Gigabit albeit amazing speeds is not aimed at 1 home user, its aimed at multiple users at home/work/office etc... but not just for 1 cheap pc and torrenting user, you don't in any way have any problems, your connection has no problems it is your cheap hardware, its not your isp's fault your hard drive is only 5400rpm or your processor is a 1.2ghz intel celeron, upgrade and still have "problems" with only receiving 600Mbps, more than we get at work and they are a business with vpns and 1Mb upload,
be grateful for the speed you have not 18Mb in a business in rural England!

Hyperoptic may only have 1Gb/s to the building, so it could be contention.

Not only did you reply to the wrong person, you certainly didn't read the first post either, he openly admits it's his hardware that's restricting the speed.

Bad day at the office?

No, my point is that it is ridiculous that so many people say that FTTC is a 'joke' and we should be spending £30bn+ of taxpayer money subsidising FTTP rollout to everyone. FTTC is more than enough for right now.

I'm almost certainly going to downgrade to the £10/month 100/100 package next month - it's absolutely pointless having over 100megabit/sec right now.

I tried a 10 thread download to MSDN to download a windows server ISO and it is capped at 100mbit/sec.

BT has made a very wise decision not to go past FTTC right now.

PS: It's great that I get this speed (and also have BT FTTP as an option if I wanted), so I'm not being ungrateful. I just wanted to prove that this sort of speed is so silly. It reminds me of when everyone had 56k modems and some people were using dodgy firmware to get 10 or 20mbit/sec on NTL cable modems back in the day. Great - but you'll quickly realise that being 100x faster than the normal broadband speed means your held back by infrastructure and the internet as a whole.

It's not contention. There are only a few people moved into this block right now. I can hit 1gigabit/sec by downloading a torrent to a ramdisk on linux, but totally pointless as it takes longer to write to disk than download the file from the internet.

AFIAK they use 10gigabit fibre from the building to the next node.

Edit: even with the non flash test I can't do a speedtest without hitting 100% CPU on a core w/ a Core i7 CPU (not a celeron). It's actually [censored] difficult to saturate a 1gig/sec link even on a LAN, nevermind to a speedtest server with some very questionable javascript.

Edited by mr_mojo (Tue 11-Mar-14 00:49:08)

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

Edit: even with the non flash test I can't do a speedtest without hitting 100% CPU on a core w/ a Core i7 CPU (not a celeron). It's actually [censored] difficult to saturate a 1gig/sec link even on a LAN, nevermind to a speedtest server with some very questionable javascript.

Aha, but thinking outside of la bo�te - take my 5 person family, each with their own PC's, smartphones, Xboxes, smart TV's, YouView boxes.

Line up 5 comparable PC's, set each of them running said speedtest in parallel, combine the results. Granted, you are probably more than likely to move the restriction from the PC equipment to the hub/switch , router/modem.

Whilst my nice new shiny FTTC connection here in this village is great because my download/upload speeds are a tadge better than the 1.5meg / 200k ADSL I had back in August 2013, by far the biggest benefit is not being impacted by what anyone else is doing in the house.
It means not having to schedule my S3/Glacier transfers/backups during the midnight hours, they can run 3 or 6 hourly. Or it allows me to stream BBC News (or sport) on 2nd monitor whilst having to work away on a problem on the other, without impacting #1 son on Xbox, #2 son on Netflix, #1 daughter on Spotify, wife on YouView etc etc.
No more "stop what you are doing for an hour whist I download this latest patch/upgrade/software/video, ok, who's next for the connection".
Twas like having 5 people, one bathroom and always a big queue at certain times.

You give my kids a 1Gigabit connection and they will show me how to use it

but... I do get your point... 100/100 or even 100/20 is probably fine. 330/30 is probably better/enough

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

No, my point is that it is ridiculous that so many people say that FTTC is a 'joke' and we should be spending £30bn+ of taxpayer money subsidising FTTP rollout to everyone. FTTC is more than enough for right now.

You're completely missing the point now, I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a joke but it's certainly not more than enough. You are forgetting FTTC major problem - distance.

I'm 450 meters from my cabinet, confirmed by a BT engineering from routing charts, I've at best only ever got 47 meg and at worst 38 meg. I know one person who gets barely 20, and there are of course those who's cabinets are enabled but are simply to far away.

Now can you honestly say FTTC is enough?

I think what the OP is suggesting is that the general speeds provided by FTTC (40 or 80 etc) are more than enough for most, and how the internet is used today by the general population. And I am mostly in agreement with this. But for edge cases where people still cannot get these speeds, alternative technologies need to be used and they are mostly not readily available, which is still a problem.

His speed test of 500Mbits/sec is impressive. But way above spec for most people's equipment to handle, as he has stated. Only SSD drives have any such chance at writing at these speeds, not to mention any bandwidth limits encountered on the actual busses inside computers too. My reasons for not needing a connection this fast include but are not limited to:

- no SSDs in any device

- my Linux router is only a dual Atom processor. I would need to replace this unit with high spec gigabit nics with a high spec processor to handle the potential routing throughput of such a connection.

- wireless limitations - I'm only running on 20Mhz single band 144 signal rate, 2.4ghz. This seems to give me maximum throughput of around 50-60Mbits/sec on tests. I could change the access point to dual band 40mhz but any clients also need to match this. Also, due to noise of other networks around me, I may not get that much increase with dual band anyway. So only other option is 5gz faster standards.

All of the above is substantial cost to upgrade and replace, not to mention hassle.

I'm considering upgrading to around 60/20 FTTC next month with Zen. Under my current spec, everything, including my wireless, can handle these speeds. Anything faster will be a waste of resources, so in this respect, as far as I'm concerned, the speeds provided by FTTC are more than adequate for the setup I have. The only possible reason I would move to any faster is if the technology involved is cheaper and/or more reliable, which glass fibre products are as they are not affected by noise due to distance and signal degradation. And even if I could get this kind of broadband, I would still do exactly what he has done (dropping the provisioned speed to 100Mbits) simply because I know I have nothing which can make use of any faster, probably saving a few pennies per month in the process too.