Aquiss do 550/75M for £50 per month or gigabit for £55. First 6 months half price, 12 month contract, no setup fee but you have to bring your own router. Static IPv4 and IPv6, and real human beings who answer tickets.

I have their 330/50M service as that's the sweet spot in their pricing at £45. The next tier down is only £3 cheaper for half the speed (160/30M).

FTTP is a shared medium, that's why nobody can guarantee the speeds. The total available on an Openreach FTTP connection is 2.4Gbps download (1.2Gbps upload) divided between up to 32 users on one splitter, which goes back to one OLT port in the exchange. So when someone like you is downloading at 950Mbps continuously, that makes less bandwidth available for other people in your area - and vice versa.

"High radial counts" is totally meaningless. They might have said something about RADIUS I guess, which is what's used to authenticate a session, but once your session is established it has no effect on the bandwidth delivered to you.

You're quite right that as well as FTTP congestion in the Openreach last mile, there can be congestion in the ISP's own network out to the Internet. As for ISPs buying less capacity than they need, it depends what you mean by "need". Nobody buys bandwidth equal to the number of customers they have multiplied by the peak bandwidth each customer has bought: that would be mad. They monitor their usage, and increase their capacity as demand requires.

Vodafone *is* cheap, and you may find that if you need to talk to their customer service department, it's not great. But you could say the same about BT.

BTW, at 500GB per month, you're not a heavy user by any stretch. In the OFCOM market report from July 2022, the *average* household usage on fixed broadband connections was 453GB. AAISP Home::1 has two plans: normal usage has a 1TB/month cap, and high usage has a 10TB/month cap. (This is probably the best home ISP you can buy)

Downloading 20GB at 900M takes about 3 minutes. At 300M it takes about 9 minutes. Either way you're going to need to make a cup of tea and have some biscuits

Personally, I would take 300M from a high-end provider with good customer service and static IPv4/IPv6 over 900M from Vodafone or BT. But it's down to each person's individual needs, preference and risk profile.

Edited by candlerb (Wed 11-Oct-23 13:57:32)

In reply to a post by AND_OR_ELSE:

I can't get Giganet or Virgin here, annoying it's a block of flats, yet all the houses around the area have access to 3 FTTP products (Openreach, Virgin, Grain) – I can only use Openreach.

If you're on Openreach you *should* be able to get Giganet, I'm on an Openreach connection and was able to order my Giganet service as soon as the fibre was installed. If their website says no, get in touch with their customer services.
I've also just renewed my contract for another 12 months as I've been very happy with the service and doing so means no price rise for the next 12 months.

Vodafone shows as £36 for me but that is super cheap. They seem to still be in the customer acquisition phase but that used to focus on FTTC customers.

I’m still checking roadworks and engineering activity in my town - hoping openreach or nexfibre are available before Christmas.

In reply to a post by Kr1s69:

I’m following their financial challenges but as it’s via openreach I don’t think there’s a huge issue if they fail. The eero will work with other networks too so remains useful.

If the service is genuinely bad then I’d look to migrate and take the financial hit, however I’ve not heard a lot of complaints about the actual product for a while (customer service is always terrible at most large ISPs)

There’s a chance Nexfibre get here before openreach so Virgin Media are also on my list of options.

I suppose being on Openreach you will be chucked to another provider if Talk Talk fail. Talk Talk service itself is ok these days by the seems of it, it is only when things go wrong that the problems start.
Plusnet is a large ISP and their customer services was ok, or it was the few times I used it.

When you say the router is limited, what do you really want to do with your router? Unless you have a huge network, BT own router will work ok. It is a bit bloated and once some of the stuff is disabled it works well.

If you live alone then even a 100Mb/s will do what you need, some people pay for more than they need.

Plusnet was fine for me, I can't say much about other FTTC providers as I was only on plusnet, but going by other people, they are more or less all the same, apart from customer service, prices and router. If you think BT router is limited, then plusnet's is even worse in that respect. I preferred Plusnet's router.

I think Vodafone makes it difficult for you to use your own router, if that is what you want.