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Switching broadband provider, any thoughts?

Where do you live? PM me a phone number for the FTTP and I’ll take a look. But I can tell you for network performance and Wi-fi performance we **** all over Sky (not my stats). Oh and it’s Sky (and other CP’s) who have chosen not to offer FTTP - although that will change in in the next 12-18 months I would expect.

Cheers
Neil


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Are you saying Sky gave you a 2Mb/sec service? They usually don’t touch customers that low.


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Aye, that's all I had when moved here before FTTP installed. It stated 'up to 17MB' but in reality was 2MB at best because of how far I was from the cabinet.

OK, PM coming your way, cheers.
 
What is often totally misunderstood is what/who affects your internet speed. These are in order of importance and ease of fixing (hardest first):

a) The actual 'line speed'. In most cases, the last section of a line is provided by Openreach for non-cable connections. If you get 20Mb from one provider, changing provider will do nothing to change the line speed because that is unchanged - the copper between your house and the cabinet/exchange is the same. So BT FTTC and other provider FTTC will be pretty much the same speed.

If you can't get FTTC and are on an older ADSL2, then your speeds will be lower.

Each provider can do some minor things to tweak line speeds and some provider routers are better than others but if the link is slower than it should be for the length of copper between your house and the far-end you are not going to get major gains by switching provider, unless you can get someone to fix the line issues, which will have to be done via Openreach.

The line speed is the maximum you'll ever get and is constant from you to the cabinet (or exchange) at any given time. It may fluctuate as your router and the provider kit try to get stable link. Be aware that at this time of year, your line speeds are likely to take a hit from all the RF interference that comes from Christmas lights and water/cold weather affecting the physical cabling. Oh, and streetlights in some places. We can tell the time of year from line noise/attenuation graphs.

If you have cable, then its a whole different set of issues due to the way it is delivered and your line speed may actually vary, so you have to pick cable or copper. If you have FTTP then it should be better and as you have a full fibre connection, it should be clear of the interference issues and be a pretty much constant speed (assuming you've recovered from the install fees if you aren't in the middle of a major city)


b) Provider connection, congestion or poor backhaul. Changing provider can affect this, if you are getting major packet loss or issues with data transfer at speeds below the line speed. Some are better than others, provide better router etc. Mostly changing provider will help if you get peak-time issues (congestion) or the router is rubbish, though buying your own router is also an option if that's the issue.

You're probably also using your provider's DNS servers, which may be overloaded at times, so you can try using Google or Cloudflare DNS servers as that might speed things up.

Provider filtering/bandwidth limiting is less common now, but does happen for 'network protection' and avoiding excessive use, so worth asking if this happens.

A very common issue during school holidays is that your kids that constantly stream stuff and torrent things which then affects your connection, as they're using all the bandwidth! If everything gets better late evening (if you have young kids, after they're in bed) or morning through to lunchtime-ish (if you have teenagers when they're still in bed!) then parental controls may be needed.


c) Wifi connection speed. Routers/access points vary in effecitveness and how they cope with multiple connections and local interference. This can be far worse in housing estates and blocks of flats. Test anything on a fixed ethernet connection and if it is better then you have a Wifi issue. Changing provider in itself won't help, unless is is a router issue. Often moving the router can help more than changing provider. If you live in an old stone cottage with thick walls or a steel built structure or have a really large house then you may need to look at a mesh wifi solution to increase coverage. The further you are from the router, the slower your connection will get as the signal gets weaker.


As a final comment, the fancy gaming routers don't do a lot more than normal ones and the idea that a mega router can make a huge difference to gaming performance just isn't true. Router packet switching delay is so low it is undetectable in any decent router. NAT processing and firewall is so quick these days it just isn't an issue. At most you may save a few microseconds, which makes no real difference given the time taken to get packets across the internet to the gaming servers and it wasn't the reason that 8 year old killed you in Fortnite ;)
 
What is often totally misunderstood is what/who affects your internet speed. These are in order of importance and ease of fixing (hardest first):

a) The actual 'line speed'. In most cases, the last section of a line is provided by Openreach for non-cable connections. If you get 20Mb from one provider, changing provider will do nothing to change the line speed because that is unchanged - the copper between your house and the cabinet/exchange is the same. So BT FTTC and other provider FTTC will be pretty much the same speed.

If you can't get FTTC and are on an older ADSL2, then your speeds will be lower.

Each provider can do some minor things to tweak line speeds and some provider routers are better than others but if the link is slower than it should be for the length of copper between your house and the far-end you are not going to get major gains by switching provider, unless you can get someone to fix the line issues, which will have to be done via Openreach.

