Broadband, speeds from providers.

[504steve]

Hi.

I'm looking for another home broadband provider.

Does the possible speed achieved actually vary between the providers, or is it like re-sellers of power, the same "power" coming down the line just different rates charged by providers?

I'm just out of contract for home phone and broadband with EE and am looking to change.

Whilst with EE the standard broadband has been very slow at times. (Slow page uploads and buffering of Now TV.) Although each time I've done a speed test it's been ok and recorded about 4Mbps download.

Also is it noticeably quicker with fiber? If you've made the upgrade to fiber would you recommend it?

I've been ordered by SWMBO to sort this out as slow broadband is "not on".

Cheers.

[mrcharly-YHT]

It varies. Copper is pretty much copper, but some suppliers get more congested than others. We used to be on O2 ADSL copper broadband in a student area. You could tell when the students came home, our download went from 20 to 2.

We are now on Virgin fibre to the cabinet. This uses their copper from the cabinet and it is their fibre. We get a reliable 45 download, 6 upload. Congestion doesn't seem to be a problem.

[Kim]

Does the possible speed achieved actually vary between the providers, or is it like re-sellers of power, the same "power" coming down the line just different rates charged by providers?

Yes and no:  With the exception of Virgin cable, which has its own physical network, ISPs buy one of a handful of wholesale products from BT and a couple of other providers in order to connect your modem to their servers.  From there, the onward connection to the internet is up to the ISP, but in practice this is rarely the bottleneck.  The main difference between ISPs comes down to pricing structure, ancillary services such as email and web hosting, how much they dick about with your connectivity to the outside world (DNS hijacking, porn filtering, download throttling, provision of IPv6 connectivity, and so on), and crucially, how competent they are at dealing with their wholesale providers when there's a fault.

What wholesale products are available will depend on your exchange, cabinet and so on.  If FTTC is an option it will usually outperform ADSL2+ by a healthy margin.  Virgin cable performs well, but limits you to Virgin as an ISP.

[Kim]

We are now on Virgin fibre to the cabinet. This uses their copper from the cabinet and it is their fibre. We get a reliable 45 download, 6 upload. Congestion doesn't seem to be a problem.

Apparently in this student area we have the opposite:  Our ADSL syncs faster during the holidays when 90% of the houses have nothing electrical to generate interference, but the difference between 15Mb and 17Mb is largely unimportant.  But I hear the Virgin network has intermittent congestion problems locally, which isn't surprising given that a quick survey of the neighbourhood wifi shows that the students are nearly all on Virgin, whereas a couple of years ago it was mostly BT and Sky.  Whatever Virgin are doing to market to students (I think they have an attractive 9-month internet/TV/phone bundle contract) is obviously working.

In practice, the main difference contention-wise between ADSL and cable is that with ADSL the contention happens at the exchange, whereas with cable the contention happens at the cabinet, making it more susceptible to localised effects (eg. a whole load of heavy-user houses suddenly switching providers).  Presumably Virgin will upgrade their cabinet equipment at some point.

[504steve]

Thanks for the info.

I can get fiber to the cabinet, but not the full virgin cable.

I think I will upgrade to fiber, just need to work out the best deal. I know it's not just down to price. (In the past had TalkTalk and their customer service,s when I needed to contact them, were a bit frustrating).

Cheers

[PloddinPedro]

Gad, you don't know how lucky you are, some of you    I'd kill for 4mbps; the best I can get is about 2mbps and the worst thing is that I know it will never, ever, improve because BT will never find it cost effective to improve the mile-long copper connections from our cabinet to the small cluster of houses where I live.

They've brought another commercial radio broadband provider into the village, centred on the church but it needs direct 'line-of-sight' to work and there's too many trees and hills between it and me to work for me. Dammit

[Bledlow]

We have a choice between Virgin cable all the way to the house, or BT & various resellers of BT cable (to 800 metres away, by the route the wires take) & BT copper to the house.

Virgin promises up to 152 meg. We're paying for 50, & usually get it. At peak times, it can slow down, presumably due to congestion. We're near a university & there are student houses in this street.

BT promises 29-38 meg.

[PloddinPedro]

...........Virgin promises up to 152 meg. .............

Shut up, just shut up!

[rafletcher]

BT will never find it cost effective to improve the mile-long copper connections from our cabinet to the small cluster of houses where I live.

I suspect the same is true of where I live - the exchange is enabled, but our lane is still "under review". What's even more galling is that BT dug up the length of the lane, passing 3 feet from our boundary,  to lay - you guessed it - fibre comms links - down to the new Arla "Superdairy"

Luckily our copper BB speed is around the promised 8Mbps, so adequate (usually) for streaming TV from the like of iPlayer.

[Tod28]

"BT will never find it cost effective to improve the mile-long copper connections from our cabinet to the small cluster of houses where I live.
I suspect the same is true of where I live - the exchange is enabled, but our lane is still "under review"."

The same applied here for many months/years even though Openreach had relayed all the cables from the cabinet to the top of the poles at least 2 years ago.  Eventually I phoned BT enquiring about the state of FTTC.  The first call centre decided they couldn't help as they weren't allowed to sell "Infinity", the second call centre couldn't help as although they were set up for "Infinity" they couldn't sell FTTP and I couldn't get FTTC.  Finally spoke to the next person who booked a site visit at the end of the month (this January) when two engineers came and fitted a hybrid wire and fibre tube from the pole across the road followed the next day by a fibre terminal in the house.

I now have a measured 32 - 33 Mbs in the house with FTTC....only paying for up to 38-40........all the website checkers and BT site still say fibre not available but I only have the 1m of copper from the modem to the fibre box on the wall between my network and the big www.  Somewhat differently to other fttp installations I have read about, our phone line still runs on the wire part of the hybrid overhead "cable".

Try phoning BT and asking..........it may take some while but you may get there in the end.