Looking to get fibre optic at Home.

Hello i have been on BeThere and o2 ADSL while they are great i would like to make the jump to fibre optic after experiencing it at my Uni Home via Virgin Media. Hopefully you lot can give me some good advice on because virgin gave be gripe with traffic management and billing and the extra cost over the 18months contract(im used to 12 months you see ). I would possibly consider virgin if i can get a cheapish package including TV and phone assuming its better value than Sky's.

I have just been looking at Sky's offerings the 38 and the not so official 76 along with the 12 month contract and truly unlimited no traffic cap does seem like the best choice for me. I compared Sky with Zen's Lite and Active offerings and sky seems to trump in price, usage and connection fee.

Now i play a lot of games on console and PC and have started backing up my works online so maybe a little above the average upload would be nice.

If possible could you help me by speaking in layman's terms also, lol and if Talk Talk is a good option i would like to know about that as well, thanks.

Edit: I was checking BT's infinity 38 as it has much better upload and i live close to the exchange also. However the cheaper infinity has 40gb usage each month. I hardly torrent but i have my Xbox, PS3 and PC online, connected and playing games most of the day. I'm not sure what bandwidth is like nowadays but when i was with wanadoo 2gb usage each month i never got charged extra. So could anyone enlighten me on that please?

Edited by deleted (Tue 10-Jul-12 16:48:15)

FYI, Virgin Media isn't fibre optic. They use misleading advertising.

Sky FTTC is the best service out there.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

FYI, Virgin Media isn't fibre optic. They use misleading advertising.

Sky FTTC is the best service out there.

Have you tried it? If yes how consistent is it? What's it like for gaming and is the router any good?

Very consistent thus far. Fine for gaming, latency is under 10ms to BBC. I can't comment on the router as I'm using my own solution.

Why is virgin not fibre optic?

It's coax. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Internet_access

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

It's coax.

True, but I don't think it really matters from a technical point of view.

There's no particular difficulty in pushing gigahertz signals down a good quality coax cable- think of your TV aerial...

By that logic BT Infinity shouldn't mention fibre either as its just VDSL over copper?

It's misleading advertising and makes people believe the service is capable of more. Shame on the ASA for allowing it. I'm not knocking cable as a product, it's great.

Indeed. VDSL2 shouldn't be marketed as a fibre product. FTTP on the other hand...

Rightio.... I shall comment

I had the 40mbps product but rang up and got upgraded to the 80mbps product no problems.

Consistent: it's ALWAYS full sync speed. It never slows down not even during peak hours. I sync at 80 down.
Torrents are great too.

The router. The wifi is actually very good. It has a max rate of 144 down on wifi not 300mbps... This in real practice gets me 75mbps via wifi so it's fine.

Compared to the superhub the sky router reaches rooms the superhub couldn't even manage a connection. & in these rooms I see 20 mbps via wifi. There's around 5 walls between the router and those rooms and the walls have the metal foil style insulation. So very very good there. I was expecting to get absolutely nothing.

The router also has been left turned on behind a fridge for around 7 months constantly. It never once needed a reboot or anything.

Gaming. I don't do gaming on sky but the pings are very good on their FTTC.

When the router signals good I see 75 mbps wifi no issues.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Tue 10-Jul-12 17:57:54)

Will i be paying more in the short term on Sky than on a virgin 18 month contract?

Not really sure.

Sky's 80mbps is £30 a month + rental

40mbps is £20 plus line rental.

Any more info you lot could give me on some other ISP that compete with Sky for price and upload traffic management, usage. Possibly some London only ISP that cover the greater area also?

Thanks

The sky FTTC product is as far as i know just the same as the BT retail offerings, resold by sky , as it is subject to the antiquated BT profiling and DLM which does not always work well on some lines , although any reduction in sync & throughput is beneficial to BTW /Openwound

In reply to a post by tommy45:

The sky FTTC product is as far as i know just the same as the BT retail offerings, resold by sky , as it is subject to the antiquated BT profiling and DLM which does not always work well on some lines , although any reduction in sync & throughput is beneficial to BTW /Openwound

No!