The line speed is the maximum you'll ever get and is constant from you to the cabinet (or exchange) at any given time. It may fluctuate as your router and the provider kit try to get stable link. Be aware that at this time of year, your line speeds are likely to take a hit from all the RF interference that comes from Christmas lights and water/cold weather affecting the physical cabling. Oh, and streetlights in some places. We can tell the time of year from line noise/attenuation graphs.

If you have cable, then its a whole different set of issues due to the way it is delivered and your line speed may actually vary, so you have to pick cable or copper. If you have FTTP then it should be better and as you have a full fibre connection, it should be clear of the interference issues and be a pretty much constant speed (assuming you've recovered from the install fees if you aren't in the middle of a major city)


b) Provider connection, congestion or poor backhaul. Changing provider can affect this, if you are getting major packet loss or issues with data transfer at speeds below the line speed. Some are better than others, provide better router etc. Mostly changing provider will help if you get peak-time issues (congestion) or the router is rubbish, though buying your own router is also an option if that's the issue.

You're probably also using your provider's DNS servers, which may be overloaded at times, so you can try using Google or Cloudflare DNS servers as that might speed things up.

Provider filtering/bandwidth limiting is less common now, but does happen for 'network protection' and avoiding excessive use, so worth asking if this happens.

A very common issue during school holidays is that your kids that constantly stream stuff and torrent things which then affects your connection, as they're using all the bandwidth! If everything gets better late evening (if you have young kids, after they're in bed) or morning through to lunchtime-ish (if you have teenagers when they're still in bed!) then parental controls may be needed.


c) Wifi connection speed. Routers/access points vary in effecitveness and how they cope with multiple connections and local interference. This can be far worse in housing estates and blocks of flats. Test anything on a fixed ethernet connection and if it is better then you have a Wifi issue. Changing provider in itself won't help, unless is is a router issue. Often moving the router can help more than changing provider. If you live in an old stone cottage with thick walls or a steel built structure or have a really large house then you may need to look at a mesh wifi solution to increase coverage. The further you are from the router, the slower your connection will get as the signal gets weaker.


As a final comment, the fancy gaming routers don't do a lot more than normal ones and the idea that a mega router can make a huge difference to gaming performance just isn't true. Router packet switching delay is so low it is undetectable in any decent router. NAT processing and firewall is so quick these days it just isn't an issue. At most you may save a few microseconds, which makes no real difference given the time taken to get packets across the internet to the gaming servers and it wasn't the reason that 8 year old killed you in Fortnite ;)

So the access part of the above is certainly true but if you have a flakey line then insist that your provider takes it up with Openreach.

I strongly recommend only using your service providers DNS - a huge amount of local caching is dependant on DNS (and will be more so in the future) so you’ll slow things down if you use google and cloudflare are the dodgiest bunch on the planet and I’d strongly avoid them- they’d sell you your own grandmother.

On the router front I wouldn’t assume they are all the same because they aren’t - core thing is flows and how many of them you have
And how much memory your device has and it’s buffering methodology so all your various home automation nest hue etc etc all have an impact then all the direct user driven stuff as above - second to that is wireless design, antenna and the chipset you use spend an extra few quid on a decent chipset and antenna and it can make a world of difference to the performance esp with beam forming.

Cheers,
Neil.






Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
Depending on locality it may be worth looking at the suppliers using other technology, i had BT but unfortunately they could not offer above 1mb/s so after searching came across Boundless Networks (wireless) which offer a few packages.i achieve 50mb/s down and 20mb/s up which is fine for my usage, here is their coverage map http://www.boundlessnetworks.co.uk/coverage . its been a really good solution for me.

Drew
 
Have a BT hub 6 , well on my 4th one now ,it's ok for a few weeks and then we start having issues , there is normally 4 of us on the internet at the same time watching Netflix using iPads extra and of coarse one on the Xbox and phone so it's like 8 devices all going at once , so do I go for a duel band routor or a Tri -band routor and which model to go for .
 
I've been forced to use BT since FTTP first came available by Open Reach to my rural home (no-one else able to access/offer it) but get shafted for £55 pm for max 80Mb (ethernet speed test direct from hub) when it should be up to 150Mb. Customer service was shocking when first came out, now much better but they couldn't resolve last lot of technical problems (@Arv on here sorted that for me instead) and currently on my fourth hub since I started with them about 18 months ago. Always told something else is interfering with Wifi etc. etc, but soon as hub changed for a new one, back to normal.

