Recommend new FTTC provider please.

Hi All,

My contract with Aquiss expires next month and I am looking for advice as to which FTTC providers I should look at next. The reason for the move is that the peak allowance will not be enough as my brothers will be moving back home soon and the packages offered by Aquiss with the higher peak usage allowances are quite expensive. As the connection will be used for gaming then latency will be a big factor for me when choosing my new ISP.

Looking at the FTTC comparison spreadsheet the BT retail unlimited 'Infinity' package seems to fit the bill, priced at £28/ month with 'unlimited' downloads and unlimited landline calls.

Virgin's 100Meg service is now live in my area. I actually tried the 50Meg package for a month but latency was a big iffy at around 30-35 ms with a small amount of jitter. I currently get 23ms on FTTC with no jitter. If I was to move over to the 100Meg package would there be any improvement in latency or would it make no difference?

Any advice would be welcome!

Thanks

Im not a virgin customer and never likely to be but from what i have been reading from virgin customers , its very dependent on where you live and how congested there network is in that area , if you have already suffered jitters on there network , its very likely you still will , what ever package you are on , unless there have been upgrades in your area .

BT are very competitive and traffic manage there network , so ping's for gaming should stay good as there priority packets but this is dependent on your line quality as they seem to have some savage interleaving depths that can make your ping suffer and to date there is no control over the interleaving on FTTC .

In reply to a post by woweebert:

Im not a virgin customer and never likely to be but from what i have been reading from virgin customers , its very dependent on where you live and how congested there network is in that area , if you have already suffered jitters on there network , its very likely you still will , what ever package you are on , unless there have been upgrades in your area .

BT are very competitive and traffic manage there network , so ping's for gaming should stay good as there priority packets but this is dependent on your line quality as they seem to have some savage interleaving depths that can make your ping suffer and to date there is no control over the interleaving on FTTC .

Thanks, I have been having a good read on the Virgin media forums and as you say the quality of the connection depends entirely on the levels of congestion within my local area. I could I suppose sign up to see what the quality of the connection is like and cancel under Virgin's 30 day no quibble cancellation policy.

Price wise BT retail offer the best overall package and I would not have to worry about keeping an eye on my peak usage. As gaming for me is a priority then latency is key. My only sticking point with BT retail is their 18 month contracts as there could be future offerings from both Sky/Be in the meantime.

We've had infinity for 14 months now and it's been fine.

I'm in N.Ireland and my ping to the BBC site for example is usually <25ms. On game servers it's usually under 40.

I'm not sure what the upload is on Virgin but you might find the 10mbit useful on FTTC.