The entire Chingford exchange is Huawei cabinets.

Ah . It only shows when you go into the ordering routine or hunt for the full price list. It doesn't show on the Home page, which I was looking at. I wonder how many people give up at that stage?

In reply to a post by Ewok:

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.

It shows on the Address option of the BT Wholesale estimates checker, but if as John says they are all Huawei on that exchange it doesn't matter.

IDNet do have the advantage of using three different backhaul providers (BTW, Fluid Data TTB and Zen) and are willing swap you to one of the other ones if you are having any issues which may be backhaul related.

IDNET is a great choice for sure, but to play devils advocate, say the pings are too high and the speeds are impacted, even if you leave - where are you going to?

A 4GLTE option will be slower with higher pings, a satellite will be dreadful. There is no VM as you state.

I know plenty are happy with IDNET here, I do not see much negative press (if any).

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

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...

As John says, if low latency is important, then you want to try to make sure G.INP activates, and DLM doesn't interfere. That means
- having a Huawei cabinet. G.INP isn't active on ECI yet.
- choosing an ISP that makes use of the loosest DLM settings offered by Openreach (is this the 'Speed' setting?)
- once operational, monitoring the error rate on the line
- if error rate high, fixing environment or forcing a lower speed.

Once DLM is involved, it doesn't always disengage easily. Proactive monitoring from day 1 is important, although even Huawei connections start with a higher latency setup for the first 48 hours.

If speed is important, you should pay attention to the A and B ranges on the checker, and only use an ISP that guarantees the A range. If the line has problems, you are more likely to get an engineer callout and a higher chance of killing the contract.

But ... honestly ... if the day job is trading, and it requires perfection, then go with FTTPoD or a leased line. FTTC is like ADSL - getting speed cheaply in the presence of imperfection.

Your VM connection is shared. What would you do now if 4 neighbours became torrent freaks overnight, and overloaded the segment they shared with you? You'd move, right? Consider yourself lucky that a cheap-as-chips connection meets your higher business needs, but don't assume that to be, or remain, universally true.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

Consider yourself lucky that a cheap-as-chips connection meets your higher business needs, but don't assume that to be, or remain, universally true.

Whoops ... hit send too quickly....

FTTC is variable, in that other subscribers can affect the service you receive. Through crosstalk, just one other subscriber, added anytime, can knock speed off your line, or increase error rates, or trigger DLM.

Even if FTTC meets your needs when it first starts, it might not forever. Again - the cheap-as-chips solution should be seen as a bonus.

My thinking is if there are issues then IDNET are more likely to sort them efficiently than BT and they have 3 different backhaul providers apparently, so if I have trouble with one, they can switch me to see if another is better. My 4g connection at home with EE has tested at speeds of 233mb with a 12-20ms ping on my phone so it might be a viable option depending how bad the line is, I thought about using that as my main connection anyway but I suspect the pricing will be high.

I am sure IDNET are good based on reviews I have seen, although I did email them yesterday with a bunch of questions, half of which they have not answered and the other half of which all they have done is quote the usual BS about things being related to distance, contention etc etc blah blah. I would have thought my email made it clear I am already well aware of that. The reply I got was exactly the sort of scripted type BS I would expect from BT, so not a good sign.

I also have the possibility of a job in Australia, which is another reason I would rather not be tied into an 18 month contract until I know whether that is going ahead or not.

Edited by Ewok (Tue 20-Feb-18 12:17:05)

You can drop them a call and see if they agree to a 12 month term, often times they do.
I am surprised RE IDNET but I have never dealt with them so I am taking the view of smaller ISP must mean better support, with little evidence either way, other than others here posting which seems promising.

Yeah I was expecting a detailed and useful reply from them. I got one from AA shortly after (who I have ruled out as they charge the same price for all speeds and me probably only getting 50mb makes them even more expensive) and was even worse, "the figures are usually pretty accurate and if they are much lower we can" and that was the end of the sentence! We can do what? haha.

I asked IDNET things like what difference should I expect between their normal package and the gaming one, so I can get some idea in real terms what the potential difference might be to justify the extra cost (yes it will vary but give me SOME idea of whatt he extra £10 gets me). And about how easy it is to switch between the gaming package and the normal one, or between different speeds. But got no answer on any of that. I strongly suspect the gaming package would be identical to the normal one, yes you get priority at the exchange but unless the exchange is overloaded to start with, that will make no difference. They do seem to have the advantage of 3 different backhauls though.

Still on the fence between BT and IDNET, I was favouring IDNET but after their reply and realising their pricing did not include VAT, I am kinda back in the middle again because I am looking at £45 for IDNET, and after various discounts (topcashback and the £150 mastercard) probably nearer half that for BT. The contract length is the main issue with BT, 6 months would be more reasonable but thats not going to happen.