Your internet BB speed ?

[Kim]

It's a strictly YMMV situation.

I moved my AAISP to BE backhaul a long time ago.
This was cheaper.

But then BE got borged by sky.

But when AAISP migrated from BE to TT, it went tits-up big time here.
TTs exchange kit just could not sync reliably with me.
It took several changes of hardware and a bunch of support time to get it to work at all.

Ugh.

I must admit, I'm somewhat nervous of how TT deal with faults.  But since the baseline is BT, and AAISP are on side I reckoned it was probably worthwhile.

[Afasoas]

Eurgh. TT. Eurgh.

Virgin Media install hasn't been the greatest experience, mainly on account of their laying the cable over the weekend whilst we were away rather than doing it on the same day as the install, as pre-agreed. So there's yet another cable spanning the front of the house.

pfSense + VirginMedia Superhub (in modem only mode) seem not to play too nicely - In the end the magic sequence of rebooting the modem, waiting several minutes, connecting the pfSense firewall and rebooting the pfSense firewall gets things nice and stable. How resilient this turns out to be I wouldn't wager on...



We've still got TalkTalk for the time being as a failover option. The VM connection is expensed otherwise I'd have stuck with aDSL.

[Bledlow]

It's got a bit faster. Was 50 meg download until today. We usually get what's promised, as well.

[DaveJ]

pfSense + VirginMedia Superhub (in modem only mode) seem not to play too nicely - In the end the magic sequence of rebooting the modem, waiting several minutes, connecting the pfSense firewall and rebooting the pfSense firewall gets things nice and stable. How resilient this turns out to be I wouldn't wager on...

I've been running pfSense with the Virgin Superhub for about three months now.  So far they seem to get on OK.  I've had several outages with Virgin, and so far its always been enough just to restart the Superhub.

[jamesld8]

joys of being in a rural community exchange area

[Afasoas]

pfSense + VirginMedia Superhub (in modem only mode) seem not to play too nicely - In the end the magic sequence of rebooting the modem, waiting several minutes, connecting the pfSense firewall and rebooting the pfSense firewall gets things nice and stable. How resilient this turns out to be I wouldn't wager on...

I've been running pfSense with the Virgin Superhub for about three months now.  So far they seem to get on OK.  I've had several outages with Virgin, and so far its always been enough just to restart the Superhub.

It's very early days, but it's been dandy thus far. Using VPN remote access is nice and quick!
TalkTalk on the other hand...

[PaulF]

joys of being in a rural community exchange area

You should count yourself lucky, that's 50% faster than my speed

[Plug1n]

I've just kicked Virgin into giving me the upgrade from 160Mb to 200Mb (it seems that you have to ask, although it is no extra cost).

Just download 3.4GB in 2mins, 41 secs at an average 22MB/s.  So it does do what it says on the tin

[Greenbank]

Cabinet finally upgraded to FTTC. BT Infinity ordered, should be activated on the 27th (ha, as if).

Should go from 9mbps/1mbps to 65mbps/20mbps.

[Afasoas]

It would be nice to get more upload speed, currently on 100/6 (up/down) Mb/s.
20 Mb/s upload is really quite enviable, but 6 Mb/s is much much much nicer than the 0.7 Mb/s via aDSL.

Still don't know what you guys do with all of the extra bandwidth. Although it's nice on the occasions I need to download something chunky, like an OS install.
Average bandwidth usage over the last month has been 282 kb/s

[Greenbank]

It's not just the bandwidth that's a concern for me, it's total usage.

I work from home half the time and can chew through bandwidth quite quickly:-

Broadband connection details:
Downstream    9,235 Kbps
Upstream    1,199 Kbps
Connection time    3 days, 1:18:57
Data transmitted    823.76 MB
Data received    7.34 GB

If I carry on at this rate I'll be: 7.34*31/3.1 = 73.4GB in a month which is way more than the usual monthly limits of limited deals. (This works out at just 29kbp/s.)

And that's not including BT TV (where I'll be getting BT Sport over my broadband connection since it doesn't come via the aerial) where we'll make more use of catch up TV and watching movies online (Netflix maybe).

All of the limited deals go as far as ~25GB/month, so nowhere near enough for me.

That leaves me the (BT) options of "up to 17Mbps" for £13/month (what I have for 9Mbps and not enough to support BT TV properly), "up to 52Mbps" Infinity for £20/month or "up to 76Mbps" Infinity 2 for £30/month. (These prices are ignoring the various deals they have on, and not including line rental, etc).

For £10 a month extra I get my various big work downloads done in 2/3 of the time, which is good when I've got something urgent going on.

Work don't pay for it as I don't work from home full time.

[Mr Larrington]

Good, eh?

[Afasoas]

It's not just the bandwidth that's a concern for me, it's total usage.

