BT Infinity installed 20 months ago, switching questions

Hi all,

I had BT Infinity 2 installed about 20 months ago when I moved into my new house.

The Openreach engineer installed a white modem at the wall and I have PPPoE'd to that from my TP-Link TL-4300 which is running OpenWRT.

This has worked well and is a refreshing change from the ADSL days where you had to buy an ADSL modem/router or use the tosh provided by the ISP.

I'm fed up with BT's continual price-hikes and am looking to move to either Sky or Talktalk. I am getting ~60mbps with BT and will be moving to 38mbps, so I assume I'll get something close to it.

My questions are:

Are all the providers still using BTOpenreach's backbone? i.e. if the service and connection are good with BT is it safe to assume that they will be with Talktalk also, or is this more akin the dark days of ADSL LLUs?

Will Talktalk/Sky provide me with a new white modem, or a new combined item? Can I just continue to use the current setup or will the old white box be removed and replaced? I would really like to continue having a modem only -> router setup if at all possible.

Is it the same old case of a MAC code for the transfer or is it more complicated than that?

Is there anything else I should be wary of?

They use the segment of fibre from the cabinet to the exchange, then you are across the Sky or TalkTalk backhaul network, and thus separate from users of other providers.

Openreach does not do the backbone anyway.

Its
BT Wholesale or Sky or TalkTalk or Zen who are picking up the data at the various exchanges and using a network they all control of their own.

Same old Mac process still.

Sky and TalkTalk supply an all in one router, with Sky you need to extract the username/password ie. a bit of faffing but think its possible. TalkTalk don't know answer, most TalkTalk customers seem to use supplied router.

Have you looked at PlusNet, cheaper than BT Retail, they have a 40/20 service so won't sacrifice upload speeds. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/isp/plusnet/package/14... and are fine with your own hardware and uses the BT Wholesale network.

The FTTC connection itself is at the nearby cabinet, and Openreach from there to the exchange. The handover to BT Wholesale/Sky/TalkTalk is at the exchange.

Have you checked your exchange is Sky/TalkTalk LLU'ed? They will want to take your line rental as well. Because they are taking the line as well no MAC is needed. Getting back from them to another BT Wholesale provider can be messy.

The rest I don't really know, but I believe Sky now supply a combined modem/router. Using your own kit instead is possible given a suitable router. Unless things have changed they have a login system called MER, and not all routers handle that. Also you need to establish the login details to use in your own.

I think your existing kit would be fine for TT.

A MAC for TT and Sky Andrew?

The router will need to support DHCP Options 61 to work with Sky.

To migrate to on fttc probably not needed but can be useful to always get to trigger offers from old provider etc

Said think but recall others saying they have done it on Sky fibre ie with sr102

Thanks for all the replies.

I did not realise that Talktalk had LLu'd fibre.

I really hope that it's not abysmal. I can cancel at any point up to the day before installation so can mull it over.

BT Infinity 2 is currently costing £30pm + £17pm line rental (a bit cheaper if line rental has been bought in advance). Their Best offer for a further 18 month lock-in in £20pm + £17pm, £37pm total.

Sky's best deal works out to be £31.40 pm including line rental spread over the 18 months, which includes 6 months free broadband. It's 40/18

EE's best deal (40/20) is ~ £28 per month when worked out over the course.

Talktalk's is £24.89 per month. Half what I'm currently paying and 2/3rds of the cost of BT's cheapest deal.

It also means I can get away from BT. Their business practice of "we're the incumbent, so we don't need to make any effort and can arbitrarily increase prices and screw what the regulator says" is blooming annoying.

Should I be paying £6 per month more and going with Sky? or some other alternative?

I would be interested in views. I'm a high user (~500gb downloaded / 100gb uploaded most months), want to use my own kit (I've since investigated Talktalk's setup and apparently a BTOpenreach modem will work as long as I use the right logon/password for PPPoE).

Thanks again!

In reply to a post by qpop:

100gb uploaded most months

You'll probably want to avoid TalkTalk then as their 38Mbps package has the upload speed capped at 2Mbps, whereas it is 10Mbps with Sky.

Edited by troublegum (Wed 22-Oct-14 18:51:57)

Their top-tier package in my area is 35/10 which is what I've opted for.

Presumably this will be upgraded to 70/10 or 70/20 when their network allows.

All Openreach fibre cabinets offer three products currently

40/2 - cheapest
40/10 - costs roughly 50p more per month wholesale
80/20 - adds another £1 roughly to wholesale cost

Which you are allowed to order is down to the rules created by each individual retailer, with most not even offering the 80/20 service if the estimate is below 40/10 for a line.

There is no easy flip a switch upgrades on the way to bring 80/20 to those can only get 40/10 or slower because of the distance from the cabinet. There are some upgrades in a year or two that may boost speeds by 10 to 20%, but the next major speed boost will be smaller cabinets being deployed closer to peoples homes and that is some years away apart from a limited size roll-out.

I'm receiving 80/20 from BT currently (well, 70/15).

As far as I could tell Talktalk didn't offer anything but 35/10 as their maximum for my line.

I may then be pleasantly surprised on the move and experience similar speeds? Or do you think they're just not offering 80/20 to me full stop?

I have bought their "Fibre Large" which does say "up to 76mb down" on this site: https://sales.talktalk.co.uk/product/fibre

The confirmation email says:

Fibre, Broadband & Calls
Your estimated broadband speed is : Download: 35Mb Upload: 10Mb

I've just done a speedtest on BT and am getting 60/15.

Any thoughts?

An update which may help other people in my shoes.

Talktalk got back to me and confirmed their estimate was incorrect, and I would receive equivalent speeds to BT.

The switchover happened on time and with no engineer input. I couldn't get the ECI modem and my router talking to TalkTalk at all at first so gave up and plugged in their bundled Huawei 635 router which worked out of the box.

Unfortunately sync speeds were about 20% lower than BT - I was connecting "real-world" at about 50mbps as opposed to 65mbps.

Trying to configure the ECI modem and router again, I eventually reset the (TP-Link WDR 4300 running OpenWRT) router to factory settings, and on reboot the router connected automatically using DHCP and aquired an external IP address.

It turns out (?) that Talktalk don't use PPPoE, and DHCPing through the modem just...works. I'm assigned a public WAN IP for the router, rather than an internal one, and I haven't stumbled over any double-NATting issues thus far.

Did the ECI modem restore the higher sync?

Ah yes, the sync speed is now equivalent to the previous BT speeds.

I have read from various sources that the ECI modems were supplied specifically for DSLAMs with ECI kit, as Huawei modems have sync issues.

It's curious, if this is the case, that Talktalk are now only providing the Huawei combined router/modem box.

The HG635 actually wasn't particularly awful, but there is no excuse for 10/100mbps ports on LAN these days.

In addition the firmware was locked down, and although there were some useful features it seemed under-resourced for the sort of network traffic our house experiences (at least 5 connected devices, HD streaming over wifi, and so on). Overall network performancy was significantly improved with the 2-box approach.