FTTC is subject to a totally different DLM that IPStream ADSL was in the "old days".

SKY "Resells" GEA in the same way that SKY "Resells" the copper pair from the exchange to the house.

What will matter is whether SKY, TT or BT Wholesale has the right level of backhaul for their customer base.

Since users of P2P will, in general, stay away from BT (a generalisation, I know, there are ways round it) then SKY will generally have to provide more backhaul per customer than BT wholesale.

Obviously it bepends on whether BT Retail are prepared to invest in sufficient backhaul - the current pricing of the 80 / 20 Infinity product doesnt leave much scope for this!

Sky has been adding 10GigE to some LLU exchanges and with its own core network can shift this data around the UK much cheaper than the BT Wholesale WBC network does.

So for Tommy45 to say Sky FTTC is same as BT Retail is just a lot of misinformation

Finally made up my mind and i am going to sign up to Sky's Fibre Unlimited with Sky landline. It's a couple of quid more than what i was paying for BeThere (was on 8meg out of 16 )with BT landline but i get a pretty decent service by the looks of things.

If anyone has anything else to add before i take the plunge please say it ASAP.

Good choice.

im on vm 100mb and if i could get sky fiber i would jump ship asap, goes down to 50mb if ya use the connected on steam and stuff, the pings and online gaming can be a prob but head line speed good but its really a 50mb service, the network is old and needs alot of work, i think the fttc network is alot more future proof and when ya can get fiber on demand it will be even better, alot of congestion too.


My Broadband Ping

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Sky has been adding 10GigE to some LLU exchanges and with its own core network can shift this data around the UK much cheaper than the BT Wholesale WBC network does.

So for Tommy45 to say Sky FTTC is same as BT Retail is just a lot of misinformation

I may be wrong about any decrease of sync being beneficial to open wound (sky fttc ) as it would be beneficial to sky instead,
But as far as the DLM and profiling go, there is no isp able or willing to offer a FTTC service free from this why is that? because only open wound have complete control over that and they will not share this with CP's ? that if it is the case is the part of the sky FTTC which is no different to the bt wholesale FTTC products

As for the dlm being different to that ADSL used , how is it different, it raises the TSNR and can switch to interleave both are not to the advantage of the end user ,
But are to the ISP as they may save on support calls and bandwidth as a result over time, If i'm paying the bill i want the choice it's as simple as that really

2 weeks it's gonna take for an engineer to come round, 2 weeks!

Has Sky an American outlet for FTTC, as I assume they must have, with all this talk about fiber?. As far as I know Sky BB only works in the UK, where we have fibre, pavements and cars -not fiber, sidewalks and autos. Strange.......

In reply to a post by Kr1s69:

Why is virgin not fibre optic?

Virgin Media is Fibre Optic (FTTC) Fibre to the Cabinet. From the street cabinet it is coax. This is identical to BT's Openreach fibre product. We can argue about the quality of their respective networks. VM's have been in place for years!! The advantage of this configuration is that there are no issues with distance from the exchange. Effectively the exchange is on your street. Speeds of up to at least 400Mb are possible.

ISPs will provide you FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) If you are prepared to pay a lot for it. This is better mostly because you are not having to share channels with other users.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Virgin Media is Fibre Optic (FTTC) Fibre to the Cabinet. From the street cabinet it is coax. This is identical to BT's Openreach fibre product.

Actually VM is FTTN(ode), which is a large cabinet with cooling you can hear, like BT, then coax to the smaller cabinets and from them to the premises. The small cabs do not get fibre feed.

ISPs will provide you FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) If you are prepared to pay a lot for it.

Errr - no .

Openreach are rolling out FTTC to most areas and FTTP to some. The customer has no choice between them, and I think the end user installation cost (from Openreach) is the same. Some time in 2013 Openreach are going to make FTTP on demand available where FTTC is already available, but not where it isn't. (Apart from the ongoing FTTP rollout which is not "Fibre On Demand"). That is expected to have a high installation cost.

This is better mostly because you are not having to share channels with other users.

