That is their usual modus operandi ......

Seems a little short sighted to me, folk just want to know that the install is a success, and I suspect they want to know this prior to the Openreach bod leaving.

In reply to a post by wtfnub:

What isp and package are you on ? I ask because of your 500mbit upload, I’m with Zen and my setup was via OR and the max I got was 900mbit down and 120mbit up.
Was your install also done with bt openreach ?

Sorry, missed your post. As Pheasant has already mentioned Quantum Air Fibre is the ISP. And not an Openreach van or person in sight.

Like others, I really cannot see why OR supplied services are not done the same. It doesn't seem to involve more kit in the home i.e. having the same up and down speeds. I've just got a very small white box (100mm) on the wall where the fibre comes in with the router attached to it. They also do 1000 up and down but £60 a month was just a bit too much for my pocket - I really couldn't justify spending that sort of money each month.

In reply to a post by 69bertie:

Like others, I really cannot see why OR supplied services are not done the same. It doesn't seem to involve more kit in the home i.e. having the same up and down speeds.

TL;DR: 2) the technology is asymmetric, Openreach don't want to saturate the PON so a ratio of 2:1 download:upload is a hard limit. 1) Openreach want to make more money so the ratio is more like 8:1 at the high end.


There are two reasons that make sense.

1) Protection of leased line revenue. 110Mbit upload is plenty for any home use, even with multiple residents on different video calls, streaming (out) and so on. It is also fine for small to medium offices, if there are no special needs such as engineering firms with large drawings, media production etc. 110 up is likely comfortable for 20 users at least. If there is a business need for more than 100Mbit then there is money to spend on a leased line. Openreach supply a lot of those and don't want to lose that income.

In some city centre business areas (Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, probably more) FTTC has not been widely deployed, some say as a ploy to sell leased lines. A typical small business (say 10 in the office) might take a 50/50 or 100/100 leased line. When FTTP comes along Openreach don't want them moving to a cheap 80/80 service, which would be fine for them. Keeping it asymmetric at 80/20 means they have to pay for 550/75 or 1000/115 to get the upload they need.

Alternative networks don't have that base so there is no harm in offering symmetric speeds especially in residential areas. ISP traffic is heavily inbound and their upstream transit and peering links will all be symmetric, so moving the traffic really does cost them nothing, and it's an easy way to differentiate their service from Openreach. On top of that, apart from the odd work-from-home engineer, graphic designer or photographer, nobody will make use of the upload. Making money by selling something you have sitting on the shelf (upstream capacity) and that nobody will really use is excellent business!

2) OR FTTP runs on GPON which shares ~2.5Gbit down and ~1.2Gbit up between up to 32 connections. I imagine they don't want to deal with situations where the PON gets saturated so they've set contention at a level they know won't cause problems for a while. By that argument they could, however, set upload bandwidth to 50% of download.

Seems a bit nuts really.

The guy doing my install said he thought Zen used to always provision initially at 300 down until the job got completed, and then would set the proper speed, so that a connection would be available at installation time. But it sounds like that has changed.

I'm sure there's a reason (probably not a very good one though!!!)

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Seems a little short sighted to me, folk just want to know that the install is a success, and I suspect they want to know this prior to the Openreach bod leaving.

I agree, I can't see a sensible motivation for this. Unless if on non-Zen backhaul, does provisioning trigger the start of backhaul charges?

I doubt it, and any in case it would be pennies per day.

More likely Zen don't want to trigger a whole bunch of provisioning until the line has gone live - in particular porting the phone number for a voice service. Otherwise lines could remain in a half-provisioned state for some time.

Perhaps it is also related to FTTC to FTTP migration: they can't give the user their static IPv4/IPv6 allocation on FTTP, until the FTTP has gone live.

Whatever it was, it sounded like it was particular to some Zen quirk to me, as the implication was that other ISPs didn't behave this way. So it sounds like it shouldn't be beyond them to do it a bit better.

It's certainly by no means how other ISP's do FTTP connections on Openreach/BTW.