FTTP 330/30 not impressed

I will start by saying I'm not being ungrateful and fully understand there are people here who are still in the situation we were in the last few years. ie, [censored] internet speeds.

We had FTTP installed on monday at last! Being the tech nerd i am it was always going to be all or nothing, so i went for the 330/30 package at £60pm. We had a load of hassle with the installation as the engineer seemed stressed out this box, broken fibre cable, location of the ONR, and activation as he forgot to ring the fttp support team first to have it activated.

So far we've had a max speed of 300mbps at 3am in the morning. I am aware the in reality the speed is never going to be the 330/30 as just like the 80/20 the real life speeds do take a hit after the bits and bytes get pushed through the infrastructure.

In reality we're getting maybe 100/140mbps down and 20mbps up. Now considering this is FTTP I'm actually gutted. I had the impression that with FTTP you could expect a wee bit under the estimated speed, but at just under 200mbps deficit, well thats just rubbish. We don't live in a busy city, or a small town. we live in a village of 15 house with only 5 residents currently taking advantage of the new technology, and none using the full speed like ourselves.

Any thoughts the subject TB members?

FTTP is still a shared medium, i.e. it fixes the distance issues but contention still exists.

Now usually people don't have it as bad as you, so if a lot of people locally have just gone live and ordered some may be downloading the internet constantly and not helping.

The contention is not even just your village, but at the much larger exchange where your data joins up with others, and its possible this is just a single 1 Gbps link currently and 300 Mbps does not fit into that many times, hence the lower 10 Gbps pricing and hopefully lots of upgrades.

So its monitor speeds build a clear based time pattern to show it gets better once people go to sleep and usual pattern would be starting to get worse once kids home from school.

Occasionally the paths the FTTP customers share are mis-configured and are too small e.g. 300 Mbps shared, when it should be higher and needs ISP to check and make the changes or prod their supplier to do so.

I also have the 330/30 service but never get below 300/28 in throughput at all times. It sounds like you�re experiencing congestion. Have you made your isp (bt?) aware of this?

A few thoughts:

* Assuming you're on BT Infinity 4, the product is 300/20 not 330/30 as FTTPoD is.
* I assume these speeds are measured from a fast computer connected with an ethernet cable and with no other traffic on your network
* You probably won't know where the splitter is so keep in mind that the same GPON network could potentially be serving another village too
* If a GPON strand is split the full 30/32 ways, your "guaranteed" throughput (still not actually guaranteed due to contention upstream) is 80Mbit down. In practice oversubscription shouldn't be an issue as very few people use their connection at full speed for extended periods.

Having said that, if you're paying for "up to 300" and getting <150 most of the time, I wouldn't say that's acceptable. Have you contacted them to report it yet?

If it helps, I have 80/20 ("76/19") FTTP and typically get 73/21.

Edited by deleted (Sat 04-Nov-17 18:22:57)

It may sound obvious but check your wired network is Gigabit and not just 10/100

In reply to a post by lincsat:

It may sound obvious but check your wired network is Gigabit and not just 10/100

Just how would the OP have got speeds in excess of 100Mbps if this were the case?

Worth confirming that the test has been via a wired connection though as this isn't stated in the original post...

Edited by ferretuk (Sat 04-Nov-17 18:38:48)

Errrr Infinity 4 FTTP is provisioned as 330/30 Mbps however actual throughput will be around 310/30 after overheads.technically fttpod 330/30 and native fttp 330/30 are the same.

Edited by deleted (Sat 04-Nov-17 19:06:50)

In reply to a post by baby_frogmella:

I also have the 330/30 service but never get below 300/28 in throughput at all times. It sounds like you�re experiencing congestion. Have you made your isp (bt?) aware of this?

I suspect you've a VLAN to yourself essentially as there's no native FTTP available in your area. The OP isn't so fortunate and shares capacity with a number of other FTTP customers.

So the BT Wholesale systems should spot this and enlarge the capacity automatically as time goes on. Your connection will be going back to a larger town or city where it will join other FTTP customers and sharing that capacity.

Hopefully the software changes will be adequate and no more capacity is needed.

In reply to a post by baby_frogmella:

I also have the 330/30 service but never get below 300/28 in throughput at all times. It sounds like you�re experiencing congestion. Have you made your isp (bt?) aware of this?

Its not Congestion, its Contention, BT over subscribe and cram loads of lines together over a shared link, we get similar, granted its not as bad and ours now only goes as low as ~200Mbit, but I will know more once my WhiteBox gets enough data.

BT are already aware of this and won't do anything about it due to they say it has to drop down below 40Mbit before they will class it as a fault, yes that's right Infinity 4 needs to loose over 80% of their line before its a fault.

Now with your connection they don't over subscribe their network which is why you also pay more and get a constant ~300 service.

Paul