Hyperoptic - new customer review

Hello,

I was planning to write this post a some time ago - I actually wrote it but it disappeared in the vast nothingness of the Internet. Anyway, since there are not that many reviews of Hyperoptic, I thought I'd post one here, as a happy customer of theirs.

In summary: I'd definitely recommend them - giving a rating of 5 out of 5

In detail: I signed up about 5 weeks ago. Then 3 weeks ago, with the help of the amazing Dave Shaw (Head of CS), our connection was the first to go live in our development.

Installation took just over an hour, and yes, they 've had to drill a hole through the wall (but that's because our development, even though it was built 5 years ago, has no provision for fibre optic/ethernet/cable). I think it would normally take about 30-45mins, but we were the first flat to get it where I live, so they had to tread lightly.

The router that comes with it is a bit bulky, but seems to be good quality and quite capable (for the adventurous out there, it also has SIP capabilities with 2 POTS ports, but you'll have to set it up manually - one might be used by your Hyperoptic landline service anyway). Unfortunately, there's hardly any information about this router out there.

Now the connection... OK, it rocks! I'm on the 100Meg up/down symmetrical package... and it is indeed! Speedtest gives speeds of around 97M down and 95-96 up to the Hyperoptic servers, which is FAST.
For the States, I'm getting about 50Meg down 70 up, but it varies a lot (as it would do, of course, due to the nature of the Internet).

Web browsing is a tad faster than a good DSL, but problem is most sites aren't that fast yet. BBC is one of the fast ones - it opens almost instantaneously. Youtube too. If you're a speed freak, you'll have to tweak your DNS and concurrent connection settings to get the max of it, but that's only if you're a speed freak. You will notice a difference from a poor old DSL anyway.

In terms of downloading... I get on average 1.2-3Mb/s from most 'good' sites (my line can achieve around 12Mb/s).
Good torrents download much faster, around 5Mb/s on average, with some peaking at 9Mb/s. Not bad at all (not talking illegal torrents here, just legal linux ISOs etc)

Speed seems to be constant throughout the day, and ping times are around 3-4msec, so excellent for online gaming too.

I'm connected through an Ethernet cable. Wireless can hardly get 45Meg, as I'm in a rather busy wireless area (this is still better than my old O2 router).

Hmmm, what else? I couldn't possibly fault them so far, other than that I now see how slow my computer is...

Again, in summary: I'd wholeheartedly recommend them! Good prices, good speeds, and great people.
Plus, they're not the 'bad' guys

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask and i'll try to answer asap (work permitting).

Cheers,
Anthony

In reply to a post by antio:

In terms of downloading... I get on average 1.2-3Mb/s from most 'good' sites (my line can achieve around 12Mb/s).

Why so slow? When you are on a 100 Meg connection with a 97 Meg speedtest?

Even units confusion does not explain it!

He doesn't say where these

"ping times are around 3-4msec, so excellent for online gaming too"

Are too which IP or servers? Ibet they are no where near as low for destinations in other countries , that low figure could be very misleading

If we assume they meant Bytes which seems likely 12 * 8 = 96 so line is OK.

On the individual sites 10 Mbps to 24 Mbps is probably not far off what many sites limit people too. When sites have millions of users running it so that the 1% with good connections can saturate their hosting links may not be a good practice.

That's correct, sorry if the unit wasn't clear. Mb/sec is Megabytes/sec.

And yes, these are obviously restricted by the individual servers, otherwise it would be pretty easy for a few people to clog their entire backbone. Bandwidth is not unlimited, and they pay dearly for it - even if it's off-peak I suspect connections are still throttled.

One I've found which seems to not be throttled is uploading to youtube. A 300MB video uploads in about 30-35 seconds.

This is also why I mentioned torrents, a healthy torrent is one way to test the true line/router capacity.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If we assume they meant Bytes which seems likely 12 * 8 = 96 so line is OK.

On the individual sites 10 Mbps to 24 Mbps is probably not far off what many sites limit people too. When sites have millions of users running it so that the 1% with good connections can saturate their hosting links may not be a good practice.

In reply to a post by antio:

That's correct, sorry if the unit wasn't clear. Mb/sec is Megabytes/sec.

Mb/sec is actually Megabits per second. MB/sec is Megabytes per second, note the capital B.

Apologies if you found my post misleading, this wasn't my intention. You could just ask and I'd clarify!

These are the ping times to Hyperoptic's test server via ookla's test applet (and if I'm not mistaken the first 'hop' is pinging at about 2-3msec, but I'm on holidays at the moment so can't check until next week). This is just testing the line itself. Tests to routers around the world would obviously vary wildly even throughout the same day (so little point in giving just a number) but if you'd like to give me a couple of IP addresses and the times you'd like me to test them I'm happy to do it when I get back home, so that you won't feel misled.

My name is Anthony by the way, and I'm not in any way affiliated with Hyperoptic, other than being their customer.

Cheers.

In reply to a post by tommy45:

He doesn't say where these

"ping times are around 3-4msec, so excellent for online gaming too"

Are too which IP or servers? Ibet they are no where near as low for destinations in other countries , that low figure could be very misleading

Thanks, I'm afraid I know but that's how I (mistakenly) wrote it in my original post which I can't edit it now, so I was merely explaining what I meant in that post. Again, sorry for the confusion!

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by antio:

That's correct, sorry if the unit wasn't clear. Mb/sec is Megabytes/sec.

Mb/sec is actually Megabits per second. MB/sec is Megabytes per second, note the capital B.

In reply to a post by antio:

Thanks, I'm afraid I know but that's how I (mistakenly) wrote it in my original post which I can't edit it now, so I was merely explaining what I meant in that post. Again, sorry for the confusion!

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by antio:

That's correct, sorry if the unit wasn't clear. Mb/sec is Megabytes/sec.

Mb/sec is actually Megabits per second. MB/sec is Megabytes per second, note the capital B.

Glad you cleared that up

Dunno why tommy45 is being so antagonistic, I thought you latency information was fine. Would love to see a traceroute to qw.foppa.dk, or even bbc.co.uk though.