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I'm moving house, so I'm in the market for a new provider.
I'm currently with Vivaciti, and I have zero complaints. I mean zero, they're amazing. Been with them for ~6 years.
My issue is, can I do better? or can I go cheaper? Is there actually much difference between providers.
When I move, I'll be working from home a great deal. So, I'll be using video conferencing, VOIP (like skype for business etc.) regularly during the day. This in addition to general evening usage of Streaming, Gaming and downloading. I'll also need a static ip, and an IPv6 range.
I'm techy by trade (not just a normal techy, I've been doing infrastructure for many years), so I'm not in need of any tech support. Having a 9-5 support line for issues with the provider is more than enough for me.
My question then is, what sort of difference does it make going to different underlying provider? I know vivaciti is an Entanet reseller, I seem to recall their being another one called Obit?
I'm looking at either staying with Vivaciti, pulse8 looks good, or possibly going mainstream with Sky/TalkTalk?
Any insights would be helpful.
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All depends on how each provider is picking up the GEA data feed and how they get that to the wider Internet
So in terms of connection speed no major differences, but things like peak time performance that you experience can vary
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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Thanks,
So is it still (what I've read is called) the backhaul provider (TT Business, Entanet, etc.) that is the biggest diferentiator when it comes to peak performance? or is can the reseller have an impact?
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Both backhaul and reseller can have an impact, e.g. a backhaul provider may have lots of capacity, but if your reseller is buying the cheapest service quality you may not get the best bit of the cherry at peak times.
Alas its like predicting how long to drive from Manchester to Glasgow on 14th November, i.e. until you try it you cannot be sure, and past performance is no guarantee of ongoing performance
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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And whether it will be quicker by motorway or A-roads.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 57825/13835kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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I would say yes - a friend was on a BT 'dis-interested' fibre contract at 12 down. He went to Sky at 2/3 of the price with better phone and other packages when BT would do nothing to improve things and got 17 down. Same line, same exchange. You could say it is down the installed kit of Sky, but then they actually better the performance of those providing the broadband they are re-selling!
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I have used sky BT and Talktalk and they were all almost identical to me.
Sky had the most downtime (network related) and had congestion for a couple of months.
All providers ultimately were / are very similar but CS varies massively.
I have BT and Talktalk active now and they are equally as good as one another, although I had to change the default Talktalk router, I just got an older model on eBay for £25 which was known to be totally stable.
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FTTC has nothing to do with Sky exchange equipment, and they are not reselling BT FTTC.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 57825/13835kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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I pay Talktalk £17.60 a month for fibre optic, that includes the line rental. I have an uptime of 82 days right now, no slowdowns ever and no drop outs ever. For the price it's an absolute steal.
I know if it goes horribly wrong and there's a complex line fault then I will spend hours trying to resolve the issues speaking with India. For me at that price I accept the poor CS.
I have downloaded well over 1Tb in a month on Talktalk without any slowdown or issues.
If CS really matters to you then pay extra. If all you want is a connection then yes Talktalk is providing me something as good as every other ISP I have used right now.
If you know your line is fairly stable I'd take the risk and go mass market where you can save a good deal.
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I'm currently with Vivaciti, and I have zero complaints. I mean zero, they're amazing. Been with them for ~6 years.
If you've been very satisfied with Vivaciti, then stick with them at your new address if they can provide the same service using the same backhaul. Better the devil......
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What - they have their own fibre trunking, then?
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FTTC is provided by Openreach to all ISPs, and handed over at the fibre headend exchange to one of BT Wholesale, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone via an Openreach GEA cable link. Each of them buys those cable links from Openreach.
The GEA cable links are each connected to the respective backhaul through a switch, not through the DSLAM/MSANs that they have there which only provide ADSLx.
BT FTTC and Sky FTTC are both provided in the same way. Sky is not resold BT.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 57825/13835kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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What is a 'fibre headend exchange' and how would I recognise one? Area SD.
The undeniable fact, howevwr, is that another ISP manges to provide a better speed for a customer than the infrastructure owner.
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On FTTC in a large number of cases the fibre does not go from the cabinet to the same exchange as the phone line, even though the phone line exchange is shown as FTTC/FTTP enabled. "Enabled" in this instance means available to users whose copper phone line goes to the exchange concerned.
A fibre headend exchange is where the Openreach handover links are, and may service several other exchanges as well as its own phone users.
In the future it is likely that as phone services move over to fibre that the non-headend exchanges will gradually be decommissioned. At least for these services.
Re the infrastructure provider, as explained earlier the FTTC from the user to the headend exchange is nothing to do with the retailer, or even the wholesaler.
That isn't strictly true, in that they can select three different Openreach DLM settings - speed, standard and stable. AIUI BT Wholesale specify speed, though maybe their retailers can opt for one of the other two. BT Wholesale ( I think) offer standard, stable and super stable matching up to the Openreach three, as those are what they offer on their own ADSLx services.
I believe BT Consumer use the BTW Standard = Openreach Speed.
