Sky Fibre or BT Infinity

Hi everyone. Our exchange has finally got fibre and I'm now faced with decision making. I've been looking to upgrade for a while, but since no fibre, I've been stalled. Right now, I'm between BT Infinity Option 2 (Unlimited 40mb/10mb) or Sky Fibre (40mb/2mb). I'm with Sky right now, on Sky Unlimited.

The 2mb upload with Sky definitely puts me off. It concerns me as to whether they plan on upping that in the future or not. Talking to an OpenReach engineer today, he's told me BT will upgrade to 80mb/20mb free of charge (it'll essentially be the norm for all fibre customers). The only thing is, is that we do a lot of gaming and streaming - how bad is BT's throttling? I understand there's no longer a fair usage policy but I've heard stories from BT Infinity customers being limited all the way down to ~15mb during peak hours?

Bottom line is, what's the best option for a household that downloads a lot, streams, uploads and games (P2P) a lot? Coming from ordinary copper wire broadband, excellent line quality (we practically live inside the exchange) and every LLU in the exchange? Personal opinions are welcome, regardless of bias - I'm looking for you folks' first hand experiences.

Sky. They might offer 80/20 in the future.

Right. Do you think I should just disregard the fact that the Open Reach engineer told me that they'll never touch the speeds? Seems a bit biased, since Open Reach is part of BT and he did seem to be selling me BT Infinity.

Wait till 12 April when Sky announce their products and prices. 80/20 will be available from Openreach on 10 April.

He's telling porkies. I doubt the BT Infinity upgrade to 80/20 will be free.

I think so. He was very friendly, but the bias was slightly obvious.

The upgrade as in product migration may well be free, but the monthly ongoing fee is likely to change.

Lots of questions if BT Retail manages to write off another £3.xx of wholesale costs.

Do you find your current probably around 700Kbps upstream limiting?
The extra that 10Meg offers makes zero difference to gaming, as even with voice you only need around 128 Kbps.

The limiting stories are matched by the stories of Sky customers getting slow speed and not being able to game at peak times.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Do you find your current probably around 700Kbps upstream limiting?
The extra that 10Meg offers makes zero difference to gaming, as even with voice you only need around 128 Kbps.

The limiting stories are matched by the stories of Sky customers getting slow speed and not being able to game at peak times.

Sorry, I should have clarified. When I say streaming, I meant livestreaming. I do understand gaming isn't that demanding though.

Edited by deleted (Wed 04-Apr-12 17:29:07)

Ok in terms of webcam streaming its worth checking how the PC copes with it, as encoding a stream can be the bottle neck, i.e. trying to encode at 6Mbps 1080i will push many PC's, where as most will happily manage a 600 Kbps 320x240 picture.

Encoding problems show up as high CPU load, and dropped frames, so worth testing to see what your hardware can manage.

There is no information about what the nuts and bolts of the Sky package will offer.

We don't know if Sky will have a heavy interleave that can be dropped when asked. Infinity DLM can turn the interleave off to fastpath.

We don't know if Sky will set the default noise margin to a higher value than BT which could drop the synch speeds of the sub 40 meg lines.

We don't know how the supplied router performs and knowing Sky you most likely will have to use that one with no choice of using another one that may have features you want to use.

So it is a wait and see situation especially as BT will most likely be offering their new 80/20 package in the next couple fo weeks.

DLM side of things should be the same as its Openreach who control the electronics in the street.

In reply to a post by aosk:

how bad is BT's throttling?

minimal to non-existant.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Ok in terms of webcam streaming its worth checking how the PC copes with it, as encoding a stream can be the bottle neck, i.e. trying to encode at 6Mbps 1080i will push many PC's, where as most will happily manage a 600 Kbps 320x240 picture.

Encoding problems show up as high CPU load, and dropped frames, so worth testing to see what your hardware can manage.

Oh I definitely have a purpose built computer for this. Hardware is fine, the only restraint is my upload speeds.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

We don't know how the supplied router performs and knowing Sky you most likely will have to use that one with no choice of using another one that may have features you want to use.

Sky are currently using the Sagemcom F@st 2504N router with modified firmware so it runs in "router only" mode using LAN port 1 as the WAN port to connect to the Openreach modem. There's rumours of a new router being available when they officially launch their fibre service but nothing concrete yet.

They are using MER using the same authentication setup as they do with ADSL so no chance of using a different router.