Better than the 2MB I used to have..... but wish someone else like Sky could get access, never had a single problem with them for 18 months and still use their email system. Would move from BT as soon as able if I could..... sorry Neil.

Hey,
I've been researching this issue and might have something. Can you check that your cable from the Openreach modem to your router/hub is a cat5e or preferable cat 6 cable.

We're finding quite a few customers are using cables they already have rather than the ones we send and many of them are CAT5 which in many cases won't give you a 1G ethernet from auto-neg, thus you get 100M which means if you have a service >100M it sucks.
 
Have to say I get on really well with BT - although me basically begging for a freebie disc for the pinshed didn't cut it, in saying that I can see the green box from my front room, so, think that helps.
 
Hey,
I've been researching this issue and might have something. Can you check that your cable from the Openreach modem to your router/hub is a cat5e or preferable cat 6 cable.

We're finding quite a few customers are using cables they already have rather than the ones we send and many of them are CAT5 which in many cases won't give you a 1G ethernet from auto-neg, thus you get 100M which means if you have a service >100M it sucks.

Neil, it's Cat 5e (with red coloured ends) supplied by BT, with all four hubs I've had so far.

Should I have Cat 6 then?
 
No cat 5e should work - we’ve had customers use cat 5 tho


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Out of interest, just asked my son to do a speed test as his PC is connected via ethernet and it read 143MB download, 23 MB upload :) which is the best I've seen to date.... yet watching Amazon Prime last night via wireless (directly below the BT hub) gave long load times and blocky picture for several minutes (although this is unusual).

A friend on here said the BT Hub's are not good quality and would be better off using a third party manufactured one for wireless... did any of your research indicate similar @Neil McRae ? Not having a go.... just wanting to get best I can for my £55 a month (phone line and broadband only), which is notably expensive compared to every person I know.

Thanks for coming back on this BTW.
 
I went from Virgin (100 meg service) _ to BT via Sky and I get 16 meg now.

Differences are - better customer service, it doesnt fail, cheaper.....

Downloads are slower of course but I now watch You Tube with no stutter or glitches.

Here is an example of why I would never go back to virgin:

Actually - another video about the TV

BT fibre is coming to my area very soon, so I will be going to Fibre to the premises. I am sure Neil can push the project on for me :) lol.
 
From smarthub onwards we use a much better chipset and platform - are you using a smart hub?

BTW I’m pretty sure you can get a 40, 55 and 80M service on FTTP that is cheaper than that now.


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Jeez that Virgin service is bad..... I was one of the first to go down the BT FTTP route and whilst initially loads of issues, things have got better. Only the dropping out of wifi from the hub(s) I have to put up with now. I used to get it to my outbuilding cabin via TP Link extender (bouncing the signal) but the range has got less over time and is no more.... :confused:. Guarantee I ask for a fourth new hub, it will get better again.
 
Virgin have challenges with cable tv technology which is broadcast based so you neighbour can impact your speed.


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From smarthub onwards we use a much better chipset and platform - are you using a smart hub?

BTW I’m pretty sure you can get a 40, 55 and 80M service on FTTP that is cheaper than that now.


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Ultrafast Smart Hub(s).

Was waiting for my current 'deal' to come to an end unless you think I can get it reviewed now? Seems these days you threaten to go elsewhere and all providers immediately reduce the cost... or so I keep hearing.
 
Ultrafast Smart Hub(s).

Was waiting for my current 'deal' to come to an end unless you think I can get it reviewed now? Seems these days you threaten to go elsewhere and all providers immediately reduce the cost... or so I keep hearing.
John,

Have you tried looking at something like this?


You'll get free streaming with Netflix and Deezer and its a lot cheaper than what your paying now.

It's what I use because I can't get anything down a phone line.
 
Was with plusnet just basic broadband changed to Vodafone fibre with a promised 60-70mb? speed had trouble getting that but more annoying was the constant drop outs, it seems the fibre only goes to the green box at the end of the road, then there’s some “gizmo” that converts from fibre to copper cable and chucks it down your line, Vodafone have finally allowed me to leave as it’s that bad, i’ve been told that BT have either a “better gizmo” or more capacity? In there’s so i’m gonna try them, went through money saving expert and got s deal on there 50mb? Option saving from £29.99 a month might be worth a try?
It will be two weeks before i’m Changed over i’ll Report back then.
Money saving expert is quite good at deals but you have to follow the criteria for getting the discount/vouchers
Although they all appear to be like the energy sector all promising the earth but not delivering
Just a note on the BT website it’s easy to get carried away with add on’s, before i’d knew what I was doing, i’d got just about every extra in my basket!!!...... I then had to delete them one by one!
 
