In reply to a post by jchamier:

No 2G is NOT going but the capacity on it is tiny as the bulk of the spectrum has been moved to 4G. It is used for various M2M (machine to machine) communications including some smart meters. I understand the long term plan is for smart meters to use the DCC network and stop using mobile phones.
(You may be confusing with the USA, whom HAVE turned off 2G, but their 2G and 3G was not the same as ours, only with 4G did we all use LTE).

All smet 2 meters will use the DCC system and smet 1 will be converted at some point, but that as far as i know don't make any difference to what is used to send the signal, DCC is a company set up by one of the worse companies ever, Capita, makes me wonder what Capita have over the government, since they seemed to be picked for a lot.
one reason why I will not have smart meters and refused them when the energy company I am with wanted to fit them with the excuse that my gas meter was old and needed replacing, in the end they replaced the gas meter with another normal gas meter, funny that it is older than the one it replaced.

5G is about capacity, and with more capacity comes the ability to do more. It is going to be a lot slower rollout than 4G was. (4G is 9 years old in the UK this year).

Most people will have no use for 5G to be honest, just another bit of technology that they will use to up the price of services. you can get 5G now, we will put the price of the service up per month.
I don't think the provider i am with do 5G, not that my phone is capable of it anyway,

assuming BT is the FTTP option which for OP doesn't sound it.

it will be interesting to see what happens in the first big power outage post loss of PSTN

In reply to a post by 69bertie:

It really does depend on the provider for FTTP. Some seem to have jacked the price up. Mine costs me £39 a month for 500/500 (I get usually around 470/470Mb/s). And it is very reliable and blazingly fast as long as the server I'm dealing with is also fast. GB's of downloads are no longer a problem. The reason I went for the higher connection speed is we, as a family, do cane the
connection.

I have been reading some reviews of Zzoomm and they have already put the price up in the first place they set up, that don't sound good.
It is only me here for the most part and i don't really tax the network, I watch some videos, browse, play some music and that is about it, 4K video works fine.
I can understand you wanting a faster speed with a family

But I could get 120/120Mb/s unlimited for £19 a month. That is vastly different to the OR product (FTTC) which was around £32 a month for 80/20 (I use to get 76/20Mb). Admittedly the above doesn't include a phone line but then I stopped using the landline many years ago. My mobile contract (£7.80/month) is far superior in many ways. i.e. more convenient, more controllable and unlimited call/sms at any time of the day, plus it has data included.

£19 a month? That is good, Zzoomm is £29 a month for 100/10, no phone line with Zzoom either, they do have a VOIP service, but I have one anyway as I had to set one up when I went for Wireless broadband a few years ago. I use sipgate, but to be honest, I don't get many calls on it these days, the only one who do is my brother, the NHS and Work.
My mobile contract is only £7 or less if I don't use all the data, and like yours have unlimited calls and text.

One thing I have noticed is that as the speeds go up, one tends to use it more and more, simply because it is there.

Maybe use more services with it that requires the extra bandwidth, not so many years ago any video we streamed with broadband was standard definition, then we went to HD as speeds got better and now 4K.

Yes, switching to my new ISP was a leap into the unknown (I kept the original FTTC alive for one month afterwards - just in case) but 6 months on, looking back it was a bit of a no brainer really. And judging by how many times I see other people around these parts getting the fibre installed, it's a case of 'me too!' OR must be kicking themselves.

some people get it because they think they need it, then they may have it installed and think why did I do that. If it is cheap then fine, but going for fibre could be more costly for me, depending on what Plusnet offers me at the end of the contract and the other thing is, my contract for plusnet ends a couple of months or so before fibre gets here. So do I just carry on at a higher price on plusnet for a few months until I can get fibre installed, or do I just go for another 18-month contract with plusnet and get fibre when that is done?
Zzoom will find that a lot of people will still be in contract, and it may take a while before they get a few customers. i think using zzoomm as a name is stupid, went out for a couple of drinks with some friends this afternoon, started talking about zzoomm and one of them thought we were talking about the video conferencing zoom.