Well, sort of. Hugely more important in making it better is the complete removal of the circuit from copper connections, hence the elimination of the attenuation that copper suffers from.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 22-Jul-12 17:53:20)

Strictly speaking, fibre is available everywhere now...and has been for about 25-30 years. But perhaps that's just me being a pedant.

But it ain't called FTTC nor FTTP . And is certainly not what the poster was referring to.

If Openreach is so bad, then sub loop unbundling as Digital Region (and others) have done is an option for Sky.

You do release that Sky run their own DLM on their LLU services too? So would probably do similar on their own VDSL2 MSAN.

Of course reduced operators costs just mean the evil empires make more profits, nothing at all to do with the ability for broadband to have gone in price massively in last 12 years.

What can you say?
Pringles are chips & Fairy Cakes are muffins: it gets me - at my advanced age - quite confused!
Cheers, Les.

In reply to a post by lelboy:

Pringles are chips

Nope!

They used to be an excellent variation on crisps. Now they are crumbly polystyrene and tasteless pap.

Sadly, Bob, you're right.
On the one hand you could blame the manufacturers for creating such unpalatable dog-do, but the bigger villain is, I think, the buying public. If many of us didn't buy-in , en masse, to their advertising hype, then maybe they'd produce a better product. As it is, the buying public so often either accept what's put before them without question, or believe the hype and feel obliged to buy - because it'll make them better-looking/stronger/more attractive to the opposite (or the same) sex - and maybe even make them a celebrity (at least that's what the advertisements say!).
Me? I'll just keep with Smith's Crisps/Fry's Five Boys Chocolate and Ovaltine!
On to matters BB. I have just received my £25 cheque from ICM: they assured me that the download figures they advised me of "are" accurate i.e. 61meg DL so I suppose I should ignore all the TBB figures which often show lower?
Best wishes, Les.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If Openreach is so bad, then sub loop unbundling as Digital Region (and others) have done is an option for Sky.

You do release that Sky run their own DLM on their LLU services too? So would probably do similar on their own VDSL2 MSAN.

Of course reduced operators costs just mean the evil empires make more profits, nothing at all to do with the ability for broadband to have gone in price massively in last 12 years.

Yea no doubt about it ,if sky are able to use their dlm they will on FTTC, and of course it is one of the many reasons why sky is cheaper, and as for their idea of a 7db profile coupled ofcourse with DLM and no chance of fast path on their ADSL LLU ,products was one of the reasons i would not go to sky
But that my gripe, i don't mind paying a bit more for uk based support, with the added benefits of that isp having control of DLM fast path or interleave ect, but the sad fact is none at the present can offer this , unless talk talk will, but then they want to throttle speeds ect ,assuming they have the same control over fttc as sky do, If ukonline was still here you could bet that they would of been offering it on request

Edited by tommy45 (Tue 24-Jul-12 21:30:37)

On Openreach FTTC, (GEA), an ISP may impose its DLM on its own network, as BT Wholesale does to provide their IP Profile. Sky may well have some similar system, and TT too.

But none of the three can directly set the SNRM. End of!

They can request Standard (apparently 6dB), stable (9db?) or super-stable (12dB?).

Then there is a prioritisation system they can invoke wrt the traffic on any given user's line, but all that does is play with the way the bandwidth available to that customer is divided up between that customer's applications - VOIP, streaming, etc. They cannot prioritise one customer over another on the GEA service. Once it is handed over to them at the exchange, then of course they can do whatever they like.

In reply to a post by tommy45:

But that my gripe, i don't mind paying a bit more for uk based support, with the added benefits of that isp having control of DLM fast path or interleave ect, but the sad fact is none at the present can offer this

I think you'll find AAISP claim they will beat BTwholesale into providing this for their clients.

Your initial post is a bit confusing.

Do you want a new fibre-optic line? Neither Virgin nor Sky are likely to offer a fibre-optice line to your premise (unless you want a leased line of some sort).

Or are you talking about Sky's VDSL packages or Virgin's coax cable offers?

I haven't read through this whole thread, but I thought it might be good to clarify things first! I see a lot of confusion among users here on this forum, talking about copper lines as if they were a fibre-optic service!