Bulldog Superactive

[Neil]

I know it only applies to London peeps, but none the less......

Originally Posted by Bulldog

Up to 4Mbps downstream.
Up to 400kpbs upstream.
Completely unrestricted broadband - no time or data download limits.
Web space-(20MB web space, 10MB file folder, 10MB Photo album)
Phone service-Free, unlimited calls to local and national UK landlines.
On-net calls (to other Bulldog customers) for free.
Mobile and international call rates as per attached tariff.
Say goodbye to BT's £34.50 (£31.50 if you pay by direct debit) quarterly line rental.
No minimum call charge or connect fee (BT minimum charge is 5p)
Keep your existing BT number (or if you prefer, ask for a new one)
Broadband and phone service conveniently charged on the same bill.
Free popular standard call features - anonymous calling (141) and call return (1471)
Advanced call features (call waiting, three-way calling, call forwarding, call barring) for an extra £1 a month.

http://www.bulldogbroadband.com/resi...P/XP/index.asp

All I can say is "Wow!"

It looks like the buyout by C&W is starting to take shape with that phone call deal-surely it can't be long until they expand that to areas outside London too?

Come on Bulldog-CF Expects!! *Salutes*

[Edit]-According to The Register, the service will be rolled out to customers out of London next year.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/13/bulldog_llu/

[Ignition]

Just to rain on the parade a bit, I wouldn't trust Bulldog to run my going to the bathroom, let alone trust them with my 999 calls.

Check this out: http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist...&Board=bulldog

Incidentally Bulldog no longer offer the 4Mbit product as a standalone. You must take a telephony product from Cable and Wireless as well as the DSL.

Hopefully Bulldog will get their act together, however considering how badly their tech team are struggling with just the 35 exchanges that have been running for the past year or more the idea of them managing a load more is scary.

Still if you don't mind sub-512k speeds from a 4Mbit line: http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...b=5&o=0&fpart=
and a phat 8.5kBytes/s from an Office class 2Mbit line:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...anded&sb=5&o=0
This is if they manage to connect you at all:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...b=5&o=0&fpart=
Gaming? Great service:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...anded&sb=5&o=0
Don't phone up unless you've a LOT of time:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthre...anded&sb=5&o=0

Loads more horror stories knocking about, The Register has a few stories about them as well and their mythical network upgrades, while they continue to advertise and gain new customers.

Ah sorry did I forget? My 20:1 office class service is provided by a wholesale partner of Bulldog, who use some of the Bulldog network to provide me my service. Bear in mind again that my service is supposed to be 2Mbit Office class, these are the results I've been getting for a month or more thanks to this shower:

Downstream 134 Kbps (16.8 KB/sec) 144 Kbps (inc. overheads)
Upstream 230 Kbps (28.8 KB/sec) 248 Kbps (inc. overheads)

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/sp...d71ffd1d660080

Statistics for pear.nildram.net:
Packets: sent=100, rcvd=94, error=0, lost=6 (6% loss) in 49.551545 sec
RTTs of replies in ms: min/avg/max: 43.617 / 51.051 / 90.193

Class act this company, I wouldn't touch them with someone elses bargepole.

[Gareth]

Yep, Ignition is right.... Bulldog have a helluva lot of issues to sort out regarding tech support. There was something about people being on hold for 3 hours (prolly in one of those links above, but I'm too lazy to look right now) to get through to CS. And I thought ntl were bad!

Apparently they've cancelled new subscriptions till they've got things back in order, and have already recruited and started training more people to man the phones. Let's hope the improvements start happening soon.

Shame really, cause their pricing is verrrry competitive, and their service is not capped. I am trying to calculate whether to stick with NTL or switch to an ADSL/BT/Sky combo and thought about using Bulldog as ISP .....that was until I heard about their current teething problems

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by GDW1975

Shame really, cause their pricing is verrrry competitive, and their service is not capped. I am trying to calculate whether to stick with NTL or switch to an ADSL/BT/Sky combo and thought about using Bulldog as ISP .....that was until I heard about their current teething problems

Ugh. Be nice if they were teething problems.

Sadly through technical incompetence (mismanaging a migration from Redback to a Juniper ERX solution - note they only have the one piece of kit for all these connections ) not wanting to spend the cash (core network oversubscribed for the second time in a year) and mismanagement of bandwidth / incompetence (migrating a load of customers to BT and forgetting to order the commensurate increase in capacity, then telling porkies about it) they've decorated themselves in a lot of mud and that tends to stick.

It's a shame, on paper it's a superb deal. However do you find the idea of 4Mbps occasionally when it works, a couple of hundred kbps at other times if you're connected at all any good?

On a personal note from a couple of people I know the general view of Bulldog is that their engineers don't know really what they are doing as they are recruited on a 'who you know' basis, rather than those that can do the job. Incompetence starts from the top I guess.

I wouldn't mind so much however my DSL uses their network, and at the moment my download speeds on my 2Mbit service are sub-20kB/s and will worsen when people get home from work. Web browsing is like surfing through concrete, packet loss plentiful, and the only high number in my stats is the latency. All this on a product being sold for £70 a month as always on low contention office quality service.

This is why I hate BD, my home connection has been pretty much unusable for over a month now, and impaired for 6 - 8 weeks, though that's me and thousands of other residential and business customers as well. Criminal.