We will see what happens I suppose.

atypical - you mean like in Samsung Notes or when some company starts shipping cheap poorly designed UPS?

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

Generally speaking FTTP is far superior to FTTC.

FTTP doesn't have any copper, so there will be zero interference's and risk of connection drop outs. Usually FTTP is symmetrical on many Altnet FTTP providers.

But in the case of Openreach and a few others, 1Gbps upload isn't supported due to lack of XGS-PON. But even then, it's still better than native FTTC as you can select higher speeds than the 80 Mbps limit on FTTC.

Problem with FTTC is most people don't get 80Mbps max due to line length of the copper to street cabinet. Some get only half of the speeds plus also crosstalk is a serious factor to consider. If there are many customers up-taking the FTTC package, then people may no longer get the higher speeds and those speeds are at risk of dropping.

Like for example when I first joined FTTC last year February 2020 I was getting 6dB SNR for 80Mbps and 15dB SNR for 20Mbps upload.

Over the months the SNR slowly dropped as more customers have switched from ADSL formerly EO Line to FTTC. I am now syncing for the same speeds at 3dB for 80Mbps and 7dB for 20Mbps upload. There are some months when connection dropped to 77.6Mbps before climbing back up to 80Mbps. This is the reality with FTTC. Now my only hope will be when part of the customers migrate to FTTP to relief the crosstalk, only then I am guaranteed to get stable 80Mbps sync. Anyway, I will get Community Fibre FTTP by December.

As soon as my contract is over, I will switch to Community Fibre, It is a no brainer.

Also don't forget about the DLM - Dynamic Line Management! On FTTC you have to wait 10 days or so and every day you will experience a connection drop out at 2am approximately before line stabilizes.

If there are power cuts or accidental disconnections to the telephone wiring then DLM will drop your connection. Intermittent router reboots will also trigger DLM to drop your connection. Then you have to wait for days before DLM returns your speeds back up when it interprets your connection as stable again.

This is a headache that you won't have to face with FTTP.

But of-course having said that if the FTTP packages are far more expensive like in the case of rural areas, then FTTC may be a better option. But FTTP in urban London like CommunityFibre, Hyperoptic, G.Network offer packages that are cheaper than Openreach FTTC! Unless the Altnet provider price hikes their FTTP package, I don't see a return to FTTC ever again.

Technology wise FTTP is superior to FTTC, but that don't mean it is right for everyone, by all accounts there is no ten day for DLM on FTTC, that is a myth and I proved that myself a few weeks ago when my router went on and off a few times due to power problems, the sync speed was low for a while, but it was back up to normal by the evening.

The only fibre network we have here, or that I will be able to get and most of the city is Zzoomm,, no other here, soi we have to pay their prices and no competition.
at the end of the day, for me price is the thing, if having fibre and 100Mb/s speed is going to make a great difference in my life then yes I would pay the extra, but I really don't think it will, reliability is fine here, as long as we don't get power cuts, that turn the router on and off 5 or more times in under a hour . That don't normally happen to be honest.

We will wait and see, I just wondered if FTTP was a better service, which it is, but what I should have put is would it be better for me?

Well in my case, when I migrated from Plusnet ADSL to TalkTalk FTTC the first 10 days my router was disconnecting for 1-2 minutes at 2am approximately before finally stabilizing after 10 days of it happening every time at 2-5am.

I know that 10 days is no big deal for the first 10 days of signing up to a new ISP. But it is something that can take away the peace of mind. Maybe you're lucky, you didn't experience it. Those first 10 days at those hours I had to avoid playing online games, particularly online chess.

But I also noticed a few months ago when my mum was cleaning the floor of the room. She accidentally pulled the broadband cable from the master socket and immediately upon reconnecting the speed went down to 77Mbps. It took 2 months for it to go back up to 80Mbps.