John get yourself an Asus router. The one I use is the dsl-ac68u the ones BT supply are terrible.
 
Was with plusnet just basic broadband changed to Vodafone fibre with a promised 60-70mb? speed had trouble getting that but more annoying was the constant drop outs, it seems the fibre only goes to the green box at the end of the road, then there’s some “gizmo” that converts from fibre to copper cable and chucks it down your line, Vodafone have finally allowed me to leave as it’s that bad, i’ve been told that BT have either a “better gizmo” or more capacity? In there’s so i’m gonna try them, went through money saving expert and got s deal on there 50mb? Option saving from £29.99 a month might be worth a try?
It will be two weeks before i’m Changed over i’ll Report back then.
Money saving expert is quite good at deals but you have to follow the criteria for getting the discount/vouchers
Although they all appear to be like the energy sector all promising the earth but not delivering
Just a note on the BT website it’s easy to get carried away with add on’s, before i’d knew what I was doing, i’d got just about every extra in my basket!!!...... I then had to delete them one by one!

Vodafone use our network - it they should have been able to resolve that with openreach. If you sign up again with someone and you have problems let me know.


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Just signed up with BT be 14 day’s before i’m Switched over open reach we’re out last Friday
The “gizmo” was maybe referred to as a RD slam “thing me bob!”
It’s all very technical
 
Virgin's service is VERY area dependant, probably arising from when they were separate companies/franchises, and the architecture around them.

The Virgin i used to have in Northampton was DIRE. Worst broadband i have ever had.
The virgin i now have in Bristol is Shockingly fast, and probably one of the best.

I just checked and i can get FTTC, however no FTTP. FTTP is obviously preferable - shame really as i'm in a highly residential area and only around 266m from the exchange!
 
Vodafone use our network - it they should have been able to resolve that with openreach. If you sign up again with someone and you have problems let me know.


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Just to clarify - Vodafone use the BT (or would i be correct in saying "openreach network"?) network for "last mile". Back at the exchange it's usually LLU's into the Vf network... Depending on the specifics of that exchange of course.
Vodafone backbone is their own network.
Unfortunately the Last mile stuff over openreach is usually the important bit for customer speed.
 
Just to clarify - Vodafone use the BT (or would i be correct in saying "openreach network"?) network for "last mile". Back at the exchange it's usually LLU's into the Vf network... Depending on the specifics of that exchange of course.
Vodafone backbone is their own network.
Unfortunately the Last mile stuff over openreach is usually the important bit for customer speed.

Yeah whatever :) the point I wanted to make was that the chances of changing provider and this fixing anything are slim unless it’s the Vodafone backhaul network that had a problem.

One thing to try when you have a problem - plug the hub into the master socket and disconnect any extension cabling - often that cable was put in years ago and in some cases isn’t great cable and just acts as a noise magnet.


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Yeah whatever :) the point I wanted to make was that the chances of changing provider and this fixing anything are slim unless it’s the Vodafone backhaul network that had a problem.

One thing to try when you have a problem - plug the hub into the master socket and disconnect any extension cabling - often that cable was put in years ago and in some cases isn’t great cable and just acts as a noise magnet.


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I’ve really no idea! (Just in case you hadn’t noticed!) one guy talked about the RD gizmo another talked about it being a redline problem? One said no other provider would be any better another said BT would? I’ve got to try something? Yes openreach chap confirmed connection to master socket (actually fitted a new faceplate) annoyingly I now have my answer phone in my upstairs cupboard??? But i’ll Give anything a go they all talked about this making a difference but it still drops out regular?
Neil i’m Not moaning at you mate, gonna give BT a go surely it can’t be any worse?
 
John,

Have you tried looking at something like this?


You'll get free streaming with Netflix and Deezer and its a lot cheaper than what your paying now.

It's what I use because I can't get anything down a phone line.

Thanks Chris, but I'm in a mobile blackspot and use a booster (via broadband) to get a better mobile signal.... So bit of a vicious circle....!
 
John get yourself an Asus router. The one I use is the dsl-ac68u the ones BT supply are terrible.

OK, watching on Ebay... £150 at Currys :oops:. This'll work OK with my FTTP hardware?

Ta.
 
you want one that supports PPP Over ethernet. You don't need any ADSL/VDSL interfaces.

Neil.
 
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