Bear in mind this discussion arises from your statement that Sky resell BT FTTC, and the context was of retail ISPs. i.e. BT Consumer.
So we end up back at the question in the Subject. Assuming that means the retailer, the answer is yes. But not primarily because of the FTTC service itself. Mainly because of the backhaul and routing capacity used by the retailer. In exactly the same way as with ADSLx.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 57825/13835kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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Thank you for that. I take it there is no way of 'discovering' which are 'fibre headend exchanges'?
So, for the OP, we are agreed that switching to Sky from BT produced a better speed.
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In a way, but not because the Sky service is faster in general than BT. The dramatic increase obtained by your friend will be down to some other major factor causing slow speed on his particular connection. Speed differences of that magnitude due to ISP change are not normal.
Possibilities are:
- temporary congestion on BT at his exchange;
- different wireless performance between the two routers if using wireless;
- at some point his modem had re-sync'ed at a low speed during a thunderstorm or other "noise" event, if he hadn't re-sync'ed later;
- for similar reasons to the previous point banding had been applied to the line by the Openreach DLM and was removed at migration time through a DLM reset.
And more.
Did he ever have 17Mbps on BT, particularly at initial connection?
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 57825/13835kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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Some posters can establish where the headend is for any particular exchange, but as far as the end user is concerned it is irrelevant.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 57825/13835kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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The problem for the customer is that they don't know what they will get until after it is installed and they are locked into a 12-24 month agreement. The government should ensure that customers can leave without penalty if performance is unsatisfactory, particularly in the first couple of months after installation.
Michael Chare
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ISPs provide speed estimates as you go through the sign up process. Due to how FTTC is setup (as explained earlier) congestion is very rare on the main providers.
Where congestion does exist it does get resolved almost always on the main FTTC providers, & if users submit enough evidence of said congestion they are allowed to leave the contract penalty free in almost all cases, provided the user actually logs a formal complaint and conducts speed tests using a wired connection etc. That said, usually by the time the complaint has progressed a couple of months have passed and often is the case the capacity has been increased in such time so the user ends up staying put.
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I would say yes - a friend was on a BT 'dis-interested' fibre contract at 12 down. He went to Sky at 2/3 of the price with better phone and other packages when BT would do nothing to improve things and got 17 down. Same line, same exchange. You could say it is down the installed kit of Sky, but then they actually better the performance of those providing the broadband they are re-selling!
That doesn't make much sense. Maybe the Sky router was able to sync at a better rate for whatever reason. However, the rest of the circuit is the same. Openreach manage FTTC connections right back to the headend.
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Indeed, Icaras - facts sometimes don't.
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Interesting. I have a line to a Market A exchange. I can't order Sky or Talk Talk FTTC but I could order Vodafone FTTC at a very reasonable price. At the moment I have a free ADSL (not ADSL2) service from Plusnet which has got quite a few months left to run. I have to do something when the contract expires as the standard Plusnet price is about £18.00. pm. I am wondering if Vodafone FTTC would be a sensible option. I had an earlier bad experience with the Post Office but at least they let me leave without making a fuss.
Michael Chare
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Hence the Ofcom Speeds Code of Practice that all the largest providers sign up to, though people do need to be aware that sometimes the reasons for slow speeds mean that no provider will be able to do better.
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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The Ofcom voluntary Speeds code of practice is a start, but it does not go as far as it could to ensure that customers are advised of an "actual throughput" and to a large extent receive this 24/7.
Michael Chare
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What is an ISP supposed to do about users doing speedtests wirelessly, connected to their router from the far end of the house with a couple of floor levels intervening?
Possibly with no computers/laptops - just phone or tablet.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 57825/13835kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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If the ISP has its own speed test they should be able to tell quite a bit about the device being used. They should also know the state of their back haul etc. It should be possible to define a sensible set of rules which allow a customer to leave without penalty when performance is poor.
My new laptop has no ethernet port, possible because the laptop base is to thin to accommodate one!
Michael Chare
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Wireless cannot be relied upon in the same way Ethernet can.
Regarding you being a market A exchange. Generally this matters for ADSL but not so much for FTTC. Your FTTC cabinet will almost certainly not go back to your market A exchange. It will go to a main exchange, perhaps in the nearest city for instance, this is known as a fibre headend. Here you would expect there to be many more options available. This is why often market A users cannot get sky or Talktalk on ADSL but can on fibre, the fibre cabinets never touch their market A exchange, they just go back to an exchange where all the major providers are available usually.
It would be worth you getting someone here to check out what exchange is your fibre headend.
Regarding Vodafone, as it's a new ISP I do not know if they resell BT wholesale products in exchanges where they do not have their own equipment. If this is the case I would stay clear. You do not want a resold product.
For you I would personally be looking seriously at BT and Plusnet, factoring in quidco cash back, but certainly give the likes of sky a chat as your fibre headend may be served by sky.
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My laptop doesn't have ethernet either  . But I have an old one next to the router connected by ethernet in case I need a wired link.
