to regional availability'. Is there somewhere I can find out if it is available yet in Exeter? If so, does anyone have an average speed they get down here?

Upload - something nice to have, I heard it will be 384kbps? Is this correct or will it be lower / is this subject to the upgrades as well?


Finally....

Thank you for reading! Sorry to ask such a lot, please don't feel you have to answer all my questions, any information about any bits of the service would be awesome. I'm just hesitant because of bad experience I had in Plymouth and that my ADSL service currently isn't that bad, if my pings got higher I'd be pretty annoyed tbh :P

Many thanks again!

Term

[andymt]

speed- i live in london and i get 9ms as an average to bbc.co.uk, and on 4mb download speeds of about 480kbps from a fast server.
rollout is to be completed by early 2006, so i wouldn't worry about regional availability. if you are in a tw enabled area, you will be able to get your chosen speed.

Upload - something nice to have, I heard it will be 384kbps? Is this correct or will it be lower / is this subject to the upgrades as well?

if you are planning to buy the broadband complete (1mb soon 4mb package) then when the rollout is done for your area you will have upload of 384kbps.
hmm speed depends... i can usually upload at around 44kbps to a fast server. speed tests say around 380kbps. however if you max it out it does affect your download speed.

if you order service before region has been upgraded you will get 1mbps download and 128kbps upload. then after upgrade you will get 4mbps download and 384kbps upload. check http://blueyonder.co.uk/evenfaster to find out when your region will be upgraded.

Hope some of this helps.