I work from home half the time and can chew through bandwidth quite quickly:-

Broadband connection details:
Downstream    9,235 Kbps
Upstream    1,199 Kbps
Connection time    3 days, 1:18:57
Data transmitted    823.76 MB
Data received    7.34 GB

If I carry on at this rate I'll be: 7.34*31/3.1 = 73.4GB in a month which is way more than the usual monthly limits of limited deals. (This works out at just 29kbp/s.)

Even on aDSL we pulled on average 200GB a month, which is why AAISP wasn't on option (..pre-dating their current offerings). Which was mainly other members of the household streaming Netflix and Amazon TV.

I suspect that's only increased.

I don't disagree - I'm frequently connected into the office and datacentres from home and at work frequently connected to home. Although the extra bandwidth is nice, it's connection reliability and stability that's more important. Which is lost on most providers...

[woollypigs]

We got SKY which were cheapest when we moved in, it took them about 6 months before the got the gist that we don't have a telly, but they connected us about two days before they email/texted to say that we are now online. Other than that I think in the last three years they have fallen over about 4-5 times, where we had to wait for longer than 5min to get it back up. I have noticed a few more times that we had changed IP, but didn't notice any downtime. Some times we live in Leeds other times we live in Manchester according to our IP. Get about 12down and 1.2up unlimited.

Now and again I would like a bit more speed, but it will cost more than what we pay atm and also we will get more adons that we don't use - like more phone minutes and more tv channels. Can't I just get more internet and just internet, forget the phone I did not need to call China, heck I call about once a year my parents in DK but use Skype for that. Don't need your TV entertainment  packet with 34 extra channels cause we don't have a tellybox.

[Basil]

Well, this looks rubbish, but considering where I am you couldn't hope for much more.  (And it's free.  )
Youtube mostly OK - Iplayer not great.  If I want a program, it's better to download it rather than try to watch "live"

A little better now that we've moved back into the village.

[Greenbank]

For reference before I get upgraded:

[Greenbank]

New BT Smart Hub (notswitched over to BT Infinity yet, that's tomorrow hopefully) is a chunk faster than my ancient v1.0 BT Homehub...

[Canardly]

Virgin are supposed to have ugraded me to 70 Mb but has not moved from its previous 50. CBA ringing them up.

[Kim]

The students are back, with the corresponding drop in ADSL SNR (less of an issue now we have full control of the line profile), and proliferation of WiFi networks crapping all over the 2.4GHz band (we're hiding from the worst of the noise on channel 13).  Not much on 5GHz as yet.

This week's SSIDs are mostly default Virgin Media ones, with a spattering of Sky, and all the Uber cars and smartphones in mobile hotspot mode that walk past.  Comedy entries limited to "Smell my cheese, you mother!" and last year's "Pretty Fly for a wifi".

[Bledlow]

Virgin are supposed to have ugraded me to 70 Mb but has not moved from its previous 50. CBA ringing them up.

They upgraded me from 50 to 76 sneakily. It was expected, but not so soon. Someone in implementation not talking to whoever sends out the notifications?

[Samuel D]

We moved flats a few weeks ago, and we still don’t have high-speed internet here (they installed a fibre-optic line but it’s still not working). I’ve been forced to use my phone to create a personal hotspot. And you know what? It works remarkably well:



That test was run at 9 AM on my computer connected via Wi-Fi to the phone. Is that good or good? If it weren’t for the fact that it’s annoying to have to set up my phone to do this and the fact that my mobile network has a 50 GB monthly cap before it throttles the cellular connection, I could do without a fixed line.

What are ISPs going to do when using a mobile phone for internet connectivity becomes a reality for large numbers of people?

[Kim]

What are ISPs going to do when using a mobile phone for internet connectivity becomes a reality for large numbers of people?

Same thing they do now:  Sell mobile tariffs.

[Samuel D]

As it happens, I’m already using the same company (Free) for my mobile and landline (they haven’t got the landline part working yet, but that hasn’t stopped them from charging me!).

They charge €30/month for the fibre internet but only €20/month for the cellular connectivity. Aren’t they going to find themselves with two-fifths the income when I no longer need the fibre part?

[Kim]

They charge €30/month for the fibre internet but only €20/month for the cellular connectivity. Aren’t they going to find themselves with two-fifths the income when I no longer need the fibre part?

Sure, but the services cost different amount to provide, and have different scalability.

I expect there will come a time when nearly everything is cellular, and most ISPs will stop doing fixed lines.  Have you tried to find a POTS dial-up ISP recently?  Most of them outsourced and then quietly abandoned it as their customers moved to DSL technology.  That would have looked equally improbable in 1999, when the wholesale cost of ADSL was about double what you're paying.

[Greenbank]

New BT Smart Hub (notswitched over to BT Infinity yet, that's tomorrow hopefully) is a chunk faster than my ancient v1.0 BT Homehub...

And my line has been switched over to Infinity...