community fibre - fast or slow - pros or cons

apart from speed / cost is there any other benefit from going for the faster service?


community fibre

1 Gbps Fibre Broadband for 24 months: £25/month. £27/month after the initial contract term of 24 months

150 Mbps Fibre Broadband for 24 months: £20/month, £22/month after the initial contract term of 24 months

Essential Package:
20 Mbs Fibre Broadband for 12 months: £12.50/month and then at the prevailing new customer rate thereafter.
(Essential Package will be excluded from any discretionary Consumer Price Index (CPI)* plus 2.9% monthly price increases that may be applied to other Community Fibre packages.)

I'm on vodafone 80/20 fttc @ £35/m (crept up from £22/m over the years)
Calls are made from mobile (ID Mobile) and incoming landline kept for legacy reasons (eg receiving calls from elderly relatives - voip service would be needed).

cf info from 'the legal stuff'

Edited by CheapSkate (Mon 26-Jun-23 16:47:15)

Unless you're a big downloader, I don't think the raw speed is an issue.

Things that might be a factor would be if you think the latency on the faster link is better (don't know the evidence for this) and whether speed variability means that you're more likely to hit your needed numbers at busy times... (dunno).

Another factor would be what router you get - the faster link will probably come with a better router which might have better wifi or meshing capability - IMHO it's my WiFi experience around my house that has biggest impact on usability/experience rather than the peak speed I can get when hotwired into the fiber termination.

Hope this helps

Jim

150Mbps isn't a game changing improvement from a decent FTTC service, though most houses would struggle to utilise 1Gbps as well. It's a shame there's no 500Mbps option as that's generally a good sweet spot between price and a speed that you can also hit over a wireless connection.

With only £5 difference between 150Mbps and 1Gbps having anything in between seems a little pointless - with the cost model it would just make their offerings more complex.

True, I hadn't spotted how close together the pricing was. It's clearly designed to make 1Gbps the default choice and the 3Gbps as the premium offering.

You may not notice much difference between 150 Mbps and 1Gbps if you only browse the web and/or only stream a few TV channels at the same time. You might notice a difference if you download large files,

Fibre services (FTTP) are generally more reliable than services that use metal phone lines. They can suffer from contention so speed tests to this website may not reach the max possible speed which for a 1Gbps service is about 940Mbps due to overheads.

In reply to a post by JimInCam:

Another factor would be what router you get - the faster link will probably come with a better router which might have better wifi or meshing capability - IMHO it's my WiFi experience around my house that has biggest impact on usability/experience rather than the peak speed I can get when hotwired into the fiber termination.

Hope this helps

Jim

With Community Fibre it appears that recently they decided to offer the same Linksys Velop MX4200 Tri-Band Whole Home Mesh WiFi 6 System (AX4200) on all packages from lower tier to the 1Gbps.

The only better router you get is with the 3Gbps Technicolor WiFi 6 that has 4 LAN ports and better specs.

But most users will have Linksys Velop MX4200 router. I have not joined Community Fibre yet. The router comes with 3 LAN ports. So if you need to connect more devices you will need to buy a network switch, which obviously can be a con.

Or your devices must be upgraded to ones that support WiFI. For example I have an old Technomate TM 5402 satellite TV receiver that has only LAN port capability and no WiFi in built. I upgraded to an Octagon SF8008 satellite receiver a couple of weeks ago that supports WiFi so that way when I upgrade to Community Fibre I won't be hampered by the lack of 1 LAN port.

Even though I could use another router as a dummy switch or buy a switch, I'd prefer not to have to do that.

Unless things have changed, I believe the main difference other than speed is that only tiers 500mbps or higher are not subject to CGNAT. Which may or may not make a difference for you depending on your use cases.
If you need a publicly accessible/routable IP address, go for 1gbps.

I'm rather impatiently waiting for Community Fibre to come to my area myself so I can finally jump ship from Virgin!

In reply to a post by jpm:

150Mbps isn't a game changing improvement from a decent FTTC service, though most houses would struggle to utilise 1Gbps as well. It's a shame there's no 500Mbps option as that's generally a good sweet spot between price and a speed that you can also hit over a wireless connection.

I'm on 300/50 via Openreach FTTP, and it's plenty good enough. If I had the option of 150/150 symmetric for the same price, I'd take that instead.

Download speeds are not an issue: it takes about a minute to download a full macOS update, for example, but it still takes 20 minutes to install.

In short, if you don't find your current FTTC 80/20 is limiting what you're doing, then you'll almost certainly be very happy with 150, and not notice the difference for anything faster.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Download speeds are not an issue: it takes about a minute to download a full macOS update, for example, but it still takes 20 minutes to install.

Similar here, even with a 1/3rd of your download speed a TomTom update takes longer to load on devise than download to pute.