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?