Good home fibre broadband provider?

Lounge
41

Correction and clarification :slightly_smiling_face: I didnā€™t intend to type "full":scream:
BT Fibre is FTTC so the nearer you are to the cabinet the better the speed.

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42

Do you ever measure it?
e.g. by going on Fast.com ?

43

Well thatā€™s a confusing description. Full Fibre!

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44

My BT plan is Fibre with Halo 3.
FTTC and the cabinet is 260m distant
I get 74mb/s down, 19mb/s up

I donā€™t want to get into price comparisons, but itā€™s Ā£21 pm plus Ā£6 each for the SIM cards. A lot less than that shown in JimDogs post; maybe a phone call is where you can negotiate, it worked for me.

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45

Even if the fibre comes to your house (FTTP) it has to change to a copper wire before the BB hub.

But agreed, Full Fibre is nothing much more than customer confusing, plus a sniff of marketing BS, maybe to help justify the price.

46

Iā€™d say it was a false Trade Description if itā€™s copper from cabinet to house!

47

moved to BT fibre Optic couple of months ago - the 3rd party company BT approved for installation took out all copper cable when meant we did not have a home telephone line - but to be fair BT put right within 24 hours

I am pretty impressed with FULL fibre optic to junction box and then to house

as i used to say in hotel trade you dont find the best Laundry company you find the best of the worst - seems ISP are the same but new router and download speeds are very good

48

Iā€™d agree and itā€™s even confusing when talking contracts with the BT people. I opted for FF1 (as above), with a new FTTP installation, this being only marginally more expensive than PN were offering to renew my ā€˜Superfast BBā€™ FTTC deal.

The cabinets around my way are often open to the elements and I reckon Iā€™m about 1/2 mile from a cabinet, which was a low on the list reason to try FTTP, as I was getting slow downloading via PN.

The irony was that when BT/OR botched my new deal/installation, it turns out theyā€™d booked me for FTTC renewal, when it was clearly a new FTTP dealā€¦which meant starting over :frowning:

And when I arranged the deal, the sales team were adamant all my supply cabling was underground, which it has never been and never will be.

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49

But do the router or the faster speeds make any noticeable difference to anything (apart from speed tests)?

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50

Do you know whether you normally get closer to 50 or 25Mb download?

51

In my case, page-loading got faster but there are so many variables in this that itā€™s challenging to say whether it was the new FTTP or simply just relocating the router due to the incoming cabling etc.

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52

I think 50.

54

The Openreach engineer who came recently recommended using fast.com to measure speeds.

It uses the Netflix servers.

55

Just scanned via 2 tests and am at ~25mbps down and ~10 up ā€“ perhaps due to time of day and all the WFH due to strikes etc.

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56

Thanks HL - very interesting.

They have you at your so-called ā€˜Stay Fast Guaranteeā€™ rather than your headline
twice-as-fast rate.

And thatā€™s in the middle of the morning, nowhere near peak time.

I am consistently getting 150Mb on my iPad via WiFi, which is my headline rate.

Because BT made so many mistakes, 2 days ago they gave me an extra month of the ā€˜discountedā€™ monthly price Iā€™m on.

This involved renewing my contract - which AFAIK means I could leave them because Iā€™m again in the 14 days cooling off period.

The only thing is Zen is Ā£2 more per month for around a third of the bandwidth.

But then Iā€™m not sure the extra bandwidth makes any real difference, even with 5 of us using devices in the house.

e.g. last night we did an expt streaming 4k videos on the TV, a laptop, the iPad, and also about 3 smartphones streaming video and a Nintendo switch playing Fortnite.

I think one of the phones went slowly but the rest seemed fine.

57

Just ran Speedtest on my ā€˜ordinaryā€™ Fibre connection via Cloudscape:

36.96 Mbps down
9.33 Mbps up

Quite fast enough for meā€¦ :grinning:

58

It seems to be variable ā€“ tested again and now at 35 up.

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59

@JimDog more effect on TV to be honest

I donā€™t stream only use FLAC through NAS, but it is directly wired to router via copper cable - best Ā£500 I spent getting direct link from front of house through garage to music room at back of house

I have noticed internet Radio is very good both are at max speed 100 Mbs at NDX

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60

Does it look better streaming 4k?

61

Yes we have LG TV and there has never been any issues on any of the streaming channels we use