ISP Recommendation For 900Mb/s

Hi,

BT Consumer are useless, and have been unwilling and unable to solve the issue I'm seeing with horrible single-threaded performance.

I ended up with a case at Ombudsman Services which was sided with BT.
If you're ever thinking of going down that route, don't bother, it was a massive waste of time.

See my original post here for details.

As there is nothing more I can do, and I'm still seeing 20-30MB/s single-threaded performance, I'm going to eat the early termination fee (a couple months into having the service) and move on.

Can anyone recommend me a decent ISP which will be able to supply 900Mb/s and has a functioning customer service department with an escalation route to someone that has at least the knowledge of a CCENT or Net+ cert.

I'm inevitably (I think) going to have the same issue after the switch so need them to able to handle the original issue.

Edited by kst (Thu 07-Oct-21 13:56:09)

You mean you're getting 20MB/sec = 160Mbps?

From the other thread I gather you're in NE Scotland with 23ms latency to London. That *will* definitely limit your single-thread throughput, and this is just a laws-of-physics thing (or at least laws-of-TCP thing).

The formula you want is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_tuning#Packet_loss

You'll find that
1460/0.023/sqrt(.00001) = 20MB/sec

That is: packet loss of just 1 in 100,000 packets will cause a single TCP stream to limit to 20MB/sec, when there is a 23ms RTT.

You can happily change ISP, pay more for business grade if you like, but you're already getting very good throughput for that location, and I'd say you are *very* unlikely to get anything higher than that on a single stream.

The solution is to open parallel TCP streams. If you have large files to transfer then use bittorrent, or GridFTP, or some other protocol specifically designed to work over high-latency links. Remember that you're not on a LAN.

candlerb

Nice Calc, bet most people do not realise the limitations as delay increases. There again most won't be bothered by single thread speed just total speed which the OP has 900Mb

Not sure any of the dozen devices we have can even do 900Mb on their own! Put them together it would be a different matter but we only have 50Mb to stress and rarely manage to congest that.

Andrews & Arnold Ltd (www.aa.net.uk/) used to have a reputation for being able to fix problem lines, but I don't know if they do a 900 Mbps FTTP service.

Last I saw 160Mbps is the highest they offer sadly, I believe due to hardware limitations on their end (Firebrick's their side).

AAISP don't do faster than 160/30.

But more importantly, this is not a "problem line". Packet loss of 0.001% is excellent, especially for a cheap residential service, and the ombudsman was right to throw this out.

In the past I've had a 100M leased line with 0.2% packet loss (1 in 500), which impacted single-threaded performance markedly when downloading from Europe or further afield, and I had to fight with the ISP to get this fixed. In the end it was - they moved me to a different switch port at their end.

1 in 500 loss is directly measurable by tools like perfsonar, so I was able to prove there was a problem. 1 in 100,000 is extremely difficult to measure: you could send 10 packets per second and only lose one packet every 3 hours.

I think its doubtful latency is the cause of his problems his previous virgin line didn't have the same restriction and i can bet his virgin service probably had another 4ms on the latency

Zen probably has the best customer support of the ISPs that do 900 Mbps FTTP.

I agree that the OP is unlikely to get faster speeds from a different ISP.