Is BT 900 mbps consistently snappy and reliable.

We have Zen Price for life, for 900 mbps Openreach FTTP which costs us just over £50 per month which means that if we changed to BT, (which earlier this year had a starting deal of just over £40 per month for a 900 mbps FTTP connection), with the regular BT, (boiled frog), price increases it would cost us much more after a year or so but our main criterion is the connection speed, reliability and the quality of service with snappy browsing etc. (We use an Asus RTAX88U Router and the house has Cat 6a cable to every room).

Every so often with my present 900 mbps ISP, (ie. Zen), the browsing appears to slow down and when I check the speed tests the speed tests are around 500 mbps instead of 900 mbps but it does depend upon the gateway, (ie. London, Manchester, East Midlands, South West, etc. We are located in Cheshire), which moves around. - Perhaps, it is an Openreach issue or a capacity issue on their systems. - Since it is all via Openreach; I do not know if BT would be the same or better and there is the rub.

Apparently BT Guarantee a minimum speed of 700 mbps, (whatever that guarantee is worth).

We have now had Zen 900 mbps for coming onto three years so we are out of contract, we know that A year or so ago there were intermittent really low speed issues, that coincided with the GEA fiasco, that in our case eventually went away after Openreach visits but Openreach said that they found nothing and after that we had a mostly solid 900 mbps day and night for some time.

Is the BT 900 mbps FTTP connection always fast and snappy day and night, (especially with regard to browsing), or are all Openreach 900 mbps FTTP connections the same irrespective of the ISP ?

I was hoping that those who had changed from a different Openreach 900 mbps FTTP ISP to BT within the last 9 months, (especially those who changed from Zen), would let us know their views regarding any performance differences if any.

Due to the silence: perhaps we can presume that the BT 900 mbps FTTP performance is also cyclical and if so we can also presume that, (under Openreach FTTP), all Openreach ISPs are mostly the same with very little in the way of performance differences between them which means that it is just down to any price differences.

If so: it may just be a case of;

“always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse”

If this is the case then with FTTP connections, why would anyone change ISP other than on price?

why would anyone change ISP other than on price?

Performance can vary across providers , and if poor performance is coupled with poor customer service then these can drive customers to look elsewhere.
Those looking for particular attributes e.g. low ping for gaming or low jitter for live web meetings may have a poor experience on some providers networks than others.

Hi,

I had endless problems with Zen while on their backhaul, none when on BT wholesale backhaul while with Zen. They kept moving me from BT's to theirs.

Eventiually I left them.

On AAISP using BT wholesale backhaul. No slowdowns at all. Having been bitten, I check the speed a couple of times a day. No problems at all. No suggestion of "minimums".

Not sure, others may clarify, but I have the feeling that the 700 minimum is a safety clause.

I've been on BT 900 via a Mikrotik RB5009 router since May 2022. Never had a second of downtime - never had random slowdowns, never had a speedtest under 900mbit. Current PPP session was established on 23/02/2023 so its been very stable. Only reason it dropped then was a router OS upgrade.

IPv4 and IPv6 are basically identical in performance

I do not use BT's DNS.

Bt speed guarantee for my connection is 700mbit.

This is pretty typical.

Edited by summat (Sun 09-Jul-23 18:00:19)

I never had a slow down in over 2 years: just a snapshot of some tests to a Dublin server (I'm in N.Ireland) - Ping is 14/15ms to UK

https://imgur.com/a/ll6awVZ

*connection always in use by 3 other people all the time also

Edited by BuckleZ (Sun 09-Jul-23 22:43:27)

Thankyou for letting me know about your experiences of BT.

I do not get dropout and I only tend to carry out speed tests when I notice that the browsing is poor. - I usually use the Ookla speed from inside the Asus RTAX88U Router.

At the moment all seems OK, it is certainly snappier than usual but using the Thinkbroadband Speed Test is not as good as others;

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/16889396327...


Download Speed = 727.6 Mbps
Upload Speed = 116.3 Mbps

Latency = 36 ms

I do not know how to display the Thinkbroadband Speed Test Results as a Graph.