It is a frustration that will be 100% avoided with FTTP.

In your particular case you are right, FTTC is indeed a better choice. Zzoomm are taking emotional advantage of customers of rural and subrural areas by hiking up their prices knowing that often rural areas have poor broadband. Bit like what Gigaclear are doing charging £79 a month for a gig, which is not reasonable at all. They dropped the price to £49 recently. But at the end of contract it shoots up to £79 and £64 for the 600Mbps. It is a complete rip-off, but they know customers are hopeless and they are taking emotional advantage of them.

Then compare that to Community Fibre London £20 a month for 150Mbps symmetrical, £27.50 for 400Mbps and £39 for 1Gbps symmetrical. You can see that immediately the choice is very obvious.

You are lucky you are getting 70Mbps on FTTC so you certainly may be less obliged to switch to FTTP.

Now if you look at BT FTTP 80/20Mbps costs £30.99, in this case FTTC is certainly a better choice as it is reliable enough to provide a service that is pretty much on par with entry level FTTP Openreach that isn't symmetrical and not priced reasonably. It entirely depends on circumstances. If FTTC can achieve decent speeds and the FTTP provider isn't reasonably priced, then FTTC is more than enough.

If FTTC is giving poor speeds like less than 50Mbps as the max estimates then FTTP may be better even if it costs more.

In reply to a post by Kenneth:

assuming BT is the FTTP option which for OP doesn't sound it.

Nope, no other option, other than ZZoomm and don't have that at the moment, just looking ahead.

Talk Talk, say no more

I used to think that FTTC had a 10 day thing, but I was otld by a few people and even some in this forum that the ten day thing don't exist. Here is a post in the plusnet communities saying how DLM work on FTTC, it is old, 2014, so things have improved even more so since then.
I also found while looking for that about open reach improving DLM in 2019, here. Maybe these changes are what sorted out my modem/router compatibility, or maybe Open reach took out the Huawei stuff from the cabinet

I have not seen this DLM problem anywhere that you speak of, well not on FTTC, ADSL yes.

I don't know if ZZoomm hiked up their prices, all I have seen was a review that said the prices was jacked up, this is from Google reviews.


CUSTOMER REVIEW BY CLAIRE H LEFT ON 18 JAN 2021

Cannot rate this service. It's awful. They jack up your fees in one month's time without consent and are so underhand, it's criminal. They messed up my house with their installation and didn't clear it up after I complained. Was the service faster, better? No, worse. BT was faster, yet I'm in the middle of Henley. After digging up road after road, this service could not be more rogue than anything else. It doesn't even deserve 1 star. Poor customer service too.

The majority of reviews have been good, but this service have only been available in one town until now, we will see what people in Hereford say about it, they are strange people here, I know I am one of them

Matthew Hare who is the CEO of zzoomm, was the opne who started up Gigaclear, so it does worry me if Zzoomm will do a Gigaclear and also if Matthew Hare will just sell up and do something else, I would hate to go onto Zzoomm and they sell to say Talk Talk.


I suppose we will wait and see, I have the answers I asked for, which is just reliability and speed, from the consumer point of view, I am not bothered if the technology of FTTP is better than FTTC, i just want a reliable broadband connection, at a speed that works for me and at a price that is not costing me the earth. at the moment, my plusnet FTTC connection is doing all of them, just wondered if changing to FTTP with all the hassle that will have would really be worth it.
Pricewise, I expect I could get a better price with plusnet, than with Zzoomm, reliability is fine, sometimes there is a bit of congestion, but not that often. Speed, do I really need 100Mb/s?

I don't know, something I thought would be easy to decide is ending up not so easy, still I have plenty of time, as long as Zzoomm don't bug me, they can post a leaflety in my door, that is fine, they can even come and knock on the door once, but no more than that.