Broadband services are not available up here in the hills. Satellite services were tested and found wanting. I do have an Telecom Italia IDSN line installed, but haven't yet used it - indeed never used IDSN services before. Anyone like to share experiences? What are the best value connections to get? At the moment I use a TIM dongle to connect but the signal is patchy and download speed abysmal. Sorry if this is covered somewhere in the threads.

Had ISDN here for about 3 or 4 years before ADSL arrived. It is a VERY poor second choice, but if it's all you've got, it's noticeably better than "ordinary dial-up".

ISDN isn a bit confusing at first, but read the documentation on the web and it soon becomes clear. You can buy special ISDN phones, but in my opinion they really don't offer anything worth having. To use ordinary phones you need a Terminal Adaptor, which Telecom supply as standard where the phone line enters the house (need mains supply). you then run ordinary phone cable from there to your phones. Finally you run a special cable from the TA to an ISDN modem - easy and cheap to buy, I've got a redundant one here, and I'm sure lots of others have as well.

Any detailed questions, I'm happy to try to remember.

Thanks for the informantion Serrano. I've got the Telecom terminal adaptor now, do you know where I can buy the actual service - I mean the best options. I went looking for an ISDN modem but couldn't find one. Someone told me that some providers of ISDN services send them... Thanks for your help

I got mine service from Telecom - at the time ISDN was a whole new world to me, so I figured that having a single supplier would isolate me to an extent from some (if not all) problems. In the event here weren't any, but at that stage my Italian was pretty basic, so I was heavily into risk-avoidance.

I ordered the service from a local electrical shop who were Telecom agents - they were very helpful (though I'm sure not all are) and placed the order then and there. I seem to remember it took about 2 weeks, but that included reconnection of the line, provision and connection of the TA, etc.

If you already have the ISDN service I think you can already use their Pay-as-you-go service - have a look on www.187.alice.it

Alternatively there may well be other providers; in my experience these are usually a bit (but not much) cheaper than Telecom.

The max possible speed is 128Kbps assuming you have a good connection. Still better than standard dial-up at 56Kbps. What speeds are you getting from your dongle?

duffer - are you still on 7mg? I'm looking to move house and I think we will only get the 7mg where we are going to. I'm used to being able to download stuff pretty quickly - an hour long programme in less than 30 mins - will I still be able to do that with 7mg? It also means we'll have to knock IPTV on the head but we haven't really used it anyway.

Download times are quite reasonable but I get about 3,5mb speeds on average. Not the 7mb on offer. IPTV is however compatible with Alice 7 mega but I haven't got round to installing it. Now that we've had the analog switch-off I might sign up to it just so that I can get a free decoder for the TV in our bedroom.