Standard vs Prioritised FTTC

So.. my cabinet has been enabled - yay.

I've decided to try Claranet SOHO as my new ISP (currently with Be). I work from home and do move a significant amount of data around during the day, and I can see the house making more use of iplayer so I'm going to go for a business package that is unlimited. Claranet have 2 service levels which are "standard" and "premium" where the "premium" is a prioritised service. The cost difference is around £10/month (~£50 vs £60) for their 40/10 service. They also offer an 80/20 service "standard" service at £60 (BT line checker says I should get 60/20, so I could double my upload speed which would be useful).

My question is: how much difference in reality does the prioritised traffic make on day-to-day usage? Does it have a significant impact if the exchange is congested? Anyone moved from a standard to prioritised service and notice a difference?

From what I hear currently nobody is experiencing congestion on the Infinity service with BT. It may be that you are paying over the odds for a 80/20 service for the belief your getting a better package when in fact it's negligible to a much cheaper service from BT.

If I was in your position I would find a cheaper 80/20 package with unlimited usage and if you experience any slow downs in the future (which may happen in a year or twos time), you can just switch to a prioritized service, at which point that package may be cheaper too.

Thanks, but I also want a static IP, which means BT business and that's almost as expensive as Clara.Nets offering (in fact £2 difference) - except it's likely to be far less congested once you're on the Claranet backbone than on the BT one. Seemed pretty simple choice really

I understand I can get BT Unlimited for £25.60, but I'm not asking that question. I really want to know whether there is any real practical difference between a prioritised offering vs a standard one?

Have Clara.Net indicated where this prioritisation takes place? I suspect its within their network as I'm not aware of a priority FTTC product from BT Openreach.

Is Claranet a LLU provider? Just wondering where the split between BT Openreach and Clara.net will be.

The 80/20 product has a 30 Meg guaranteed rate across the the openreach segment, the 40/10/2 products are 15 Meg.

So IF congestion is on the Openreach segment then the 80/20 will be better. But also so many other points it could be

In reply to a post by arad85:

My question is: how much difference in reality does the prioritised traffic make on day-to-day usage? Does it have a significant impact if the exchange is congested? Anyone moved from a standard to prioritised service and notice a difference?

Sections 2.1.5 and 2.2.6 of this document read to me as if it does nothing useful wrt competition for Openreach resources with other end users. If this is what they mean by "prioritised". It only provides room for traffic manipulation within the available bandwidth for the particular user, e.g. VOIP versus web browsing.

There is information about the WBC side of it in this one, but I concluded the same result applies. I don't see anything that means an end user can be prioritised against another.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The 80/20 product has a 30 Meg guaranteed rate across the the openreach segment, the 40/10/2 products are 15 Meg.

But what's the guarantee on the prioritised traffic on 40Mbit?

Interesting docs - thanks. I shall read them a few times to let it sink in....

Then you can explain them in English, to us all!

I have a niggling feeling that there is something else somewhere, as it has always been a given as far as we are all concerned that the "Priority" services do give priority through the BT Wholesale backhaul. However those two documents seem to specifically state that is not the case.

The "standard" service offers a minimum throughput of 12Mb by BT wholesale/Openreach whereas the "premium/prioritised" offers a minimum of 16Mb throughput - but that is only the case where there is contention on the BT wholesale network of which there is not any just yet. ISP contention and other things may come in to play regardless of the extra you pay for the additional BT wholesale service.

Thanks James. That clears it up for me

As I said 15 Meg over the Openreach segment

For the Openreach segment in black and white:

http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/updates/briefin...

The 12 was the old fault level, which has also now being removed too.

What BT Wholesale guarantee's is likely to be differnent

I know it's not ideal, but you could use a dynamic dns service in conjunction with the BT service. This is what I used to do when I had a dynamic IP and wanted to run a server from home. Maybe Clara.net are worth it, but if your concerned about the bottle neck at the cabinet level, it's going to be the same whatever provider you're with. As Andrew has pointed out 15Mb and 30Mb guarantee for the 40/80 products.

I'm not a fan of BT, but there is no point in paying over the odds for a service that holds little benefit imo. Very few people need a *truly* unlimited service. Of course if you live in an area that offers another FTTC network separate from BT like I do, I'd probably go with them just to spite BT.. But my guess is you don't have that luxury.

Edited by LeJimster (Mon 23-Apr-12 13:35:25)

...more often than not, the 'priority' is provided in the form of 'no traffic management' just as it is with plusnet's FTTC. You are not gauranteed a minimum connection speed though with prioritised traffic.

I thought 15 meg was the minimum threshold BT provides. However for around 10 months have had speeds as low as 20k but predominantly in heavy periods around 6 to 11 meg. Equally many of these could have been the ISP contention, backhaul etc as well as BT.

Present ISP stated upgrade to a business package in Feb.
"The results you have provided for your contended FTTC line really aren't that bad for a Sunday afternoon/evening when alot of our customers were utilizing their connections." Response to a speedtest at sub 3meg!

At first for 7 months they accepted speedtest.net results, last 6 months only bt speedtest results which were either down at time or just plainly too slow to load subsequently timing out.

Over which bit of the network. definitely BT Infinity products are no where near the price where theey can guarantee 15 Meg from your own all the way out to the internet.

I've been on business - sorry for the late reply.

So.. we have a few links in the chain. The bit from me to my ISP (which I assume is from an Openreach server somwhere) and then the ISP section.

Assuming I have narrowed my selection down to two ISPs (i.e. Claranet and BT) then the network is the same between me and where the network splits to the ISPs. Congestion on the common section is governed by link speed between my exchange and the backbone "server" (I assume this is a BRAS) and I have no idea how loaded that will be. I'm guessing there's no way to find out either is there although it sounds like there is a guarantee of 12Mbit/sec over this section of the network.

The second bit is down to my ISPs network. Claranet claim not to do any form of traffic shaping - BT only claim to shape P2P. My feeling is that whilst the BT Infinity network is likely to have a much larger cumulative bandwidth than the Claranet one, there will be less people on it, so there is less likelihood of contention.

As to the question of do I need unlimited or a static IP. No, not really, but I'm prepared to pay to get them as I CBA messing around with changing IPs as I do a lot of FTP from a work VPN where the works DNS caches the IP address of my dynamic DNS address. Also, I do quite a lot of daytime uploading of large files as I work from home so I need something I feel is "unlimited".

Also, cost is of a secondary issue to quality of the service.

Any morew inputs on my badly worded statements above?