Best Value ISP for Gaming + General Browsing

[Cookie]

Off the top of my head, I know Be are trialling it. Not sure if anyone else is. Vm and bt infinity are still only fttc

 

[Gouldy]

It depends on your area. Some are FTTC and some areas are FTTH

 

[Cookie]

It depends on your area. Some are FTTC and some areas are FTTH

Linkage? Can't see VM offering anything more than FTTC?

 

[Gouldy]

Sheds some light on it;

http://www.broadbandwatchdog.co.uk/ftth.php

A few places already have it, it depends on what area your in.

In south Yorkshire you can have either ADSL 2+ with most providers and VDSL through the digital region ISP's

No FTTH for me just yet but I'll be happy when my FTTC order is installed in the next couple of weeks.

 

[dk]

another vote for BE here (or o2 as i am with, who use BE for their LLU service)

I get 20mb from my line (and an amazing ping), its been down probably twice in 2 1/2 years for an hour or so, customer service is great, UK based!

Plus i get a discount as i'm with o2 for m mobile too.

with BT and most other operators, good luck getting decent speed in peak evening hours, o2 LLU never traffic shape or restrict you, nor do they block any sites.

 

[Cookie]

Sheds some light on it;

http://www.broadbandwatchdog.co.uk/ftth.php

A few places already have it, it depends on what area your in.

In south Yorkshire you can have either ADSL 2+ with most providers and VDSL through the digital region ISP's

No FTTH for me just yet but I'll be happy when my FTTC order is installed in the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, your link proves VM only do FTTC. BT are trialling FTTH IIRC

 

[richy22]

^^^ Correct.

I believe they do also want to push FTTH, but alas it comes down to monies....

 

[Cookie]

^^^ Correct.

I believe they do also want to push FTTH, but alas it comes down to monies....

Whilst that link estimates 10-15bil, I doubt we'll see change from 50-60bil once all is said and done.

It's not going to happen for a while

 

[SamP]

We paid for fibre/oc3 at where I work back in 04, cost us 45k to have it installed. Oh how times change.

 

[Cookie]

We paid for fibre/oc3 at where I work back in 04, cost us 45k to have it installed. Oh how times change.

Proper business lines are still expensive tbh, because you pay for the lack of contention, proper support and resiliency.

 

[Darren S]

Sky have always been great with me in the past. We're moving from them to BT Infinity in the next few weeks though.

We've recently moved property and I'm only getting 2mb here... and that's central Manchester too!

Hopefully you'll find them alright, m8. I'm currently on that and have no issues at all, tbh.

D.

 

[Darren S]

We paid for fibre/oc3 at where I work back in 04, cost us 45k to have it installed. Oh how times change.

About the same time we started to ditch 256k leased-lines at work. From Blackburn head office to Birmingham depot - approx £10.5k per year.

Slow as feck (well, not really for the time) but MASSIVELY reliable. If we had one drop out per circuit per year, that was unusual.

D.

 

[richy22]

BT Infinity has its flaws though.

They have no means of testing ANY of the Infinity lines at the moment. So if something goes wrong it will take ages to fix it.

 

[Cookie]

BT Infinity has its flaws though.

They have no means of testing ANY of the Infinity lines at the moment. So if something goes wrong it will take ages to fix it.

Have they got special Openreach engineers who know fibre, or are they trying to teach the old monkeys new tricks?

 

[richy22]

Have they got special Openreach engineers who know fibre, or are they trying to teach the old monkeys new tricks?

A bit of both.

They should be able to test the lines remotely when you ring the call centres, they can't do that as they dont have the infrastructure in place (One would of thought that would be quite an important thing to do!!!). They have a few systems in place for the copper/LLU services (whoosh)

They are relying on engineers with handheld OTDR testers (if they even use OTDR) to do the repairs by driving up and down and checking the line randomly.

 

[Adam]

I haven't really read into FTTH/FTTP from a consumer aspect but it will be interesting on how BT via Openreach actually go about providing the fibre.

Knowing how much it costs to blow fibre through to a premiss from a commercial aspect it surely has to come down to home owner/user to pay the ECC's to actually get the fibre into the house. Unless they have other methods of delivery but as far as I know all current delivery of fibre is via underground and Openreach would need provide specialist ducts and tubing to blow the fibre through.

 

[richy22]

I know how they do it..for FFTC anyway, It might not be the "correct" way of doing it but this is how the spinoff of Marconi do it around here....

