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/

I'm with Virgin Media. I get a constant 50Mb+/4.7Mb+ day and night at any time. We are expecting to have 100Mb/10Mb available soon. I think you can understand why I have no intention of changing ISP.

[IMG]http://www.speedtest.net/result/1344422951.png[/IMG]

My ping and jitter is generally constantly good, though VM has been criticised for not being that good for gamers in some of the old network areas. ie contention and all that.

[IMG]http://www.pingtest.net/result/42121491.png[/IMG]

My live quality monitor is pretty distorted today because I have been downloading and uploading shed loads, but here is a snapshot from a couple of days ago.

[img]http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-thumb/177ac...[/img]

Here's my live monitor. Looks terrible doesn't it?

[img]http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-thumb/164b8...[/img]

Edited by deleted (Thu 16-Jun-11 20:28:00)

I'm with Plusnet, and can recommend them if your OK with their traffic management policies, and their usage caps. Personally I *am*, because it keeps my service away from those who want the unlimited options: knowing your usage and keeping to a matching package also means you aren't subsidising someone else's broadband.

- The order was a nightmare, because things got stuck within BTW/BTO. Would have happened whatever ISP I used.
- Plusnet's support was great at overcoming the worst of BTW/BTO, but the problem still dragged
- Originally I had ADSL, was just on the border for getting full 8Mbps. Good quality line.
- I'm 550M from the cabinet (as measured by the Openreach engineer)
- Day 1 gave us a profile speed of 38717 (which equates to the top sync of 40,000), latency of 11ms, pings of 13ms.
- Day 1 BQM showed 4% packet loss.
- DLM cut in after 48 hours, added interleaving, increased latency to 18ms. No packet loss.
- DLM cut in again 12 hours later, for no apparent reason, and dropped sync speed. IP profile was about 34800, so I guess sync was about 36000.
- Day 3 BQM

I went through a regrade to get the 10Mbps uplink, which obviously reset DLM back to the starting conditions, and then went through the same 3 day experience again.

Since then, the days have been like this: BQM. It still sits with a latency of about 18ms, and a profile speed of 34,800.

Speedtest.net results are usually around 33.2-33.5Mbps. BT's speedtester can be more variable, but is usually around 31Mbps.

In reply to a post by planetf1:

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

Which online backup do you use ?.

I'm using "Squirrelsave" from memset. I don't actually use their windows software and instead script it myself using ssh/rsync, but they do have a hands-off app that just does it for you.

I'd definately recommend them - fast, unlimited, just always works

http://www.squirrelsave.co.uk/

It's actually a service from "memset" a UK (guildford) based hosting company.

In the past I've also used
- carbonite -- my main issue there was having to use the provided software, and for a time I was running linux, which there wasn't sw for.Backups were also throttled above 50GB. Otherwise the service was good
- livedrive - I signed up to a cheap promotional offer (they had a 1 day £1/unlimited/year offer -- seriously). I've never got the service working. sw is buggy, locks up multiple machines, throughput isn't great. I may try again but for now would say avoid!

Have you tried Crashplan? Friends of mine were talking about last week.

Interesting - not come across that one before.

On their site they seem to be Windows only.....did you just get it working with ssh/rsync on your own or are there more details around on that?

I use CrashPlan and it seems ok so far - i'm currently using it on a Windows machine but i'm going to move it to a Linux server i'm setting up when I get chance.

The guys at memset were happy to explain they tool used ssh and how to extract the key ... I did install the client to get it to pull the config, but then used ssh/rsync myself - obviously they didn't provide explicit help on that aspect.

It was this openness that caused me to sign up, and I've been completely happy since.

Thanks.

I've just started a 30day trial of Crashplan. It's only been 1 day so far, so I'll see how it goes.

I'll also have a look at squirrelsave though.

Another one to look at is safecopybackup.
You can backup mapped network drives and install on multiple computers.
Gets a bit expensive if you want to go beyond 300GB though.

I've been using this for a couple of years and am pleased with it.

I like that it uses a checksum to check for duplicates and has the ability to reset (Clear out file/version history and sync to your current file structure) to reduce the amount of allowance used.
When you do this it doesn't need to backup all the files again as it recognises the checksum.