Speed tests are not usually, if ever, device detecting so far as I know. They pick up the IP address of course, and maybe the device operating system. Postcode if you choose to tell them. Then the state of the wireless connection at the end user can vary from one second to the next from hundreds of Mbps to 11Mbps or less.
How do they know you aren't streaming to one device while doing speed tests? Even wired? What if Win10 is doing its own thing downloading stuff and you don't know about it?
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 57825/13835kbps @ 600m. - BQM
Edited by RobertoS (Mon 17-Oct-16 00:38:53)
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Our tester is certainly device testing, hence the fastest tablet of the month prize on twitter.
Detecting wireless is harder, and even harder is detecting whether wireless range is the problem.
The ultimate conclusion will be more complex product base, i.e. you pay £x for a guaranteed speed of 2 Mbps, with burst to 76 Mbps, i.e. as per lots of Ethernet services
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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The two nearby exchanges both have Sky and Talk Talk LLU presence. As I can't order their FTTC products, I assume that my cabinet is not connected to either of them. It appears that I could order Vodafone FTTC. They don't have a presence at these exchanges, or my local exchange so they must have bought back haul capacity from some one.
Historically Vodafone have had a reputation for quality for their mobile phone products. Have they kept this philosophy for their broadband products?
Michael Chare
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I had a different thought:
If the ISPs were to be concerned that customers might try to leave because of poor performance when they were not entitled to, they could supply routers that would allow a speed test to be initiated from the router's web user interface. The router could ensure that only its speed test traffic was sent, perhaps to a special ISP IP address that would record the results. That way there should be no arguement as to whether the customer is getting the service that the ISP has contracted to supply, what ever that might be. The router could also report the connection speed at the same time just in case that was the cause of a customers poor performance.
Michael Chare
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What does the Checker say here?
https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/adsl.htm?s...
When you say Vodafone have a reputation for quality? What do you mean? Bad quality? Vodafone by far have the lowest 3G coverage, along with O2. They also have fairly sparse mast coverage even for 2G, but this has improved since the cornerstone agreement with O2. Either way, both O2/Vodafone are a long way behind in terms of data coverage. VF are also are the most complained about provider.
Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 17-Oct-16 14:52:56)
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Cost wise doing that does not make much sense as it will definitely add to the price of a router. Further, it does not guarantee anything as someone else in the home may be running uTorrent as the test is occurring.
Nothing 100% proves congestion without a shadow of a doubt, but ISPs in my view are decent at releasing customer who have congestion once an official complaint is logged. BT are also very good at dealing with congestion if you get to their high up team, with many users here citing they have been put on less congested routes and within a few days their congestion has gone away.
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Indeed, Icaras - facts sometimes don't.
Settle down. I'm not saying you're lying, im just saying it sounds odd. As I say Openreach manage FTTC connections, the router syncs with an Openreach DSLAM. Thats not how ADSL works, so the sync speed won't change beteeen providers.
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Most likely explanation being something like a change in how G.INP or Vectoring is running on the line and the change in VDSL modem at the consumer end. But as ever without masses more data its hard to draw a line.
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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Essentially its all about making the consumer kit actually managed hardware, and thus providers having the same visibility and monitoring as they do on core network kit.
What is going to be interesting is how will public handle seeing the buffer symbol on FTTH connections, while the issues over xDSL are removed with FTTH, the problems of capacity and congestion arise just as much, e.g. look at fixed connection speed service from Virgin Media
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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The checker link you provided says:
:
VDSL Range A (Clean) 42 31.4 7.7 6 -- Available -- --
VDSL Range B (Impacted) 30.8 15 7.1 3 -- Available -- --
WBC FTTP Availability Date
FTTP on Demand 330 30 -- Available -- --
ADSL Products
ADSL Max Up to 8 -- 7 to 8 Available -- --
Fixed Rate 2 -- -- Available -- --
I did use the past tense with regard to Vodafone quality! They have been slow to roll out 4G.
Michael Chare
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The ISP routers I have seen are built to order. I suspect the hardware could do what I suggest and there would be an additional cost to develop the firmware. The router could ensure that only its speed test traffic is passed to the ISP, whilst the test is taking place.
If I do move to Vodafone, and it won't be for some months, I will try and get some thing from the to say I can leave without penalty if the performance is bad, but I am reassured by your comments anyway.
Michael Chare
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they could supply routers that would allow a speed test to be initiated from the router's web user interface. The router could ensure that only its speed test traffic was sent, perhaps to a special ISP IP address that would record the results.
Which sounds like a great idea.
Till you then think that each isp would have to design their own firmware for the router (major cost) and that you would not be able to use your own router etc in house. As the router would have to be locked down to stop and tampering.
Add in which speed tester are they going to use? As we know just how these can vary.
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The routers for many ISPs are customized to order. There would need to be additional work done to provide the facility. There would no doubt be some cost for this work, but spread over many units this might not amount to very much. If customers want to use their own router they just could not use the facility.
Michael Chare
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I think the BT Smart Hub provides this function.
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Mine just links me to the BT wholesale speedtester
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