Fibre - Honest advise please.

Hi
my exchange is now fibre enabled, it was meant to be live on the 30th Sept, but they completed it early. I'm looking for some honest advise about my options.

I'm looking at 3 possible providers, but I am open to other suggestions.
BT, SKY & PlusNet.

I like the idea BT & SKY give unlimited usage, but I like that PlusNet offer a static IP for £5.00 one of fee.

At this point I don't know what my usage is as my current ISP doesn't offer any bandwidth usage figures. Over the last 2 days ( Fri & Sat ) we've used 12GB, I can only see that increasing if we have fibre.

If anyone has any advise on providers, usage etc, please help

The BT Speed Tester say's I should get 63mb down and 20mb up, how likely am I to get any where near that ?

For ADSL they claim 1mb - 6mb I get 5.6mb.

I've read posts where some people are getting slower connections on fibre than ADSL how does that happen and is it resolvable ?

Any other advise or suggestions welcome.

Thanks

You should get the estimate. I'm on BT Infinity2 which is unlimited.
When people get slower speeds, it's often due to aluminium cables or a cable fault - these usually impact their ADSL speeds before they upgrade anyway. A cable fault can be fixed, but aluminium cables can't.

The Plusnet peak-time allowance is 250GB, but unlimited midnight to 8am. P2P and external FTP are throttled to 2Mbps between 8pm and 10pm. Streaming is not affected by this restriction.

Sky will require you to have your phone rental with them on full LLU. That can sometimes be a bit awkward if and when you wish to leave them for a different ISP. They do not have throttling, and from the reports here seem not to have any significant congestion.

BT also require you to have your line rental with them, (going up in January), but that isn't a problem when wishing to move to other ISPs, so long as you are out of contract. They don't throttle either. Many users of Infinity report full speeds 24/7.

sky offer unlimited on both 40 and 80meg packages (they are my isp of choice at the moment) and claim no shapeing as so do BT now however there 40meg package has a useage cap of 40gig which for me is totaly useless and unlimited on the 80.

Plusnet has a useage limit of 40gig on there 40meg package and 250gig on the 80meg whoever both packages have a midnight to 8am slot where all downloads don't count but what's the point with fibre as its so quick the days of overnight downloads are long gone!

Something else to consider is that while all supply there own routers you MUST use the sky one due to the t&c's and the authentication (mer) that they use, you can use the billion router with sky useing the beta firmware but its a expencive router and to be honist the sky one seems to do the job at the end of the day.

the download meter i use is http://addgadgets.com/network_meter/ HOWEVER it only monitors the computer its installed on so if you use wireless items eg phone, console, ect then it carnt count there usage as well.

lastly the only slow connections ive heard of at the moment are either phone cable issues eg old copper/aluminium lines, heavy interference . However sky are haveing problems of half speed connections which from some posts ive read has been tracked to a block of ip addresses but is still ongoing, for this reasion alone even when sky enable our exchange before i make the jump i will be waiting to see if we are affected just incase it turns out to be something else.

Interestingly your 3 choices are the same as mine

Edited by omnius (Sun 16-Sep-12 11:37:33)

Thanks
How is fibre delivered ? Will they use my existing extension or is it a new cable run ?

Will they provide the router or do it ?

Apart from PlusNet anyone else doing a static IP with unlimited bandwidth for a decent amount ? possible 12month contract ?

Thanks

http://www.robertos.me.uk/html/fttx.html
(A bit out of date, but explains what you are asking).

Plusnet is only unlimited between midnight and 8am.

BT Business Infinity either has or can have a fixed IP address, and possibly better support/faster fixes.