BT FTTC different to Virgin's ?

Hi there

apologies for the silly questions. Am currently on Virgin Media cable, and am pretty close to cancelling due to latency issues. I'm thinking of switching to BE in the short term but when I look at my local phone exchange it says:

FTTC status: RFS date set : 01/03/2012

(http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/STWINTN)

Is this BT's FTTC offering? would it be different to VM's, or would it likely suffer from the same high utilization problems that plague my locale? Finally what does RFS date set mean??

thanks chaps

Hi,
This means that the exchange is due to be upgraded to enable FTTC (fibre to the cab) this is different to Virgins coax service
You will still have to have your local cabinet upgraded to support it and once done you can get FTTC services from most ISP's not just BT Retail.
It will be the ISP that dictates if there will be any latency issues, depending on how much bandwidth they provide for their service.

RFS = Ready For Service. But those dates just mean it is planned for the future. It nearly always slips three months a few times, a few days before the date . So planning on it is a waste of time.

How much download allowance do you need? It is possible to get Be on a monthy contract through a reseller, but not cheap.

not much, virgin's 10mb offering was fine until it became unstable. online gamer for my sins, so quality > volume..

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Is this BT's FTTC offering?

Yes although several ISPs are 'reselling' it so you don't have to sign up with BT. Sadly at the moment Be is not one of them.

would it be different to VM's, or would it likely suffer from the same high utilization problems that plague my locale?

It's a completely different service. There is no reason to make any assumption about it based on VM's performance. There are significant technical differences between the two services and it's likely that everything between you and your ISP's servers is completely different and takes different routes. In effect you're not in 'the same locale'. Lag and jitter are known potential issues with VM's technology though so in theory that should be less of a problem with BT's offering.

As for RFS - that's the date that BT currently expect/hope the service to be operating. Sadly it's a large project with a lot of complications and RFS dates have been known to slip. Maybe by a month, maybe by several months. My exchange has the same RFS date and I'm just working on the assumption of 'some time before summer 2012'

Edited by Andrue (Wed 02-Nov-11 14:56:43)

The VM faster services offer a different QoS as on their own network rather than the overcrowded 10Meg which has some 70% of Virgin customers on it

Post a couple of URLs for us to ping.
For example:-

C:\Users\Bob>ping bbc.co.uk

Pinging bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=249
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=249
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=249
Reply from 212.58.241.131: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=249

Ping statistics for 212.58.241.131:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 13ms, Maximum = 16ms, Average = 14ms

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Post a couple of URLs for us to ping.

And where they are in the country has a massive difference - VM's generally not the best for low pings or VoIP.

I can't comment on VOIP, but on both the 20Mb and 50Mb speeds I found the ping and jitter to be very low, lower than I've ever had on ADSL.

I am on Virgin Media's 50Meg service in B63 area of birmingham and i am constantly plagued with unusable internet (also a gamer) where everyday at the same time the internet gets so much latency and jitter gaming is out of the question and VoIP, and the best thing is, VM say theres no issue on my line and that everything falls within there KPI(key performance indicators) when my line finally passed the acceptable level(in VMS mind) they saud it would be fixed by the 26 october and considering i have been having these issues since April of this year you can imagine i was happy to hear it would finally be fixed. I now however have, to use a common internet phrase "AN EPIC SADFACE" because guess what, its the 3rd of november and the internet is still broken, and its not even the peak time of week for my connection of Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings.

heres an example you tell me if its acceptable
TBPM

In reply to a post by pete_thomson:

I can't comment on VOIP, but on both the 20Mb and 50Mb speeds I found the ping and jitter to be very low, lower than I've ever had on ADSL.

As I said, it depends where you are in the country. VM is a postcode lottery

Your coax may be fine, but that pattern looks very like someone switching on a connection for 12 hours of the day to download masses of content.

On a quick sample of VM BQM versus BT BQM - the BT graphs in general do look better.

Was only a visual comparison, but does bear out what people are saying. There is the odd good connection for VM, so it being geographic seems a reasonable assumption.