In reply to a post by mumba:

I am now waiting for my survey. My biggest worry is actually now with Openreach and that they will find some excuse why they can't run the line to my house because of the conservation area I live in.

I'm in band E so my install costs are high.

My fluidone order is in progress, and I am in a conservation area - band E. I hope we're not neighbours (CT4) or we could have done something a bit more clever!

Incidentally, BT Openreach did my survey yesterday - I wasn't there but they rang me. Everything is fine...

Edited by Jabes (Fri 08-Sep-17 21:59:07)

How soon after placing the order does the survey take place?

BT Wholesale has a number of advantages over its competitors. I chose TalkTalk Wholesale for my AAISP line, thinking it would be more reliable. Nope, no chance! It's had variable pings - when my line resyncs it chooses either a ~13ms or ~19ms ping path. It's had relatively speaking significant downtime. And peak time congestion issues, which they took ages to fix.

The reason for TalkTalk's issues is mostly because they have a cobbled-together network from a circular core dark-fibre route, connected to exchanges by leased 1/10Gbit/s lines. Essentially, they don't really own any of the network themselves and don't have the means of optimising it.

By comparison, BT's network has been around much longer and has been carefully designed. It's also owned and operated almost entirely by them, so they have full control and can optimise it. When I was on BT, I never saw peak congestion, excessive downtime or varying pings (max ever was 11ms).

When we add on the fact that BT Wholesale covers every single exchange in the UK (except KCOM of course), it's got some strong advantages. So while £48 per Mbit/s per month is in no way a true reflection of their costs, taking your costs and adding a given margin on top isn't the only pricing method. When you have significant advantages over your nearest competitors, you can afford to keep artificially high (demand led) pricing.

AAISP's 1/2/10TB tariffs have only been made possible due to special arrangements and rates with TalkTalk, which I imagine would be charging them significantly less than £48 per Mbit/s per month.

Their recent discussions of usage implied that the price of the 1TB tariff didn't really cover the cost of 1TB of usage + Openreach WLR/GEA rental, so my calculations suggest perhaps TT is charging in the region of £20 per Mbit/s per month.

Edited by deleted (Sat 09-Sep-17 07:58:23)

In reply to a post by Bill100:

How soon after placing the order does the survey take place?

Mine was done ~ 3 weeks after placing the order.

In reply to a post by Bill100:

How soon after placing the order does the survey take place?

FTTPoD Timeline (so far)

10th August - Order accepted
7th September - Openreach External Survey
...

Understand what you're saying but have a look at Adrian's speech from 7 min 35 sec. Ok this goes back a couple of years so things may be different now but he's basically saying BTW aren't (or weren't) very quick at fixing congestion issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OHDA47T_8g

This is back from 2015 though. I think things have changed somewhat since then, especially as BT Wholesale have significantly increased their investment in their backhaul network to cope with the growing demand.

I think one of the biggest issues for AAISP was the procedure of raising congestion. The first support call was to an Indian call centre, where the people dealing with the incidents had next to no experience in network analysis and treated things as individual line issues.

I agree BTw's network is very likely much more resilient in its redundancy with its mesh design.

However just to point out when I was on BT infinity my packets seemed to be flip flopping between 2 different routes so I had permanent on going jitter, luckily the latency difference wasnt huge but it was there, also the routing is not always optimal, this of course depends where you live but in my case if I use BTw my packets first go north to Peterborough or Birmingham and then south to london whilst sky have a POP in my city so I go direct to london.

Plusnet (and other BTw customers) had congestion issues a year or two back related to the shared MSIL's on BTw getting congested, these shared MSIL's are supposed to be managed by BTw but were allowed to get congested, it got fixed by plusnet moving its customers to dedicated MSIL's and those shared MSIL's are no longer congested.

How much did u pay for Band E inc VAT?

couple of thoughts on the adrian aaisp video.

at 20mins interesting comments on the sin349 rubbish.

He also mentions earlier in the video about a ethernet FTTC type wholesale service from TT which he says is very well priced, I wonder if thats what they using for their wholesale TT now, because if BTw and TTB were very similar priced he would be able to offer the same packages on both but the 1TB package is TTB only.