PlusNet is a great ISP (UK)

[Feathers McGraw]

Glad yours is OK. Ours was being used in a student house and seemed to have a mini meltdown whenever you connected 10+ devices to it!

[SteveRiley]

When I asked them to change my PTR record, they made the changes almost immediately, with no fuss, and within 24h the changes had taken effect.

I don't know of any US-based ISP that would do this. Technically, they own the IP address, not you. Multiple "A" records can resolve to the same IP address. But "PTR" records cannot behave this way: what would it mean for an IP address to reverse-resolve to multiple hostnames? If I were a network operator, I'd want all "PTR"s to resolve to names within my administrative domains. But hey, it's cool that your ISP is more flexible

GCI (General Communications, Inc.) is getting ready to bring Gigabit Internet speed to Anchorage...It won't be cheap (unfortunate but expected).

You should live in the US if you think the UK is bad. I get 10 Mb/s for $35.00 a month.

You'd think that Seattle, with its major concentrations of big software companies, would be overflowing with cheap plentiful bandwidth. Nope. Comcast is our only choice. I pay $85/month for 105 Mb/sec. Verizon built FIOS on the east side (Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland), thus competition exists for folks on that side of the lake. They sold it to Frontier, who appears to have zero interest in expanding. What's especially galling is that, outside King and Pierce counties, the public utility districts are stringing fiber to houses and offering oodles of bandwidth for dirt cheap rates. Grrrr.

Any faster and you'd have to upgrade the rest of your LAN network to get the benefits!

As Internet speeds increase, the metric to watch is your router's WAN-to-LAN performance. That is, how fast can your router ingest data? Some cheap home routers have bad WAN-to-LAN performance.

[Feathers McGraw]

I don't know of any US-based ISP that would do this. Technically, they own the IP address, not you. Multiple "A" records can resolve to the same IP address. But "PTR" records cannot behave this way: what would it mean for an IP address to reverse-resolve to multiple hostnames? If I were a network operator, I'd want all "PTR"s to resolve to names within my administrative domains. But hey, it's cool that your ISP is more flexible

I'm pretty sure that BT, their parent company, wouldn't let you do this. It's pretty cool that Plusnet use the same infrastructure as BT but be reasonably independent in terms of administration.

As Internet speeds increase, the metric to watch is your router's WAN-to-LAN performance. That is, how fast can your router ingest data? Some cheap home routers have bad WAN-to-LAN performance.

Wired speeds, or wireless? Wireless speeds are so difficult to measure independently because there are so many things that affect them. An extreme example - was in the kitchen the other day and my mum turned the microwave on - I went from having almost "full signal" to nothing... then **PING**, and I'm back to normal.

Feathers

[SteveRiley]

Wired speeds, or wireless?

"WAN-to-LAN" means how fast the router can ingest data from your DSL or cable modem. I discovered the importance of this the hard way. A while ago, when I bumped my service from 10 MB/sec to 50 MB/sec, I was only getting about 20 MB/sec on all my PCs. After several various test configurations, I realized that the ingest rate on my router's WAN port (the port connected to the cable modem) couldn't handle more than 20 MB/sec. My router was throttling my cable modem. I replaced it with a router that could handle 720 MB/sec on the WAN port. This should suit me for a while

You can find these measurements at the tests reported on Small Net Builder.

was in the kitchen the other day and my mum turned the microwave on - I went from having almost "full signal" to nothing... then **PING**, and I'm back to normal.

The standard home microwave oven operates at 2.45 GHz -- exactly the same frequency as 802.11b, 802.11g, and some implementations of 802.11n. Routers that support 802.11a, dual-freqency 802.11n, and 802.11ac operate at 5 GHz. These are not affected by home microwave ovens.

[Feathers McGraw]

That's a cool site, thanks! I couldn't find my TP-Link WDR-3600 on there, though (apart from on the forum).

I actually chose that router so I could use 5GHz too, I'm currently tinkering with the position so that the whole flat is covered, at the moment the range isn't great so if I walk in one room with my device it automatically switches to 2.4GHz, and doesn't automatically switch back, which is annoying.

Nobody else in the flat block is using 5GHz though, so once it's set up properly it'll be ideal.

Feathers