BT's FTTC v. Virgin Media's HFC

Hi,

In the city where I am looking for a new home, very few houses/flats have FTTP, which in my understanding is the best solution for home internet. So having this as a requirement is not really workable.

As far as I see the options then are FTTC provided by for example BT, with max speeds of around 80 / 20 Mbps DL / UL or HFC provided my Virgin Media which offers max speeds of 1130 (on average) / 52 (on average) Mbps DL / UL.

So the thing is that HFC as far I know uses coax cables where a lot of homes are bunched together on the same coax cable, and at peak hours the speeds might then be affected and perhaps also latency (also why they add the "on average").

So if you were a household of two people. where one uses the connection for gaming and therefore would like a low and stable latency and the other one for streaming which requires bandwidth, which one would you pick ? And which speed is sufficient?

For those uses I would go with the 80/20 FTTC if the FTTC. Whilst FTTC is more at the whim of degradation of lines it is much more stable for gaming than Virgin and that should be more than enough bandwidth to do streaming and gaming in a 2 person household. The only real downside compared to the faster speeds is game downloads (especially when you could be downloading 50GB plus, but it is more a matter of it taking longer than it actually stopping you doing anything).

Hi, ok thanks for the answer.

I guess 80 / 20 is under ideal circumstances, what if it is more like 50 / 10. Like for example this one from https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/
High(DL) Low(DL) High(DL) Low(DL)
VDSL Range A (Clean) help 75.7 55 20 13.9 49 Available
VDSL Range B (Impacted) help 73.7 49 19.7 12 40 Available

I assume this means you can at least assume 55 Mbps DL and 14 Mbps UL?

For the streaming is it standard HD or ultra HD. Ultra HD would increase the bandwidth requirement but even then if it was 50/10 then would most likely be ok. However, there is also the possibility that FTTC lines can degrade over time so a line that gives 50 now may only give 40 in a years time - there is no way to really predict it.

If gaming is important then FTTC will almost always give a more stable latency than we normally see from Virgin connections. If gaming is casual then it may not make much difference to you so you may want the higher bandwidth.

There is no definite answer to this and not all lines perform the same. Some FTTC lines are bad. Some Virgin lines are very stable. There is no hard and fast rule that will give you the answer.

So all I can tell you is that if I was in your position I would probably go FTTC if gaming was really important. If gaming is less important then the extra bandwidth would be tempting (although I am assuming that Virgin 1Gb is more expensive than getting an 80/10 FTTC so cost could also come into the equation).

We were a household with two older adults, a younger adult (our daughter) and her son.

During the day my wife and I would both use our connection for work - often with video conferences or large downloads. In te evening, my wife would often be on video training sessions and I would be surfing and maybe BBC iPlayer running. Daughter would be surfing, watch you-tube &c and grandson - just a little. And at times a niece or nephew staying who would be working too.

We had a 50+ down and 15+ up FTTC and I cannot remember ever having any bandwidth issues and even with the small amount of gaming, no problems.

The one you show that stats for is a worst case of 49/12 which is still good enough for two people.

In reply to a post by lo22:

And which speed is sufficient?

Depends if the games you play are those that download frequent 300GB patches, or if latency/variability is most important. Virgin's network is great for large downloads, 200MB or faster services. On FTTC you'll get slower speeds, but less variability in latency (for gaming "ping"). My friends kids have games on XBox that are insanely large and download updates all the time. They have 45 Mbps FTTC, and the kids are usually moaning about "slow internet" on the weekend... kids have no clue

I am indeed looking to have a low and stable latency while I am gaming, so it does sound like FTTC is the way to go for me!! And haha, yeah waiting for transfers I can definitely do that, it just requires a bit of planning!

Another thing, if you have someone else taking up quite a lot of bandwidth on a 50 DL / 13 UL Mpbs connection, do you end up having problems with bufferbloat when it comes to gaming?

Oh and thanks so much for the feedback, you guys are really great!!

