Of the five in the house who share it, there's only me and one other in tonight, and iplayer has just bombed out on me yet again - first on the PS3 via wireless (which I'll admit has always been a bit flakey) but now on my machine, on LAN, to our supposed 24mb bulldog/pipex/talk-talk deal... which we pay a LOT for.

So I've just been on one of those broadband compare sites, and as always, the promise of higher speeds, for lower fees all come crashing down when you start following the "more info here" links and find all the astericks realting to usage policy, "based-on" offers, and installation.

My Mum recently got a blinder of a deal with Sky, mostly thanks to their messing her about and offering compensatory measures, but even the package she'd signed up to in the first place was pretty impressive... it was one of the in-the-street kiosks in a shopping centre deals, which we simply don't get in C.London - or at least not in the parts of town I frequent.

So, how do I go about doing this? Angle with Orange because I'm a long standing customer? Tell Talk-Talk I'm off, tired of my service provison getting bounced around in buy-outs, with no apparent retention of the quality of service I was once used to, to see if they'll beg me to stay? Go all out and treat myself to a full-blown Sky package? Go with Virgin despite their seemingly too-good-be-to-true promises? Or drop the bells and whistles and go dedicated independant like Zen?

Check Samknows to see what's available on your phone number, if you haven't already. Frankly, if there's 5 of you then get the best product not the cheapest.

What's your monthly usage? If it's over ~40GB then you may have problems with "normal" packages. If it's available to you, I do recommend the BE Pro service based on my experience because the contention is guaranteed to be good and the faster upload speed with "Upload Plus" (AnnexM) makes it feel much more responsive.

TalkTalk might offer you a deal on price if you phone them up for a mac code (even if you don't need one - it's a good way to get to the customer retention department) - but they are heavily contended... as are all of the cheaper packages.

One thing to bear in mind when sharing a broadband connection is upload saturation. If one person leaves their PC on uploading flat out (virus or file share for example), it will kill the connection no matter how good it is - unless you have a router correctly configured for QoS.

Having been a Zen customer for years they'd get my vote - they really don't fiddle with your connection (they might do AV filtering on e-mail but I think that's about it).
Or you could give Andrews and Arnold (www.aaisp.co.uk) a try - based in London and appear to have a similar policy to Zen but with somewhat higher download limits. Also seem to be quite happy to put a lot more technical information out there for those who actually know what to do with it.