FTTC v ADSL+

I've grown up with the internet and been on a FTTC 76/20 connection for about 3 years, I am clearly wondering now is FTTC really necessary for me (and others for that matter)?

My situation is - I'm a part time dad, so have the kids 3/4 nights a week, I have NowTV movies, a Ethernet wired PC and my eldest has a lap top he brings with him, this was on wifi, but now using home plugs for his gaming. There are 3 phones in the house when the kids are here, 1 otherwise, no tablets and just a Now TV box.

When on my own I tend to either be on the PC surfing/watching TV/Now TV movie. When the kids are here it is 2 computers gaming and Now TV & a phone in constant use on You Tube (daughters being daughters....).

At present I am 76/20 with PN and have opted to leave due to their price increases and poor customer service. I had considered a 36/10 ISP, but these are not much cheaper than 76/20.

Simple question is does what the household do warrant the extra cost or should I just go back to 17-20 ADSL+ LLU for reliability and ultimate control of my internet.

If you don't do a lot of uploading and you can live within that download then there is nothing forcing FTTC. In the end it comes down to how much you value it - no-one can really tell you if it is "worth" it.

For me, I would have a 12 down, 1 up service if I went back to ADSL. 12 would be just about OK. However, I do photography from time to time and back it up to the cloud and doing that on a 1Mb upload rather than the 12Mb I currently have would be very painful. And downloading at a faster speed, whilst not essential, is useful.

It is a personal choice. There is much that people can live without but each has to choose what is important to their personal situation. Many people pay for Sky TV - personally I used to but no longer do because I decided it was no longer of that level of value to me.

I see what you mean. I also do photography and upload to a cloud based service., I suppose I could leave that over night to upload to get around the complaints from the kids.

I'll have a look at ADSL+ and see how they fair.

Photo upload is not so bad if you are using standard JPEGs but I tend to be shooting 24MP in RAW so from a holiday I can easily end up with 60GB of photos to upload, that is really painful on a 1Mbps connection.

RAW weighs in at 30 MB to 40 MB usually for me, but even JPEG can be 12 to 15 MB when dealing with large images and fine quality settings.

If travelling back from a holiday via London Underground the Wi-Fi there has very good upload, and Leeds Bradford Airport has the best public Wi-Fi we've seen in the UK where the limit is more to do with your actual device rather than their wireless.

For the gamers in the family having more bandwidth headroom to keep the local congestion from creating large ping spikes would be a must for me.

I do use a Netduma with congestion control but for somebody that does not the extra headroom while people are streaming while gaming will help somewhat.

I suppose it depends on how fast ADSL+ is where you are. People used to manage with ADSL, but then again people used to manage with dial up.
Now TV will work with a pretty decent ADSL service, I was getting HD on Netflix with a 4Mb/s ADSl service, but then it is only me here.
If I could get about 10Mb/s ADSL then I would certainly go back to ADSL myself. you got to look at what you want, not what other people want.
if you want to save money and still stay on FTTC, then have a look at the new vodafone deals if you can get them where you are.

I have been thinking of it the only problem with me is the router they have and they will not allow it to be changed.

I asked my son to explain how Sky Broadband works at his mums. He said the only time he notices problems (he is on wifi) is when his brother and sister are on their Kindle and Mum is watching a streaming movie from Sky Box Office. Other than that he says it is fine.

He had issues here on wifi on Infinity 2 which were similar to the issues at his mums, since I put him on TPLINK homeplug and he has no issues at all - the problem in my house was poor wifi from the HH5.

Its just phones and visiting kindles on wifi now plus Now TV.