Regrade to Zen Office

I was thinking of upgrading my Zen Pro package to Zen Office, but would like some clarification of the advantages.

What are the "Peak times" defined as (the period during which traffic prioritisation and guaranteed download speeds are applied)?

Outside of the Peak times (early evenings and at weekends), are there no speed or contention benefits over the Zen Pro package?

I am trying to get improved reliability when streaming HD video over the Internet during the hours 6-9 pm. The service requires a steady 2.7 Mbps max, but at present I am getting dropouts in the streaming, I assume, due to contention at the exchange, and this spoils the enjoyment of watching the music streamed.

Maybe going fibre broadband would be a better bet, than switching to an Office product?

There are no defined 'peak times'. The prioritisation applies so the minimum speed shouldn't drop below the stated amount regardless of when the network is used - essentially it's minimising the effect of contention when it comes in to effect.

If you're okay with the usage amount on Zen Pro, and are in a Fibre area, then I think you'd probably see more benefit - the minimum speeds are higher on Fibre anyway; assuming you can get reasonable Fibre speeds where you are. (12 Mbps minimum on FTTC, versus 4Mbps on the Office services - assuming you sync at 8Mbps or more currently).

regards,
Phil.

We are in a fibre FTTC area; but (a) the cost is a bit too much at present and (b) we don't need the disruption associated with having an onsite BT engineer just yet.

I have considered that we would move to fibre next summer; but in the meantime I'm looking for an improvement in contention at the times of the day when it seems to slow round here (evenings from 5pm onwards and at weekends); also the 400GB package would be useful - at present we are close to using up the 200GB on Zen Pro and have to carefully monitor daily throughout the month; 400GB would mean I could stop doing that and be certain we had enough bandwidth for everything we want to do. The 3-4 Mbps guaranteed speed should help with the HD streaming service.

So I might go Zen Office as a stop-gap until next summer; but I was worried it might not help at the busy times of the day - only during "office hours".

Thanks
Nigel

Morning,

Sorry to hijack the thread, could you do me a favour please? Can you run the BT Speedtest during the day and evening, including the weekend, and email the results. If this is a performance issue, we may be able to sort this.

Kindest Regards,

I think it's probably too late, I regraded the line last night and have been informed BT will switch me across to the Zen Office product tomorrow morning.

I will see how the line performs on the new service

Thanks anyway
Nigel

Well the regrade to Zen Office occurred this morning. Since it involved a BT engineer at the local exchange doing something, I did rather expect to either lose service for a short period of time, or have the router disconnect, resync & reconnect.

In the event none of this happened - why?

What has the engineer done at the exchange and why did it not cause the router to resync? Do I need to manually reboot the router?

Thanks
Nigel

There's no physical change required by an engineer - you're not moved to any different equipment, so I don't know why there would have been an engineer visit. Was there something in our emails that indicated an engineer was involved in this?

regards,
Phil.

From the email I received from "customer services" after placing the regrade order:

"We have received a confirmed date from BT for the work to be completed at the exchange with regard to your Broadband service regrade order.

Your service regrade will take effect at a time between 8.00am and 11.59pm on the date shown below"

In the absence of any change being made at the exchange, how does the regrade work to provide reduced contention and a guaranteed higher throughput speed?

Edited by deleted (Thu 06-Dec-12 13:39:15)

I've tracked the email down and I'll see if we can do something to clarify things, though it doesn't say anything about an engineer being involved in the regrade process. It's a fairly generic one for regrades - some involve changes at the exchange some are essentially a system change (e.g. care level).

The regrade essentially changes the rules applied to your service - so during periods of high usage other services without the elevated priority would experience slow down more than your service. It's not a change in contention - it's a change in the effects of contention through prioritisation of traffic to deliver a higher minimum speed during busy periods.

It's been years since we've made reference to contention in terms of minimum speed expectations on Broadband as the old ratios (pre ADSLMax the published thresholds were 50:1 home, 20:1 office) were never a true reflection of customer experience; the thresholds published now give a "real world" indication of what to expect. We don't have details on the contention ratios behind it, but BT manage their capacity to ensure the thresholds are met for (I think) 95% of peak time - where peak is not a defined period of time but when the particular network is at it's busiest.

regards,
Phil.

Edited by deleted (Thu 06-Dec-12 13:50:00)

No the email didn't mention the word engineer but "changes at the exchange" suggest work being done at our end and that kind of implies the involvement of a BT engineer.

Thanks for the clarification which was useful reading.

NigelS