ok if you have actual stats as a source then I stand defeated, fair enough. Although do you agree the increase might vary from area to area as suggested, as that logic seems reasonable enough.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

ok if you have actual stats as a source then I stand defeated, fair enough. Although do you agree the increase might vary from area to area as suggested, as that logic seems reasonable enough.

It's a discussion not a competition!

The main factor is actually the starting speed, not the end one. The usage changes in an area where people are on 1 - 2Mb will be very noticeable.

The average ADSL2+ speed is a shade under 8Mb.

In reply to a post by David_W:

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Probably just exchanges that still just had 1Gig links, and will be moved to 10GigE very soon.

I suspect part of this may be a balancing act going on between not wanting to order (and pay for) unnecessary capacity, and the lead time for upgrading backhaul circuits - though the issue in some areas may be unavailability of 10GigE circuits. I would have thought that increasing data volumes make it a 'no brain' decision to aim to upgrade backhaul to 10GigE in advance of offering FTTx. If this backhaul is via a managed circuit which has bandwidth charges, it should be relatively cheap to upgrade the bearer to 10GigE and enable extra capacity as required with relatively short lead times.

I'm always amazed at how loudly people complain in stories in The Register and similar about outages on cheap consumer ISPs when their expectations are unrealistic. If you're taking overtime to work from home, you should have two different forms of Internet access that are as diverse as possible - one of these can be tethering a mobile phone or a PAYG mobile broadband dongle, so may cost very little if rarely used. Internet access matters to us - we've got Zen FTTC, my contract O2 mobile broadband account and I can tether my contract Vodafone mobile phone.

I've considered putting cheap consumer ADSL on our other BT line so that I can implement auto-failover on my router. This would protect me against failure of the FTTx system, also, if I choose a provider using LLU, against a BT Wholesale outage, though not against failure of the twisted pair network between the PCP and our NTE5s. The other alternative would be seeing if Virgin are prepared to add their cheapest broadband product to our cable account at minimal extra expense, though I was most unimpressed with cable broadband when I had it.


If quality of service matters for home working, I'd think there was justification for your main ISP being one of the business orientated ones (such as AAISP, IDnet or Zen). These providers don't operate on such tight margins, so have more of a cushion to try their best to ensure users don't experience contention serious enough to cause packet loss or excessive jitter.

Sky unlimited broadband costs £7.50 a month. You can download hundreds of gigabytes with no problems. Latency is very low. There are NO caps on torrents, p2p etc. If the same person was to do with zen, to download the same amount would costs them HUNDREDS of pounds a month. That's why sky has become over congested in several exchanges, which they have already said will be fixed in a week or two maximum.

on the figures, is it from all isp's or just a few? eg. plusnet publish a lot of figures which can be misleading as they have a low usage userbase.

what still seems odd is if usage only goes up by 10% on average, how are isps been caught out by such a small jump.

In reply to a post by dave2150:

Sky unlimited broadband costs £7.50 a month. You can download hundreds of gigabytes with no problems. Latency is very low. There are NO caps on torrents, p2p etc. If the same person was to do with zen, to download the same amount would costs them HUNDREDS of pounds a month. That's why sky has become over congested in several exchanges, which they have already said will be fixed in a week or two maximum.

It took just over 3 months to sort out the capacity issue in the Hastings area last year although Sky blamed Alcatel for constantly pushing back the planned start date of the upgrade work.

Entire list of congested exchanges and the estimated resolution dates:

http://beusergroup.co.uk/pastebin/?q=51011572bcb75

At least Sky are admitting the issues and doing something about it, unlike BT who are plagued with over-subscription and capacity issues and won't admit anything is wrong despite the fact connections are dropping to 2mbs in peak hours on infinity 2.

Edited by lockyatlrg (Thu 24-Jan-13 13:12:16)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

on the figures, is it from all isp's or just a few? eg. plusnet publish a lot of figures which can be misleading as they have a low usage userbase.

what still seems odd is if usage only goes up by 10% on average, how are isps been caught out by such a small jump.

Sky got nailed by Sky Go, Netflix, etc, and an influx of high usage ADSL2+ subs as a result of the advertising campaign more than Sky Fibre.

That was from BT Retail.

Edited by deleted (Thu 24-Jan-13 13:42:58)

you got no update on your issue? I had slowish speeds for 3 days which dissapeared and been fine again after that.

On the BT care forums 90% of complaints are people unhappy with their sync speed dropping not congestion, yours seems the only one which has hideous speeds on all protocols for any sustained period of time.

there is people from my area popping up on BT forums now, but BT have come to a dead end and we are talking about ending my contract early.