I have two broadband enabled telephones lines. On one I have Netcentral (www.netcentral.co.uk)  and Sky’s Broadband service on the other.

I have two so if I have a problem with my Business ISP (Netcentral) I can just change an IP address and jump onto the 2nd Broadband service. In theory I should not need a backup solution but recently I was intermittently off line with Netcentral for about 4 days. I was informed I could purchase “Enhanced care” that would give me a Service Level Agreement to a fix within 20 business hours. The cost of which would be 10 pounds per month. Without enhanced care I was looking at a maximum 40 hour fix.

So given the choice of 120 pounds per year (Enhanced care) and 20 hours of downtime potentially, I decided to plumb in a 2nd Internet connection at a cost of 60 pounds per year and have a completely separate route to the Internet. This works out cheaper and has more redundancy.

Sky’s out of the box experience is very good, they use a Netgear wireless router and it contains everything you need in the box. You literally just need to plug it in, connect to it wirelessly and you are done.

So how does it compare with my existing business ISP

Download Speed

Sky:                2248 kb/s
Netcentral:    3332 kb/s

Upload Speed

Sky:                 355 kb/s
Netcentral:     351 kb/s

Ping (lower is better)

Sky:                 65ms
Netcentral:     45ms

Summary

Netcentral is faster at downloading

Sky is faster at uploading (but only just)

Netcentral’s Ping was quicker.

Cost

Sky:  5 pounds (with a 40 gig Cap) This is part of a service bundle with TV/Telephone and Broadband total cost 26 pounds per month.

Netcentral: 19.99+VAT (with a 30 gig Cap) Broadband Service only.

Conclusion 

For Sky customers you cant really complain at a 5 pounds a month Internet connection.  

The connection as you see doesn’t compare too badly with the more expensive service and for a typical home user should be fine.

I have only started using the Sky connection and it will take a couple of months to see how reliable the connection is.

I don’t think I would ever be without a business class ISP, so for me having a low cost backup gives me some redundancy as Internet communication is vital to my job.