Good home fibre broadband provider?

[Guinnless]

My mistake, I think mine said Fibre 1.

[JimDog]

@Guinnless

Full Fibre is FTTC so the nearer you are to the cabinet the better the speed.

Hi Guinnless

BT.com says:
“Our FTTP broadband is called Full Fibre. FTTC stands for fibre to the cabinet. Also known as fibre broadband, it uses fibre cables to a cabinet on your street, then copper cables the rest of the way to your home. FTTC broadband isn’t as fast as FTTP, but you can still get superfast speeds up to around 80Mb.”

I think all 3 products in my screen grab above - Full Fibre Essential, Full Fibre 1 and Full Fibre 2 - are FTTP.

Jim

[JimDog]

I just called BT 0800 800150, pressed 5 for billing, and spoke a very good agent.

He first informed me that I will soon get compensation for the delay in switching on my BB.

I then asked him whether I could downgrade from my current package of BT Full Fibre 100 to BT Full Fibre 2.

He said that I should be able to downgrade because I’m still in my 14 day cooling-off period, but in practice he has found that ‘the Openreach system’ will not allow downgrades from BT Full Fibre 100.

I said that that’s a shame because other providers are offering the same bandwidth as BT Full Fibre 100 at half the price.

He said went off and found a way to give me a 3 months free discount on my account.

That’s worth 3 x £36 = £118, which means that in effect I have got 2 years of BT Full Fibre 100 at the price of BT Full Fibre 2.

So in the end I am going to stay with BT, not move to Zen.

Thanks especially to @Mike-B for nudging me to call BT and negotiate.

(As long as they actually do what he has promised and it just works for 2 years I will be very happy).

[JimDog]

BT have just emailed me to confirm the 3 month discount, so I am very happy with this result.

[HappyListener]

When I agreed my FF1 (FTTP), the deal was 3m’s free upfront and then £27.99pm (IIRC) - I think this included £1 to retain the landline without any call package.

I think BT can be very flexible if needs be. I did a deal with their Retentions Team many years back which was very good i.e. far cheaper than their advertised tariffs – so good their billing system couldn’t cope with it.

They also insisted on opening me a fresh BT a/c, even though I have a legacy one, which has my legacy, but still live, BT e-mail address attached to it. It seems that if this a/c is closed, the BT e-mail goes too, so it’s left open with a nominal balance FTB. All crazy really. I use the BT e-mail address for random/unimportant stuff, so as not to clog up my primary mailbox.

[Simon-in-Suffolk]

@davidhendon

I think the point is that with fibre you shouldn’t get those “average” and “up to” descriptions.

Not exactly the same, but worth considering with most consumer FTTP fibre setups (GPON) you can find your contention greater especially on uplinks compared to FTTC. You are are more at the mercy of your local distribution network and what your neighbours are doing.

But sure FTTC is very much dependent on physical distance to cabinet and the physical state of your domestic wiring, and in some cases the wiring between you and the cabinet, so yes I find the term ‘average’ here pretty useless. Fibre is consistent here, unless there is a fault, which can be more troublesome to resolve, but as I say at the mercy of contention due to the GPON splitting of your particular FTTP connection on its way to your main district or regional exchange.

If you have PtP fibre than that is like a leased line back to the exchange and there is no access contention, but very rare for consumer services and typically very much more expensive.(because there is no contention, splitting or sharing). This is what a SME might use however.

Regular contented FTTP connection using GPON infrastructure as used in the UK

[Alley_Cat]

@JimDog

@Alley_Cat

support has always been UK based

BT broadband say:
“You’ll always speak to one of our team based in the UK and Ireland.”

I don’t think that was the case when I was with BT years ago, they certainly couldn’t;t help with various technicalities - long time ago -maybe I had the landline with BT and broadband with Zen???

[Alley_Cat]

I find Speedtest to be pretty good.

[JimDog]

I think they did outsource a lot of call centres some time ago, so it seems they must have brought them back to the UK and Ireland.

[TimOopNorth]

When I had my big problems with BT a good few years ago the call centre was outside the UK and I really struggled to understand the accent of the advisors. Good to hear local call centres being used

[Simon-in-Suffolk]

Indeed they did in the past, but as per my post of them investing in recent years in customer service, some of those functions have been brought back to the British Isles.