GigaFast / City fibre

Morning,

Anyone on the 900/900 package can provide feedback please

Due to go live next month

In reply to a post by Stanman_24:

Morning,

Anyone on the 900/900 package can provide feedback please

Due to go live next month

I've been on it for about 2 years in Aberdeen. there was congestion early on but this hasn't been a problem for months however I've just downgraded to 200mbps

having 900 down is great but you'll never fully use it. I ended up monitoring my usage and artificially limited my WAN port to 200/200 for a week and I didn't notice any difference. Asked my wife if she noticed anything being slower and she didn't even know I'd done anything

I have 900 service and get 940Mbps up and down all day every day.

But 99% of the time its hardly a blip out of that.

I do make full use of it at times to a offsite family member for backups and it maxes it out no problem. I also have 10Gbe network at home so there plenty spare if other things are happening on home network.

My experience has been pretty poor for 900/900. I get consistent 940 down, but I'm lucky to get 2 Mbps upload. Packet loss is terrible and its taking forever for any fault resolution.

60 days since the installation date and not a single day getting the correct speeds!

Luckily I still have my Virgin connection

I'm looking to change to Gigafast 900 too, from Virgin Media. Because I run a Plex server to friends and family I need the upstream.

Not all the comments I have had about Vodaphone/City Fibre have been complimentary, e.g. regarding customer service and inconsistent speeds at busy times. One would have thought with a built-for-purpose, fully optic network there would be no contention issues. I wonder if there has been corner-cutting when it comes to spending on adequate kit at street boxes, nodes and hubs..

Having said that I see that customer satisfaction is slightly higher than Virgin Media's.

CityFibre like OpenReach use GPON for their fibre.
It's 2.4Gb/s down and 1.2Gb/s up, shared between up to 32 homes.

That's just the contention on the local loop. There's also contention on cablelinks and backhaul across the country.

There's contention on ANY residential broadband and probably on most business broadband as well.

If you want contention free you need to pay a pretty penny for it. That's what SLA's are for.

Being with Virgin Media has spoilt me in one respect. I always get what I pay for and a bit more, even at peak times. This is because VM configures its hubs to perform at over the headline speed. On the downstream my hub is configured to 1200000450 kbps giving me 1.1 Gb when measured by SamKnows to share across my network. The headline figure is 1Gb. I never get below 945Mb on my Ethernet connected devices. . If VM can do it on NTL legacy networks, surely City Fibre can deliver on a totally fibre network. They need to consider the customer and not over-subscribe.

Edited by KilgoreTrout (Tue 18-May-21 16:10:00)

In reply to a post by KilgoreTrout:

If VM can do it on NTL legacy networks, surely City Fibre can deliver on a totally fibre network.

If you think Virgin doesn't suffer from contention then you're delusional.
They are probably the worst offender out of all the big networks.

They need to consider the customer and not over-subscribe.

They do consider the customer. That's why it's a contended network.
If there was no contention anywhere in the network you would be paying hundreds of £'s per month.

Networks are a banding act. Contention needs balanced. Upgrades are constantly needed to keep up with expanding growth and data usage.

People use their internet in short bursts. Most people take the lower packages, like 40Mb on OpenReach or 100Mb on Virgin.
It would be prohibitely expensive to have the whole network with enough bandwidth for everyone to max connections out all at the same time.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

If you think Virgin doesn't suffer from contention then you're delusional.
They are probably the worst offender out of all the big networks...

...People use their internet in short bursts. Most people take the lower packages, like 40Mb on OpenReach or 100Mb on Virgin.
It would be prohibitely expensive to have the whole network with enough bandwidth for everyone to max connections out all at the same time.

I was speaking based upon my experience with Virgin Media. Getting what it says on the lid, and then some more, is my experience, even at peak times. VM allowing for overheads contributes to that. This is the only good thing about the VM service, which is why I am looking at Vodaphone Gigafast as an alternative. I am aware that many other VM customers are not so lucky. Their low up speed and high latency are deal breakers for me.

I get what you are saying about sharing out broadband capacity and that ISPs assume that we aren't all caning our connections all of the time. I'm just suggesting that overprovision of the config file increases the chances of customers getting the down and upstream speeds they have paid for.

BTW. I didn't suggest that VM have no contention. In my case they have mitigated it successfully. I would thank you for not suggesting that I am delusional. Ascribing intellectual weakness to someone you think is wrong, is very bad manners.