In reply to a post by therioman:

I'm always very wary of altnets as our experience with several of them has proven they're not as robust.

Depends if you have a choice. Around me its an Alt Net or Virgin Media no sign of OR FFTP and no announce plan.

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

I'm beginning to think that altnets are cheap for a reason.

They're often cheap because they're desperately trying to build a customer base and one way to do that is to be low price as it gets the low price crowd to use them.

You can absolutely guarantee as they mature (or more realistically get consolidated) the prices will rise.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by therioman:

I'm always very wary of altnets as our experience with several of them has proven they're not as robust.

Depends if you have a choice. Around me its an Alt Net or Virgin Media no sign of OR FFTP and no announce plan.

Indeed - and I didn't say for a second that isn't the case - but it doesn't mean the altnet isn't more 'risky' (Although VM is also a bit of a 50/50 roll the dice experience generally)

In reply to a post by smouty:

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

Which is precisely what Swish do. As I said, I don't have any choice about that currently, except to go back to my miserable FTTC line. Don't think it was a cab fault caused the last problem, though.

Do they do this? I didn't think they used any Openreach equipment and I haven't seen any evidence of any new cabinets in my area.

To be fair to Swish, I have not had an issue with them and am happy with the service. Their Trustpilot reviews are pretty decent too. I had no complaints about by BT service either apart from the speed and I'm happy to see the back of PPPoE.

There won't be loads like with FTTC/VDSL services - there'll be the odd one - but they are likely to be off-street - if like other similar altnets - for example one around here owned by the same people as Swish have one outside a sports/leisure centre.

In reply to a post by smouty:

Do they do this? I didn't think they used any Openreach equipment and I haven't seen any evidence of any new cabinets in my area.

Yes they do. For example Haslemere and Farnham (although I can't find a Streetview shot of this one with the Swish sticker still on it).

In reply to a post by therioman:

Indeed - and I didn't say for a second that isn't the case - but it doesn't mean the altnet isn't more 'risky' (Although VM is also a bit of a 50/50 roll the dice experience generally)

Agreed, dpends on the persons needs. VM often works, but isn't great in areas with 33 year old cabling that is degrading (and they know this). The alt nets have a chance to gain customers in areas where OR decided 30 down and 2 Mbps up FTTC was "good" ...

In reply to a post by therioman:

What you're experiencing there is what is pretty typical from most altnets. They are rarely as stable as the Openreach style services - mostly because the latter is quite a mature setup and most altnets are still scrabbling around, building networks, learning etc.

People love to moan about Openreach & BT (sometimes quite rightly) but one of the reasons they're slower and more boring is that they've generally got better processes and network stability - I'm always very wary of altnets as our experience with several of them has proven they're not as robust. I'm sure in time it will change as they get consolidated into a couple of players, but for now... not gonna happen.

I doubt openreach fibre network is any better or worse than altnets, after all, as people keep saying here it is not the fibre that is the problem. even on Openreach network, people have problems. I had a problem a few years ago where only one Modem would sync confused openreach as they had no idea what the problem was. My iold ECI modem would not sync, or the router hub one from plusnet. they even sent me a Zyxel and that played up as well.
But that was the only main problem I had in the 9 years I was with plusnet, apart from a couple of slowdowns.


I am willing to give different things a try, after all I tried a wireless network at one point, still got the thing on my roof pointing towards our cathedral, if it had kept offering a decent service I would still be on it now maybe, but it was not cheap. £30 a month for 10Mb/s, but it was better than the awful 2.5Mb/s I had on ADSL., until they could not cope with the amount of customers. By the time my 2-year contract ended, we had FTTC available.

I am pleased there are Altnets around, it gives people more choice and by the seems of it they are taking customers away from Openreach, I doubt it will bother Openreach that much at the moment, but it still pleases me.

What needs to be done for a lot of these Altnets is better customer service and to keep their networks running. 18 days and 8 hours now since mine have disconnected, so that is pretty good and the last time it disconnected may have been a router thing, I noticed yesterday that my router was on auto update. See if it stays connected until the end of the month.

My other half have no problems with Gigaclear apart from their customer service is a bit iffy, but still mile better than BT and Talk Talk customer service which is appalling.

I wish altnets all the best, let's give people more choice

In reply to a post by therioman:

They're often cheap because they're desperately trying to build a customer base and one way to do that is to be low price as it gets the low price crowd to use them.

You can absolutely guarantee as they mature (or more realistically get consolidated) the prices will rise.

They got to compete, but also make a profit, so they can't go crazy with price rises, but maybe, just maybe, we are being ripped off by the other providers with their silly prices.

what is happening now is providers are forcing people to fibre, by telling lies saying that their phone line can't support FTTC, and they must change to fibre and then offer speeds about 100Mb.s for silly prices. If their line can;t support FTTc, then what the hell are they using now?

In reply to a post by gkw:

Yes they do. For example Haslemere and Farnham (although I can't find a Streetview shot of this one with the Swish sticker still on it).

That is the type of cabinet that Zzoomm has by our local Aldi on the cycle path.

I doubt openreach fibre network is any better or worse than altnets

It is better than many of the altnets. The fibre in the ground to your home is only a small part of the overall picture. If you had to deal with the altnets often (and I do), you'll find the provisioning, support, troubleshooting, order processes etc are often half baked. You'd also see if you looked at our monitoring screens that the Openreach circuits are far more robust than the majority of altnet ones (there are some outliers who deliver very robust service, but that isn't then norm). For a start, many of the altnets have very limited peering, transit etc to the outside world so issues with any of them tend to cause network issues for the altnet, whereas the more established ISPs typically (but again, there are exceptions) using Openreach have a more robust network in that sense too.

I am pleased there are Altnets around, it gives people more choice and by the seems of it they are taking customers away from Openreach, I doubt it will bother Openreach that much at the moment, but it still pleases me.

But in reality an awful lot of people have an altnet or nothing for a fibre connection - so they're not getting choice, they're getting a fake choice as the realistic choice is 'fibre from the altnet with the flaws' or 'not a fibre connection' - that isn't really a choice.

Openreach brings more choice of provider where variables like peering, transit, customer support etc can be the differentiators - an altnet typically brings zero choice in any of that and often an inferior overall service.

It isn't quite as much a win as it sounds - and the reality is (and we're seeing it already) the altnets can't compete and will get consolidated. The same happened in the cable days and we ended up with Virgin Media.