A tale of two OR FTTP ISPs

...or Why your Cooling-Off Rights are important.

Had a Sky service installed - 80/20 over Openreach FTTP. From day one there was noticeable packet loss as soon as there was throughput over a few megabits - a typical consumer HD streaming service at 7Mbit was enough to trigger it. It also took much longer than it should for downloads to reach full speed, although they did eventually. Feels like a link somewhere is congested... and I didn't have the appetite for spending hours on the phone to get through to someone who would understand what I was talking about.

Exercised cooling-off rights to switch to Vodafone, what I presume is 115/20 (although I'm not sure). Downloads reach full speed instantly and there is no packet loss when the line is under moderate load.

BQM comparison: https://ibb.co/zZkDb7b
The packet loss 8pm-10pm on Sky is streaming video at 7Mbit. 2230-2330 is streaming video at 3-5Mbit.
For comparison between 2230 and midnght on the Vodafone BQM I streamed exactly the same 7Mbit content that created packet loss on Sky.

TBB Speedtests - the router in use is old, so could be what's limiting single-thread to 65Mbit-ish.
Sky: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/_assets/speedtest/but...
Vodafone: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/_assets/speedtest/but...

Now an interesting question is which profile the Vodafone service is provisioned on. It's advertised as 100Mbit down, 18 up so my guess would be 115/20. The average upload is generally achieving in the 20.7-21.3Mbit range which seems wrong though - I didn't think Openreach overprovisioned their FTTP profiles. Is that normal for 20Mbit up services on OR FTTP?

In reply to a post by ft247:

Now an interesting question is which profile the Vodafone service is provisioned on. It's advertised as 100Mbit down, 18 up so my guess would be 115/20. The average upload is generally achieving in the 20.7-21.3Mbit range which seems wrong though - I didn't think Openreach overprovisioned their FTTP profiles. Is that normal for 20Mbit up services on OR FTTP?

I think it's normal. On my Cerberus "300/50" service I get about 52Mbps of upload, and given that's TCP payload, the actual OLT profile must be slightly higher again.

Download I get about 307, which is 93% of the supposedly 330 from Openreach. It's possible Cerberus are applying shaping on their BRAS.

Same here, on TTB 100/20 generally get +10% on speed tests.

How far into your COP were you when you gave notice, out of interest?

Just to highlight that Sky offer a 31 day 'enhanced' cooling off period to casual readers...

I wouldn't have thought I'd see the day where Vodafone were running a better broadband network than Sky.

Presumably this is something Sky would have fixed, but like you said there would likely have been hours of pointless troubleshooting to get past first, and they'd have wanted to arrange Openreach visits or tell you that your Wi-Fi needs optimising.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

How far into your COP were you when you gave notice, out of interest?

Just to highlight that Sky offer a 31 day 'enhanced' cooling off period to casual readers...

I was four or five days in. Reading the T&Cs in detail there was no cast-iron reference to the 31-day period so I figured there was no point hanging around.

I placed the order with Vodafone which triggered an e-mail from Sky within ten minutes. As the Sky contract says you have to assert your cooling-off rights either in writing or by phone, I called up and was pleasantly surprised to find they suggested allowing the Vodafone order to go through as a working line takeover, even though the date was set after the 14 day cooling off period would end. They confirmed no early termination charges would apply.

In reply to a post by jpm:

I wouldn't have thought I'd see the day where Vodafone were running a better broadband network than Sky.

I had no previous experience of Sky but understood them to be generally competent.

Vodafone are setting up a static IP free of charge - I really can't see any cause for complaint, especially given the price paid (£23 pm). Admittedly, it's shortly to become £25 due to the CPI + 3.9% increase...