Which ISP? Is that an age old geek question or what? Actually these days I'm not sure it can be limited to a geekquest anymore!

In the UK, the Broadband market has recently started to see a glut of free offerings, from the likes of Carphone Warehouse (mobile phone retailer), Orange (mobile phone network provider), and now Sky (satelitte TV provider and part of the Murdoch chain). As you'd expect all of these have at least as many strings as your standard apron, but as a Sky subscriber (I bought into Sky+ (PVR) when the UK PVR market wasn't quite mature enough) I can now choose from:

• 2Mb (upto) (capped @ 2GB) FOC (but with a £40 activation fee)
  
• 8Mb (capped @ 40GB) £5/month (activation fee dropped to £20)
  
• 16Mb (uncapped) £10/month (with no activation fee)
  
• 8Mb (capped @ 70GB) £17/month (but with activation fee back up to £40 eh?)
  

at this point I should probably add that I belive the area I live has a 1MB limit -- the fact we can even get ADSL is something the whole neighbourhood is ever so grateful. When we were shopping for houses ADSL availability was high on my shopping list, and just as we found our ideal property (which we bought!) BT kindly acknowledged they were due to drop their 5km-from-exchange restriction, which was timely.

I've been a happy Pipex customer since around 2002 (I moved back to the UK from Silicon Valley where I'd had a fine broadband connection until the ISP went bust). In my time with Pipex, I've had to phone them only a couple of times and I've never had a problem with the connection. I only moved away from them once, when I moved to a rented property that was already connected to NTL for phone and cable, so I opted for them for my broadband (cable modem) and that too was more or less troublefree, and obviously wonderfully, for the day, fast at 700Mbps).

Currently I pay way too much for my uncapped 1Mbps service from Pipex (something like £23.99/Month!).

I'm sure looking at this in black and white you might think it was obvious to follow price, but as a customer of both Sky and Pipex, I know I've had no problems contacting or dealing with Pipex, whereas Sky, being significantly larger, are sometimes frustrating to deal with (like many large teclos); I've had many heated discussions over various issues with Sky -- do I really want to risk my broadband connection simply on the basis of price?

Doubtlessly overseas readers will be oh so eager to let me know just how little their local ADSL costs!

Thinking this through, I think I'd rather check out the ISP's taking part in the BBC's Multicast Trials and get a little more for my money;a static IP address might help too ;-) It's probably appropriate to invest some time looking through the excellent ADSLGuide.org.uk. And when I'm through with that, I'll start shopping around for new gas and electricity suppliers!