1st Broadband have been operating in Penwith (a little bit more west than Penzance) for over a year now. We have other points of presence in the St. Agnes/Mt. Hawke/Perranporth areas as well as Buckfastleigh and surrounds in Devon.

And ... Er... We also have full control over our entire wireless connection right up to the customer premises equipment - which we provide too. We don't normally allow self installs. It's all done with outdoor units at roof-top level unless there are exceptional circumstances.

And while we don't own any fibre we do have a very good relationship with a local network company who own a lot of fibre in the South West and we use that to bring all our connections back to our core pop near Exeter.

We also use real public IP addresses for our customers.

Can't see whats different, really! :-)

Contention ratios will always be a point of, er. contention. I prefer to think of not quite an actual ratio, but prefer to qualify it by a level of service. The suits however want numbers and thats probably what the masses are used to seeing now with all the publicity surrounding *DSL, etc., but we have various service levels (bandwidth allocations vs. number of punters in that particular allocation) and it's all controlled rather nicely by our distributed network of routers (not cisco though, it's the penguin for me!)

We can do uncontended bandwidth too, if you can afford it. Most people don't really need it which is why contended services seem to work very well for the majority.

Gordon
Network Manager, 1st Broadband Ltd.