Edited by lo22 (Sat 10-Sep-22 08:44:35)

And might old fashioned ADSL be better than the Virgin Media's HFC solution when it comes to latency and jitter?

Running a BT Mini Hub at the moment, due to broadband issues (don't ask) and it runs about 30mb DL on 4G. However I am able to stream 4K and play on the XBox, so the 30mb bandwidth seems okay. Previously when I had both VM and BT all gaming was routed out over BT for best latency and jitter. Yes, the VM connection was faster at 200mb, but the 65mb BT was more stable for gaming.

On Cable if someone starts a download they can increase the jitter of the connection even more, even only using 20-30% of the max speed can cause issues. FTTC is less impacted until you get closer to maxing out the connection.

One of your demands are against a VM weak point.

VM have suffered for years with jitter, which is essentially variable latency.

There is good VM areas where the jitter might be really low, but even those areas will be vulnerable to occasional spikes in latency which may depending on the game be a problem. It depends on the game really, if you playing something online thats not a twitch shooter, you will probably be fine. I think its only really shooters it would be a problem.

Streaming I assume you mean things like Netflix, VM should be fine on that, but at the same time FTTC will be more than enough as long as you get at least a 30mbit or so sync speed. Just on FTTC you will have to be careful to not do something like download a game same time as streaming. Whilst on my gig1 cable connection I can download a game and the connection is af its idle, no issues at all watching a stream at the same time. The reason for this is packet loss is much worse than jitter, and when your downstream is maxed out without shaping then packet loss will occur on your streaming.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 30-Nov-22 11:05:23)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

One of your demands are against a VM weak point.

VM have suffered for years with jitter, which is essentially variable latency.

There is good VM areas where the jitter might be really low, but even those areas will be vulnerable to occasional spikes in latency which may depending on the game be a problem. It depends on the game really, if you playing something online thats not a twitch shooter, you will probably be fine. I think its only really shooters it would be a problem.

Streaming I assume you mean things like Netflix, VM should be fine on that, but at the same time FTTC will be more than enough as long as you get at least a 30mbit or so sync speed. Just on FTTC you will have to be careful to not do something like download a game same time as streaming. Whilst on my gig1 cable connection I can download a game and the connection is af its idle, no issues at all watching a stream at the same time. The reason for this is packet loss is much worse than jitter, and when your downstream is maxed out without shaping then packet loss will occur on your streaming.

Hi thanks a lot for the explanation. I am indeed going to play an FPS shooter game, so therefore I have chosen to go for FTTC.

So when a FTTC is maxed out one experiences packet loss? Why is that? Just asking out of curiosity!

I can only speak from my own experience.

If the line is saturated (maxed out utilisation) then packets will get dropped aka packet loss.

Assuming there is no prioritisation then it will be indiscriminate, so probably some packet loss on everything you do.

You can do QoS on your router to help mitigate this, and/or cap your game downloads to a specific speed, all the PC store apps have bandwidth cap features implemented. For consoles you could cap them via QoS on your router.

If you are the only gamer, I dont think its a big deal, you just dont download games/updates whilst you in a gaming session. (Plus I think consoles auto throttle downloads whilst a game is running).

I think you made the right choice going FTTC.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 01-Dec-22 10:41:44)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

I can only speak from my own experience.

If the line is saturated (maxed out utilisation) then packets will get dropped aka packet loss.

Assuming there is no prioritisation then it will be indiscriminate, so probably some packet loss on everything you do.

You can do QoS on your router to help mitigate this, and/or cap your game downloads to a specific speed, all the PC store apps have bandwidth cap features implemented. For consoles you could cap them via QoS on your router.

If you are the only gamer, I dont think its a big deal, you just dont download games/updates whilst you in a gaming session. (Plus I think consoles auto throttle downloads whilst a game is running).

I think you made the right choice going FTTC.

Exactly, regarding downloading when you are not playing!!

And cheers, I appreciate the feedback