Pulse8 are also worth considering. 30 day contracts, just like IDNet.

The major difference being that you will be put on a TTB SMPF offering. Pulse8 do other options, but maybe not at the same price.

I'm with IDNet having previously been a Pulse 8 customer. Both are pretty good in my book.

On my line IDNet BTW has been better than Pulse8 TTB, which in turn was better than IDNet TTB.

Make of that what you will.

Isn't Pulse8 MPF TTB by default, and only SMPF if the customer requests a WLR3 line?

Oh for goodness sake (or something like that!), why do I get MPF and SMPF the wrong way around?!

You're dead right, Bob. It is MPF by default.

I'm sure Pulse8 will offer SMPF is available on request, but it may be a higher cost option.

I didn't know you had AAISP, last I knew it was Pulse8 or is that just the line rental/voice?

I do not want to get too far down the line of being against the smaller ISPs as I get bashed for it, although you can imagine which providers typically have the most direct peering.

Ultimately it is your choice, my personal view is the Safe Bet is BT, it's a good mix of price and overall reputation. It's also one of the few offering 55Mbps.

What is stopping you getting Infinity 1, and seeing how it fairs for you? I had 76Mbps for years and dropped to 55 with BT, then down to 38 when I moved flats and I notice zero difference day-to-day, no regrets for me, nice saving. Once you go live on Infinity 1, pop up the stats from the HelpDesk page of the SmartHub, here we can give you an idea of what speeds Infinity 2 would typically yield.

Looking at the estimates, I would say 50Mbps is a nice estimate, in many respects lines are more stable when they have a slightly lower speed and hence a higher noise margin. E.g my line has a 16db noise margin, hence it really never drops. If I went to a 76Mbps package and the noise margin went down to 3db, I am sure there would be the occasional drop.

Here are a few of my tests from the BT days (all tests over WiFi):
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/14770058691...
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/14716296064...
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/14833184342...
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/14796806831...

Here is my Sky line, as you can see with the two lines being quite separate, it shows evidence of congestion, Certainly, it is nowhere near as nice and smooth as my BT used to be:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/15190894954...

I still manage a bunch of streaming, some gaming when I get chance etc on the Sky line and it's my daily driver right now. The point is my line right now is not perfect but day to day I don't really notice a real difference over my perfect 76Mbps line. Sometimes 4K struggles, but rarely, when it does it automatically falls back to 1080P and I don't really notice unless I check. I think overall you will be happy if you don't constantly run speedtests and look for faults, once you have it going you will just set it and forget it.

I think your prior fault with BT which was handled poorly is creating a lot of this anxiety. You were just unfortunate here, most of us have stable, solid lines.

Out of interest on your VM line can you run a speedtest here and post the results. The speedtest here gives a much better picture than the speedtest.net
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest

Edited by ukhardy07 (Tue 20-Feb-18 01:30:11)

I recommend you look and find out what cabinet your new property is connected to.
If you are lucky it is a Huawei cabinet. Very very few lines on Huawei cabinets have interleaving.
If you have an ECI cabinet and the line is too noisy for Fastpath, the default interleaving adds 8ms latency.
You can check what cabinnet type it is by following this guide.
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/cabinet-lookup.htm#fttc_c...

IDNET do offer 55/10, as well as 40/10, I was looking at it last night. I have been wondering whether BT would be better more due to their size and links with BT wholesale than anything else.

I would be surprised if AA was worse due to routing, given their reputation I would assume their routing to be as good as it gets, but perhps I am wrong.

I am looking at IDNET at the moment purely because I can take a 1 month contract which gives me a chance to assess how good or bad the line itself is as well as IDNET and what kind of pings I get, without getting me stuck in an 18 month contract with the likes of BT.

Yeah my previous experience with the old BT ADSL certainly has me concerned. The BT results look nice, plus look at that ping on Sky!! Not that I would consider going with Sky anyway, I know they are great for TV, bad for internet.

I have narrowed it down to either BT (where I don't really want to be stuck in a 18 month contract until I know what I'm getting), IDNET, and possibly Pulse8. With IDNET and Pulse8 having 1 month contracts meaning I can test things out and decide whether a move to BT and 18 month contract might be ok. They all offer the 55mb too which is what I will go for.

I guess your line at 25mb in that speed test is why it can struggle with the 4k, I suspect 4k can get to around 25mb when streaming to it's probably borderline.

I will run a test on my VM line tonight.

I spotted Pulse8 last night and noticed the 1 month contracts. But not been impressed with the few bits I have heard of TTB so would rather stick to BTW I think.

I know it is cabinet 18 at Chingford exchange, I will have to walk around and see if I can find it because I don't have a phone number I can use to look it up from.