FreeServe was initially set up and owned by the Dixons Group. There were a couple of other free ISPs around and Dixons cottened on to it being a good idea and were the first to market it big style. Free Online was one of the first (run by PlusNet but as a separate company - now just another vISP selling the same stuff as PlusNet).

France Telecom set up and owned Wanadoo for their ISP operations. Wanadoo bought out FreeServe in 2000 and then proceeded to change the branding over to Wanadoo (2004).

Orange was set up way back when, however sometime in 2000 or 2001 Vodafone bought the parent company of Orange. They didn't want the orange network so they flogged it off and it was bought up by France Telecom.

This year, France Telecom decided to simplify its branding and brought its two ISPs (Wanadoo and Orange) together under the name of Orange. There were other services (mobile networks for example) that were also converted to the brand Orange in other countries.

Tada

Cheers, i can sleep easy now LOL

No jokin aside I really didn't know Dixons had any role in it.
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Well you do now
I've been part of the ISP industry and payed attention to it for a while now since I had to talk me folks out of AOL in 97ish..

35.99 with blue younder 10mb runs faster then my uni connection now thats wot u call speed!

Just a thought but people are going on about 8meg connections like they actually get 8meg. I'm on an 8meg connection myself and I'm lucky to get just over 1, and no its not my ISP its BTs bloody phone lines. I was told by a BT service engineer that I was lucky to get that speed and the fastest possible theoretical speed from my exchange is 2.5meg. Just a thought to anyone forking out good money on a high speed connection. The odds are that unless you live very close to an exchange in an inner city area you'll be waisting your money.

I disagree, yes plenty of people have cables not capable of sustaining high speeds. I'm not in a city and I get a rock solid 8Mb synch every time. I have a friend in the middle of nowhere who gets something like 6.5Mbps.

Various things can affect the connection from an overloaded exchange to an ISP with throttling to a badly wired extension in your house. Generally, a MaxDSL connection doesn't cost more than a fixed line rate connection as the ISPs pay for the amount of data used, not the speed of the connection.

biggest thing with todays mega speed is the contention ratio, you can have a shit hot line but if you have loads of people going through your area, then its gonna be crappy regardless.

and if your line is that bad then you should downgrade, as a higher speed on a line that cant take it can actully slow it down.
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Connection ratios don't tend to vary that much usual 50:1 but I agree with you.
As for connection speeds, well its all down to BT at the end of the day isnt it. I know for a fact that there is two miles of aluminium cabling rather than copper between me and the exchange.

name me 5 isps that offer anything other than a standard 50:1 ratio without doubling the price.
Check your info

My point was that all these isps which as you say work under local loop unbinding all offer similar terms, connection ratios max 50:1 etc etc. "BT wholesaling" Of course there are a lot of ISPs which offer better services but as far as I can tell all these are marketed under "business use" and are priced accordingly.
Not sure how many people there are in the UK with broadband but I think we can safely say that between 5pm and 12pm all of these are gonna be operating under the maximum ratio regardless of which ISP they are using.
Thats not to say that some ISPs arent better than others of course they are just wanted to make my point clear

I can't find them at the moment, but PlusNet used to publish their MRTG graphs which provided evidence to the contrary to what you are stating.

You are stating that during peak times the wholesale capacity is being used up and contended. In reality, although ADSL is designed with this provision in mind, most exchanges are hooked up to the central backbones via fiber which provides far more bandwidth than they are actually using (read into 21CN for information on the exact connectivity).

There are bound to be busy exchanges which are struggling for capacity, but BT normally stay on top of them and flick the switch to enable the usage of more of the fiber. You can look up your exchange in the usertools site to see capacity information.

The MRTG graphs I was looking for demonstrate the business practices which are causing contention. This is where an ISP buys pipes to their wholesaler based upon the principal that all their users will only be using a certain percentage of that connection. When the majority of usage occurs at once, these pipes become full and this is where the contention lies.

The ratio of users to pipe bandwidth varies from ISP to ISP and this is the cause of the slowdowns that most people notice. In my case, changing from PlusNet's overloaded/packet shaped pipes to Zen's more appropriately managed pipes has made a significant difference whilst I am still on the same exchange, same copper, same wholesale product.

One thing I didn't pick up on before is that you mentioned you are on aluminium cable probably from the 80s/early 90s. This was never designed to run ADSL and the very fact that it does is a complete bodge. Think yourself lucky that you can get ADSL at all and contention probably doesn't even get a chance to come into play with your line.