They pull the old copper cable out from one end, and attach the fibre to the other end thus pulling it through. They have big sod off vans that come out to "pull" the old cable out at the cab end.

 

[Adam]

Yeah, that's a total different ball game.

The average consumer ADSL line, the copper will come via a drop wire. So as I understand it, OR would need to provide a brand new fibre feed via a duct/tubing to the house and provide a network termination point internally somewhere.

 

[Cookie]

They are relying on engineers with handheld OTDR testers (if they even use OTDR) to do the repairs by driving up and down and checking the line randomly.

I had an Openreach engineer come out at work (2 of our lines in are BT) and that's all he had, IIRC

 

[Chapster5]

Welcome to Sky...

According to them we are getting up to 8mb/s



Hmmm Now I can understand a drop down to say 4mb/s but under a mb your having a laugh? Sh*t imho

 

[Gouldy]

That reminds me of my plusnet connection. I'd ring and cancel of I were getting those speeds

 

[Chapster5]

That reminds me of my plusnet connection. I'd ring and cancel of I were getting those speeds

Trouble is its under my dads jurisdiction I have no say. He gets all his phone, tv and internet with Sky so he saves. Hes happy with the internet for some reason :/

 

[Dave138]

Welcome to Sky...

According to them we are getting up to 8mb/s

View attachment 70011

Hmmm Now I can understand a drop down to say 4mb/s but under a mb your having a laugh? Sh*t imho

99% chance that something in your home is causing that. Things to consider:

First off try putting your computer into the router with an Ethernet cable. If the speed is fine then you know it's a wireless issue and in that case just try changing the channel on the router. If that fails then consider these things;

How many telephone sockets? Are they all filtered? Is the router in the master socket?

I would also recommend removing your faceplate from your master socket and plugging the router directly into the test socket with an alternative micro filter.

I can't stress enough to try an alternative micro filter, the amount of BB issues that are just down to a faulty micro filter are insane!

 

[182Pete]

So is the coax that feeds to your house, from that fibre in the cabinet

Not right.

The coax cable used in DOCSIS networks has much better shielding than the unshielded twisted copper cabling used in ADSL networks.

Because of this reason electrical interference causes many more transmission problems in ADSL networks resulting in sync speeds that are much lower. ADSL networks will never achieve the speeds of DOCSIS networks unless the presentation to the premises is physically replaced.

 

[Chapster5]

99% chance that something in your home is causing that. Things to consider:

First off try putting your computer into the router with an Ethernet cable. If the speed is fine then you know it's a wireless issue and in that case just try changing the channel on the router. If that fails then consider these things;

How many telephone sockets? Are they all filtered? Is the router in the master socket?

I would also recommend removing your faceplate from your master socket and plugging the router directly into the test socket with an alternative micro filter.

I can't stress enough to try an alternative micro filter, the amount of BB issues that are just down to a faulty micro filter are insane!

All computers are on the Ethernet (bar one in the shed on wireless)

There is a socket wired from the main telephone socket through to the dining room where the router is and a filter is on that socket

There is 3 telephone sockets, 2 connected to the main socket via hard wiring to the board behind the faceplate. (one is unused, the other leads to the dining room to the router)

Suppose I could try a new filter on the socket in the dining room, the master socket (by the front door) is unfiltered the only thing plugged into there is the house phone

Nick

 

[Dave138]

Suppose I could try a new filter on the socket in the dining room, the master socket (by the front door) is unfiltered the only thing plugged into there is the house phone

That's the problem, get a filter on that master socket. In the meantime remove that phone from the master socket for the time being and I bet the speed increases straight away.

 

[Chapster5]

Trouble is mate,

The phone in the master socket is the master base phone for all the other phones in the house (wireless ones) so without that plugged in no one can ring us lol.

There is a filter in the socket in the dining room the wire to the dining room socket is wired directly into the board inside the master socket and a hole cut in the casing and it run through from there so a filter on the master socket wouldn't affect anything.

Nick

 

[Dave138]

Still needs a filter mate. Remove the phone (for 2 mins) run a speed test and see if it's better. If it is then you definitely need to filter it.

 

[Gouldy]

You need a filter on everything, using a house phone direct into a socket somewhere WILL cause you problems

 

[Chapster5]

Cheers guys I'll have a bash!

