In reply to a post by zyborg47:

In reply to a post by tdw42:

The Openreach connection between a headend exchange and customer premises is the same regardless of the ISP. It is a shared service, the underlying FTTP GPON network is 2.5Gbps down / 1.25Gbps up shared by upto 32 customers and the guaranteed rates for all the bandwith profiles are published.

The link between headend exchanges via the ISPs own or bought-in backhaul and datacentre(s) to the internet is usually unknown as it is commercially confidential information - if you can cram more users into a given amount of backhaul capacity with the hope that not all of them use lots of bandwidth at the same time you make more profit.

Ha, ha, I was right, with the 32:1 ratio. It is less with Zzoomm so i have heard, 1:16.

Given how long you've been here and how often this has been mentioned I would hope so! No way Zzoomm are running on 1:16 though: no-one builds out with that ratio to homes initially. They'll be at 1:64 at least and aren't comparable anyway.

In reply to a post by PCJM40:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I was right, with the 32:1 ratio. It is less with Zzoomm so i have heard, 1:16.

I think it is normally 30:1 with 2 unused/spares for Openreach PON

And that's the *footprint*, i.e. ports are reserved for properties whether or not they're taking FTTP. So if you're the first person on the street to get FTTP, and everyone else is on FTTC, the ratio you get will be much less.

In practice, the split ratio here makes little difference unless you're very unlucky and you are next door to a video production company that works from home. The actual average usage per household is something like 5Mbps at the moment.

Openreach only provides the "last mile" connectivity (well, the "last 20km" would be more accurate). Your choice of ISP will affect how your traffic is routed to their point-of-presence and from there to the outside Internet. But to be honest, the big brands all do a pretty good job of this.

The ones to worry about are the small Altnets, some of whom are several clues short of a load, and multi-hour outages or service degradation are not uncommon. They're also the ones who may not have sufficient IP addresses to give out one to each customer, so share addresses between customers with CGNAT. It's usually OK for simple web browsing and streaming, but it limits the more advanced things you can do with your connection.