Does FTTC provider and package make a difference?

Hi,

I am hopefully moving house in the next few months to an area which should be covered by FTTC. The current owners only have traditional ADSL and achieve just 1mb because of distance to the exchange.

The house is a fair distance from the FTTC cabinet by the look of various speed estimators, but I should be looking at around 12mbit. I work from home so I need to maximise speed and stability. I'm moving from a Virgin Media area where we have the slowest broadband at a mere 50mbit so going back to copper is a bit of a change!

Two questions:

- Is there any difference in technology/speed capping, etc of the various speed packages or are they just "up to" and subject to line length and quality? In other words, if I went for an "up to 76mb" service instead of an "up to 38mb" or "up to 52mb" service would it make any difference to my speed if the line can only support, say 12mb?
- Is there any technical difference between the various providers (Sky, BT, etc) or is it just commercial packaging? Would I get the same speed and reliability from each because they share the same equipment, or is it more complex than that?

Many thanks in advance!
Tim

The packages are just capped versions. So, if the checkers are saying 12Mb then it is pointless going for a 76Mb service. The 38s are common and BT have recently changed their 38 to the 52 at no extra cost.

Hardware is the same at your property and the cabinet. As for reliability - should be the same for all providers, the differences will be with the level/quality of support and any peak time congestion.

There is the reliability of the providers own backhaul networks, so you can have an area where the FTTC is working but customers on one provider have no connectivity, but on another they do, though these sort of events are often transitory and just as likely with people like Virgin Media.

Is there much difference in their backhaul? Most will be leasing fibre from a major player and those all have very similar levels. When I needed an ultra high reliability fibre link my colleagues and staff were finding the differences were very very small - most was down to te response, reroute and repair times.

Not a big difference, but yes differences are more down to how providers handle oddities like network blips, or if things like parental control systems are bullet proof or break now and then causing issues

Some of the smaller providers may struggle when there's lots of usage - during Wimbledon for example. Providers will have different levels of capacity...