 

[richy22]

Well bang goes my theory of going full Sky (apart from the physical line of course)

They have ran out of capacity in the exchange meaning that I can't go onto their own kit.

So I have to go onto what is in essence BT kit and be olo to sky.

Grrrr

 

[Cookie]

Well bang goes my theory of going full Sky (apart from the physical line of course)

They have ran out of capacity in the exchange meaning that I can't go onto their own kit.

So I have to go onto what is in essence BT kit and be olo to sky.

Grrrr

Be/o2?

 

[MikeoftheQuays]

Welcome to Sky...

According to them we are getting up to 8mb/s

View attachment 70011

Hmmm Now I can understand a drop down to say 4mb/s but under a mb your having a laugh? Sh*t imho

b****cks. We've just switched to Sky from Virgin...

Mind you, what you're showing there is better than we were getting from Virgin. 0.1Mb/s to 0.2Mb/s and a ping to the google servers of over 2 seconds. 3 engineer visits, dozens of phonecalls and 3 months of waiting and we finally decided to call it a day.

 

[richy22]

Be/o2?

It doesn't matter who I go with I'm gonna be OLO

I wanted to go LLU as it would be cheaper. Annoyingly The exchange in the next town has sky/be etc is LLU

 

[iain187]

I've been on sky for a few years, it's gone down once and when I called they couldn't work out there was a problem in my whole area, so they decided it must be my router

they the decided to send me a new router which locked out my current one via MAC address... so when the outage was fixed my router was dead and it took about a week for the new'en to appear.



I'm going to have to check all the house phones for filters as im sure we only have the filter where the router is plugged in hmmm

 

[Chapster5]

They sent us a net gear router with their own sh*tty firmware! So we swapped it to a belkin, got a piece of software that extracts the username and password from the netgear router and put them into the belkin, jobs a good one.

The netgear one just kept cutting out every half and hour or so

Nicj

 

[koi]

Moving next month so need to sort out broadband and phone, not in a cable area sadly :dapprove:

Anyone on here use Tesco broadband? £16 a month for 12 months and unlimited downloads sounds like a good deal to me.

 

[Dave138]

Moving next month so need to sort out broadband and phone, not in a cable area sadly :dapprove:

Anyone on here use Tesco broadband? £16 a month for 12 months and unlimited downloads sounds like a good deal to me.

Hi mate

I used to work in their technical support department. They use C&W to provide the network. You will no doubt get a Thomson TG580 router which is possibly one of the worst routers going. If you're lucky you may get a Technicolor TG582n. Just a note that the unlimited download is actually 100gb but for the vast majority of people it is enough. When I was there they had no system in place to enforce this anyway, but that may have changed.

Now working in technical support I only ever saw the bad things so my opinion is not really going to count. However if you check the reviews online they are not rated highly... But neither are most broadband providers.

Remember that whoever you go with (with the exception of Virgin) they all use the same copper cable from your house to your exchange. And the biggest factor that will affect your speed and performance is the quality and length of this copper cable.

All I will say is that if you do go with Tesco, get a different router as these caused the most issues for us.

If you need any more information just let me know

Thanks

 

[Gouldy]

I recently had plusnet fibre installed.

I'd recommend this to anyone who, like myself, uses the Internet for browsing, shopping, online gaming and the occasional download. Their priced competitively too, I'm on the extra fibre package and it's £16.50 a month IIRC. Very good value for money IMO.

 

[koi]

Hi mate

I used to work in their technical support department. They use C&W to provide the network. You will no doubt get a Thomson TG580 router which is possibly one of the worst routers going. If you're lucky you may get a Technicolor TG582n. Just a note that the unlimited download is actually 100gb but for the vast majority of people it is enough. When I was there they had no system in place to enforce this anyway, but that may have changed.

Now working in technical support I only ever saw the bad things so my opinion is not really going to count. However if you check the reviews online they are not rated highly... But neither are most broadband providers.

Remember that whoever you go with (with the exception of Virgin) they all use the same copper cable from your house to your exchange. And the biggest factor that will affect your speed and performance is the quality and length of this copper cable.

All I will say is that if you do go with Tesco, get a different router as these caused the most issues for us.

If you need any more information just let me know

Thanks

Yeah just read some reviews, Tesco doesn't score too highly so guess I'll just pay the bit extra and go with Virgin Media. Just liked the idea of no data cap but think I should be fine with 40gb anyway.