Which FTTC ISP?

Hi,

I'm a few months off yet - the Openreach PDF says Sept-11 and they are just starting to put the FTTC cabinets into the estate now, but i'm wondering which ISP's people would recommend and why?

I've seen various people recommending various ISP's, but no one seems to say why they are better than BT Infinity.

How is BT Infinity for speed, reliability and ping times?

Does anyone have a Live BQM graph for Infinity?

I do a lot of upload with online backups, some streaming but don't do that much download compared to some or any torrents at all.

However, I don't like the thought of a download cap.

I like that Infinity is unlimited and way cheaper when you take into account free install, free hardware, 3 months free, Quidco cashback and free Openzone minutes.

Are any of the other ISP's so much better to pass up on that?

Thanks,

Ian

Speed
- My profile is 35 Mbps
- Quite often get 34/8 Mbps speeds
- I once dropped to 27, but mostly it's well above 30 on speedtests
- On one, and only one occasion, for one hour I got around 7 Mbps. I reported it to BT via twitter, they got back to me and confirmed it was a fault - though by then it had been corrected - so only an hour
- pings vary by geography -- BTs routing can be complex. I get around 22ms to BBC from Southampton. My traffic seems to route via Birmingham. BT DLM can also enable/disable interleaving.

I don't have a Live BQM graph sorry

No download cap - BT removed the 300GB limit a month or more ago

I do use online backup and can get 7-8 Gbps

Had one recognized outage in several months -- though I don't actively monitor. was out for around 45 mins so not good...!

I switched to BT from O2 Unlimited (4/1) in Jan 2011 . Absolutely the right decision

All sounds good - thanks for that!

I've seen "profile" mentioned in a lot of threads - is that the VSDL term for sync speed on ADSL?

How do you know yours is 35Mbps?

Roughly how far from the cabinet are you?

How long did it take from the cabinet appearing to being able to order? (when did a date show in the checker and when did the checker show you were able to order?)

Thanks,

Ian

IP profile isn't sync speed.

You can see both at http://speedtester.bt.com/

I know you are asking about BT, but I'll share my experience of Plusnet with you;

Sign up offer was good (if you take phone too)
Connected 3 weeks ago, good communication from Plusnet prior to that
Have raised 5 support tickets with them (via web based support) all answered within their quoted time frame
Speed has been good, my profile is 32409 down / 2000 up and my speed tests all come in at 30 d / 1.6 up
There are download / upload limits from 0800 to 0000, but if ur sensible u can schedule your torrent client to only download 0000 to 0800

And my current BQM is here.

Yes - profile should roughly correspond to the sync speed (the BT system sets this as a traffic throttle based of variables such as sync speed with historic data). This speed can be found out from the BT speed tester site.

I thought I was around 500m from the cabinet from notes I kept quite a few years back, though it could be longer. it's probably not a lot shorter as the cab isn't that close.

Our cabs were being installed in I think late June 2010 and didn't go live until Dec 2010 !

With FTTC if you are using the BT OpenReach modem you cannot find out the sync speed.

However the BT Dynamic Line Management mechanism will set your ip profile to something approximating your sync speed (a little below) assuming the line is stable. If unstable it will likely be a lot lower for periods of time.

The ip profile effectively "limits" or "throttles" the data throughput in the IP network before it hits your connection.

The speedtesters generally show actual data throughput -- which after all is the most important aspect. This won't be sync speed either. But the BT one does show the profile.

Edited by planetf1 (Thu 16-Jun-11 16:01:43)

I use BT changed from ADSL+ whatever I got to fibre costs are ok never gone down speed as below, not sure why everone hates BT whoever apart form Virgin its ther system(sorry whoelsale) that gets it there.

Thanks - does anyone have a link to the speed tester where you can see your profile?

Ian

http://www.speedtester.bt.com/