The annual ISP Awards were held at a formal dinner in London on Thursday night, and I joined staff from Web User as a guest of Telewest Broadband. It was a pleasant evening: the company was entertaining, the food was outstanding (by mass catering standards), and the awards were less boring than they might have been. Telewest won a prize for Blueyonder (Best Unmetered Dialup), which always cheers up a dinner table. Freeserve took the award for Best National Consumer ISP and, interestingly, Bulldog Communications won Best Consumer Broadband.
I am, coincidentally, a long-standing Blueyonder home user, and I've found the service extremely good. However, Telewest has just put the "surfunlimited" price up to 14 quid a month, so it's not the cheapest dial-up available. Talking to Chad Raube, Telewest's director of Internet, I also discovered that the Telewest digital set-top box I have at home already includes a cable modem, should I have the urge to upgrade to its broadband service. It's somewhat ironical that while millions of people can't get broadband, hundreds of thousands of Telewest subscribers already have the capability installed, and don't realise it.
