Hey, I'm currently with Virgin Media cable / fibre optic and it's awful, with 10-25% packet loss regularly. I've tried all the qizmo tricks etc but I understand this is a common problem with Virgin so there's no hope for it and I should switch provider.

What are UK peeps experiences with sky/talktalk/plusnet/BT - how are your pings and PL?

I've only ever had Sky for fttc but I can't really fault it. Pings are rock solid, routing is a bit iffy sometimes but proxies really help there. 12ms to uk 25 to nl 38 to foppa etc. I've heard Plusnet are going downhill recently, bt are also good but they can route you through manchester before london even if you are down south. zen also have decent pings.

Virgin probably would fix your pl eventually but it could take years... literally.

with ipv4 address exaustion, routing through weird places is kinda inevitable. try rebooting your adsl modem/router to get a new ip+route. :s
ipv6 is like nuclear fusion - always 30 years away.

plusnet are a subsiduary of bt. they're the ones that thought cgnat would be an awesome idea. unsurprisingly they're the provider that gets the most complaints from their users, last I heard (followed by bt).

my household tried to get bt fibre. they sent out an engineer, who plugged something in to the phone line, then went out to the local roadside box thingie, then came back scratching his head, then tried to find a different box, then came back again, and told us we couldn't have it because their records were fucked up.
And that's BT in a nutshell. We're currently stuck with BT's copper adsl.
I get disconnected about once a day. For about a month I had to reset the modem/router/thing about once a day too, to get it to actually reconnect again. The BT-supplied router hijacks http connections. As much as I hate giving any of my info to google, setting my dns servers to something other than the router/BT's was mandatory to avoid dns hijacks+slowdowns.
I don't really play quakeworld often enough to comment on packetloss/ping, and as its not fibre anyway, I cba to sit on any servers for a while.
Are you sure the problem is your ISP and not the server/datacenter?

you should be able to set up qizmo to spam extra packets to reduce effective packet loss.
with fte servers, you can use 'setinfo dupe 1' to double-up server->client packets (you'll probably need a higher rate setting too).
I don't know about ezquake/mvdsv.

same as gore, think sky are without doubt the best bet (never had routing issues though)

was on plusnet before and sky was a definite improvement.

Ask the ISP if they have transit with Level3. Best routes around the globe. You can get in game 77ms to NYC and 142ms to Brazil.

I don't know much about UK providers, but while you're upgrading stuff, get this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blue-Microphones-Yeti-USB-Microphone/dp/B002VA464S

<3