I work from home and have 1 client with whom I have an SLA that states I must be avaliable to connect to their system between 8am and 6pm 365 days per week.

This is was not a problem, my NTL connection had been a rock for the past 10 years but recently (the past week) it has become flakey. In the past week it has gone down for at least 3 times, for various amounts of time, and of course this client has required support during the outages
As a result I have got it in the ear and in the wallet :s

I am looking for a cheap as chips ADSL connection that I can use purely as a back up when NTL is down. The best deal I have come across so far is from Sky Broadband. I can get a *8mb* connection with 2gb monthly cap for a one-off install fee of Ã,£40, no monthly charge.

Does anyone know of anything better or does that look like the solution ?

Got that slightly wrong; its 2mb download w/ 2GB cap.

http://broadband.sky.com/

BASE package.

If you pay for sky anyway then its probably worth going with them, otherwise if you have a BT phone line then talktalk may be a good enough option.

Thing with sky is the 2GB bandwidth is stingy.

take a PAYG deal on a BT line if you already have a line there, if you dont use it then it costs nothing.  

Ill take a look at that. I was thinking that this Sky BASE deal wasnt bad as they throw in a Wifi router (which would be handy).

Any idea what the charges are on the BT PAYG scheme ? Would I quickly pass the Ã,£40 mark ?

Nevermind, it appears nobody is doing the PAYG deals where you dont have to pay a monthly subscription to use them.  There used to be a couple of companies that did