The next time that BT have an offer for new customer offer I will probably join the happy throng by pressing the join BT button and just take the regular BT price increases on the chin as a price for life is worthless if the product is inferior.

Only had my BT FTTP since early May so too early to really comment but it's consistently fast, no blips. However that may be because I was one of the first in my area to notice it was available and so ordered right away to get off Virgin.

My main reason for perhaps leaving is that if they do offer a faster package than the gigabit I'm on, the PPPoE connection will absolutely kill my router and I won't get the benefit from it.

I am however looking at a complete homebrew router system to counteract this.

Is home FTTP900 CGNAT, or do you get a "real" IPV4 connection? That's one of the things that puts me off the BT home offerings. I know you have the option of a static IPV4 on the BT business packages.

BT don't use CGNAT

In reply to a post by jimbof:

Is home FTTP900 CGNAT, or do you get a "real" IPV4 connection? That's one of the things that puts me off the BT home offerings. I know you have the option of a static IPV4 on the BT business packages.

As I understand it, with BT Residential It will be a dynamic IP Address and I have no idea about CGNAT.

Since, (at the present time), BT have a good offer for a 900 Mbps FTTP residential deal, I signed up with BT last Friday and will migrate to them near to the end of July.

Anecdotal evidence says that BT is better than Zen and since BT are larger and have more capacity than others that is likely to remain the case.

A fly in the BT ointment, over the next few years, could be that BT seem to have plans to unload Plusnet and they also have plans to move BT residential customers to EE and keep just business customers with BT. - Maybe, that is total tripe but I did read it somewhere.

Edited by Fido (Sun 16-Jul-23 17:01:46)

In reply to a post by BuckleZ:

BT don't use CGNAT

Ah ok. I stopped following BTs antics when they were doing the original CGNAT trials. Glad they're not using it.

You'll get a single IPv4 address, which is dynamic.

You'll also get an IPv6 /56 prefix. This is also dynamic and assigned by DHCPv6 each time you connect.

I've never seen any hint whatsoever of CGNAT on BT home connections. I can't see it coming in a hurry, only in a potential switch/move to EE as you suggest, which may well happen.

If they slip CGNAT into that transition..I'll be leaving.

Edited by summat (Sun 16-Jul-23 17:35:50)

BT Business 900 here - fixed IP - I have zero issues with speed but have noticed that because of the extreme low latency (4-5ms) the BT DNS servers are now the bottleneck with normal browsing. Moving to faster DNS servers results is more 'snappy' web pages loading - for normal web browsing, you are maybe using 1% of the available bandwidth ...

The 110Mbit/sec upload is also very nice to have - uploads are now pretty instant for most services.

I'm using a direct PPPoE IP v4 connection to my router.

Edited by teeerex (Mon 17-Jul-23 12:47:31)

BT & EE broadband are identical, they are now supplied by the same platform. If you look on EE it says powered by BT. I think EE broadband customers just get a "BT" IP these days from the same pool as the BT broadband customers. So any change to EE is very likely just going to be a rebrand of who you pay the bill to.

BT seemed to have a good supply of IPv4 addresses, some of the newer blocks they've used seem to be ones that were previously assigned to EE or its predecessors.

In terms of performance we've been on BT 900 for a bit over two years now, zero issues with the performance in that time. We had Zen Broadband for a while before fibre arrived and we had several issues with their backhaul being overloaded in that time.

When I was was with BT I was on they 900 Mbits package using my own Router and had no issues with speed and it never slowed down in the evening either, it was rock solid.

I only left BT for the broadband due to I didn't want to be forced to use their SmartHub Router when they moved us over to their Digital Voice Service that forces you to use their Router, plus their prices kept going up and up each year, so I moved to a completely new ISP, better support, better price and better speed.

---
Paul

I've had some IPs come up as EE on speedtests. Guessing they've merged them

If FTTP come to my area, I will have FTTP with UnchainedISP. Because they using BTW backhaul carrier and including static ip address plus you get instant reply from uk support. UnchainedISP FTTP is 12 months contract.