In reply to a post by candlerb:

You're right though that the speed makes no difference: it costs them the same to support a 900/900 or a 100/100 service, except possibly for the odd person who fileshares and fills the uplink 24x7 (but they're taking a chance that there aren't too many of those)

I remember the days of NTL launching cable modems in 1999 when some people would flood the “128k” uplink (actually was around 90k most of the pilot) and the ISP management were unhappy. 🙄

The smaller, more nimble, companies may have a march on the older organisations that have had to cope with many technology shifts.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by seb:

Most are building market share. I suspect the prices will go up a bit in longer term

The one outside my door has had the same price for 6 years, and only just moved from £25/m to £29. They only have the one product, can't see the point in variable speed tiers, so its 900 / 900 Mbps. I can see their point, hope the infrastructure and run costs are sustainable at that price. Under half of what I pay for 250/25....

I've heard from providers (who won't go on-the-record) that 900Mbps or 100Mbps services won't hugely affect usage so it doesn't cost more to provide faster services (when you're talking altnet full fibre) in the sense of actual data usage.

As I noted not all Altnets are cheaper than BT Wholesale, but even still looking at the work done by GoFibre one of the reasons they might be cheaper than BT Wholesale is the quality of the work is putting it politely poor. Certainly not up to Openreach and Nextfibre work which I have personally seen. So one has to wonder how reliable their networks will be in 20 years time. My guess is Openreach and Nextfibre/Virgin are planning for the long term. Some of the altnets not so much. Quality work costs more.

There will always be heavy users who are unprofitable

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Some of the altnets not so much. Quality work costs more.

The companies that pre-date Virgin Media is >30 years old in most cases, and some of the original installs were pretty poor, but the network is still around. I suspect the same for "poor" alt-net installs, somehow they will be made to work.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Some of the altnets not so much. Quality work costs more.

As it happens, I've had Youfibre / Netomnia installing in my house today and the install is exactly the same quality as an Openreach one would have been. In fact, it's indistinguishable apart from it obviously being installed in parallel as they can't touch the existing service. The engineer was very clear that working under PIA means no shortcuts - everything has to be by the book.

As with all of these things, I suspect a lot of it is down to the engineer you get and how willing they are to work with the customer to achieve their satisfaction. For me, this was "give me 30m of fibre and when you come back later today, I'll have it routed through the house with two ends for you to commission". I think both of us won here

In reply to a post by daern:

As it happens, I've had Youfibre / Netomnia installing in my house today and the install is exactly the same quality as an Openreach one would have been. In fact, it's indistinguishable apart from it obviously being installed in parallel as they can't touch the existing service. The engineer was very clear that working under PIA means no shortcuts - everything has to be by the book.

Then GoFibre is in a whole heap of trouble because I am quite sure using cable ties to secure hardware to the poll and I am been generous there, more like hanging hardware from the pole is not by the book. Though I guess technically my pole is yet to be "enabled" so maybe they will properly attach it at that juncture. However when Nextfibre used PIA around my mothers everything was properly attached to the poles from day one. I fact the first thing they did was attach brackets to the polls to attach their equipment which is what alerted me to something going on.

When it comes to installation I have 8m of 25mm flexible metal conduit from the back of my house to my "computer cupboard" along with a stainless steel eye in the wall all ready and waiting. No string in the conduit as I have a 10m length of proper fish tape I can push through in under a minute

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

We have just signed to an Alt-net as there are no openreach plans to fibre up, for a 1Gb/300 connection for £29/month fixed.

Happy with that!

I've done the same. It is running in parallel with BT (offered for £1 per month until my BT contract runs out in November). My BT bill last month was £145. Granted, that includes my mobile and football, but it's still pretty eye-watering.

My package with Grain is going to be £19 per month for a 150 up/down connection, plus £5 for a fixed IP address, plus whatever I end up paying with I port my geographic landline number to a VoIP provider. By the time I port my mobile number out of BT mobile and find a way to add the sport back in, I expect to be paying less than half what I pay for BT right now.

Will it go up? Absolutely, but it's a lower point to start going up from.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

In reply to a post by daern:

As it happens, I've had Youfibre / Netomnia installing in my house today and the install is exactly the same quality as an Openreach one would have been. In fact, it's indistinguishable apart from it obviously being installed in parallel as they can't touch the existing service. The engineer was very clear that working under PIA means no shortcuts - everything has to be by the book.

Then GoFibre is in a whole heap of trouble because I am quite sure using cable ties to secure hardware to the poll and I am been generous there, more like hanging hardware from the pole is not by the book. Though I guess technically my pole is yet to be "enabled" so maybe they will properly attach it at that juncture. However when Nextfibre used PIA around my mothers everything was properly attached to the poles from day one. I fact the first thing they did was attach brackets to the polls to attach their equipment which is what alerted me to something going on.
[...]

(My bolding.)

I wonder if this might be GoFibre 'reserving' their place on the poles, pending a proper installation. I think I've read about this sometimes happening with PIA, a kind of altnet 'race for (pole) space'.

In reply to a post by seb:

I've heard from providers (who won't go on-the-record) that 900Mbps or 100Mbps services won't hugely affect usage so it doesn't cost more to provide faster services (when you're talking altnet full fibre) in the sense of actual data usage.

Sorry for replying to something so late. I guess it makes sense they won't want to go on the record but it's pretty well known in capacity planning. The major expense is having to have the empty capacity there for users to burst into. As cable companies found out when providing tier uplifts usage doesn't go up proportionally to burst and after a point doesn't budge. Almost everyone does the same things faster.

Init7 in Switzerland epitomise this. Same price for 10 or 25 Gbit, customer just pays for the SFP28 optics.

Edited by XGS_Is_On (Sat 15-Jun-24 14:28:04)