Hi all

Many thanks for the replies so far.

The only ISP that has been mentioned that does FTTP seems to be AAISP, which seems very expensive looking at their website. And Plusnet, who no longer are accepting orders at the moment, and KC which is area specific. Are there any others that people are aware of?

WWombat: you seem to infer that people can get FTTC services over FTTP, but I'm not sure that is the case. Do you know? Note that we do not have FTTC in our area as we do not have any cabinets, so the choice for us is Hyperoptic or Openreach FTTP, or (extremely poor quality) ADSL.

Thanks
Richard

Richard

I'm on the Plusnet FTTP trial and the prices charged are the same as for FTTC at either 80/20 or 40/20. However as mentioned above, Plusnet are no longer accepting new FTTP clients and have not mentioned their plans for the future.

BTR charge the same as for FTTC on their 80/20 or 40/10 options.


George

Can confirm that if you order a 40/10 or 80/20 product in an Openreach FTTP area then wholesale price is the same, whether providers do the same is down to them.

In reply to a post by rathga:

WWombat: you seem to infer that people can get FTTC services over FTTP, but I'm not sure that is the case. Do you know?

Take care to distinguish the service from the technology carrying the service.

So, in an FTTP area, you will get your superfast service provided by FTTP technology, and will not get it provided by FTTC technology.

Then, when you order your service, you will (should) be given choices that depend on the technology available. If you have FTTC available, you can be offered services with the underlying speeds of 40/2, 40/10 or 80/20.

If, however, you have FTTP available, then you will also be offered a choice from the same services that are available via FTTC plus some extra services that are faster and more expensive.

When carried by FTTP, the services that offer the same speeds as under FTTC have the advantage that the speed is not affected by distance.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

For most people, the choice you are asking them to make is "cheap now, fast enough now, but too slow in a decade" vs "expensive now, too fast now, but still fast enough in a decade." Pretty much all of them stop after reading "cheap now".

The assertion that the current last-mile technologies are going to be "too slow in a decade" is a conjecture, and a woefully unsupported one. For something that works now to become "too slow" an application has to become popular which needs the extra bandwidth. Essentially the only thing that drove the present expansion to 10+ Mbps is live streaming video, whether in the form of Skype video calls or watching TV and movies.

Video resolutions may increase, gradually. But that's a race against the codec researchers, who will be packing the same quality into fewer bits every year. When I first had Gigabit Internet access almost twenty years ago you needed 10-15Mbps to stream mediocre full screen video from a pre-recorded source. A few years later DVD was doing the same at higher resolutions in 6-10Mbps. Today everybody owns devices that live stream better quality higher resolution at 4-6Mbps.

Actually, I agree totally.

The "too slow next decade" was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to the slogan used by the "fibre to all is the only solution" brigade.