Are all FTTC ISP pretty much the same?

I'm moving, and that means saying bye bye to my 1000/1000 Hyperoptic connection. New place can get FTTC but not Virgin. Speeds are showing as 54-71 for downstream.

I've previously used Plusnet, and after the way I was treated when cancelling the line to have Hyperoptic installed I'd rather avoid them if I can - but also if they're significantly cheaper than others.. that might sway it.

Any ISPs to look into, or to avoid? Are any more or less cooperative with allowing government agencies access to their systems / logging all the things?

If the local infrastructure is in poor condition and/or congested it won't matter which provider you choose, they all piggyback off the same cabinets and phone lines.

Customer service will be the only thing to differentiate them TBH.

That's PN ruled out for me then really, as they were not good in that respect. I've no reason to suspect the local infrastructure is poor though, the quoted speeds seem toward the high end of FTTC

I've just been looking at their pricing structure, and can't believe that line rental is £17.99 which is crazy when you see that BT Wholesale actually reduced this fee in December 2015 to £86.72 PA + VAT works out at £8.67 per month. Source, see: WLR Basic Line Rental pa

GeX said:

That's PN ruled out for me then really, as they were not good in that respect. I've no reason to suspect the local infrastructure is poor though, the quoted speeds seem toward the high end of FTTC

I've just been looking at their pricing structure, and can't believe that line rental is £17.99 which is crazy when you see that BT Wholesale actually reduced this fee in December 2015 to £86.72 PA + VAT works out at £8.67 per month. Source, see: WLR Basic Line Rental pa

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BT (Home) charge £18.99 for line rental, always creeping up and up.

One thing to look out for if you aren't going for the higher tier fibre is that basic packages vary on the upload speed. Some are only 2Mb while others (BT, Sky, (Edit: Not Plusnet)) are up to 9.5Mb.

Some ISP's also throttle / traffic manage to the extreme. SSE for example got loads of customers through cheap prices but the service is terrible.

PlusNet fall into the 2Mbps upload category.

I thought BT, Sky and Virgin are all different and all the others use one of those?

I've just switched from VM 300mbps to EE up to 76mbps service. I was swayed by them as my mobile phone got a 5gb data boost which is handy.

bremen1874 said:

PlusNet fall into the 2Mbps upload category.

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Oh yeah, forgot they changed.

I've just signed up for a BT FTTC Infinity 1 service. 55/10 for £18.99+£10 per month for 12 months and I went through Top Cash Back and got £96 back (pending back).

Price & upload speed sold it for me.

MonkeyMan said:

BT (Home) charge £18.99 for line rental, always creeping up and up.

One thing to look out for if you aren't going for the higher tier fibre is that basic packages vary on the upload speed. Some are only 2Mb while others (BT, Sky, (Edit: Not Plusnet)) are up to 9.5Mb.

Some ISP's also throttle / traffic manage to the extreme. SSE for example got loads of customers through cheap prices but the service is terrible.

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Thanks, I'll be making sure I check upload speeds - I have an offsite backup that runs overnight, and isn't normally too bulky. I don't fancy going from 1000Mb to 2Mb though!

Go with Sky, I just moved from them to BT and regret it!

Will be moving back as soon as I can...

SSE has been totally fine here. Maybe those suffering from traffic management are high torrent users or vpn users and torrent or unrecognised traffic is managed to preserve the service for others. Not had any issues streaming tv or streaming to twitch etc.

I'd definitely recommend Andrews and Arnold (AAISP). Yep they're expensive (£60 a month on their Home::1 1TB VDSL service) compared to the run of the mill providers, but what you get is pretty much the best ISP there is... Professional, courteous, high level of customer service and technical ability. Oh, no traffic management or filtering! They're vehemently against it .. their order page even tells you to use another ISP if you want filtering



http://www.aaisp.net.uk/broadband-home1.html

lol and I thought Zen are expensive.

Dooksy said:

lol and I thought Zen are expensive.

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You get what you pay for.. ultimately it comes down to if you value what they offer you. I've been with A&A for about 15 years and at times I have had challenge myself to re-visit the question, but now they're offering the 1TB services then it's a no-brainer for a techie.

And how many times have you had to call them to warrant the increased premium over other providers? I asked myself this, and when my 12 months is up, I'll be going back to Sky.

ov_sjo said:

You get what you pay for.. ultimately it comes down to if you value what they offer you. I've been with A&A for about 15 years and at times I have had challenge myself to re-visit the question, but now they're offering the 1TB services then it's a no-brainer for a techie.

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You get what you pay for to an extent.. but £60 is what I pay for 1000 / 1000 !

You get what you pay for to a point - once you're out of bargain-basement territory then the returns start to diminish.

No amount of extra cash each month to your ISP is going to alter your sync rate, and that's arguably the most important part of an FTTC connection.

GeX said:

That's PN ruled out for me then really, as they were not good in that respect. I've no reason to suspect the local infrastructure is poor though, the quoted speeds seem toward the high end of FTTC

I've just been looking at their pricing structure, and can't believe that line rental is £17.99 which is crazy when you see that BT Wholesale actually reduced this fee in December 2015 to £86.72 PA + VAT works out at £8.67 per month. Source, see: WLR Basic Line Rental pa

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Errmmm.. BT and plusnet both went up (line rental) this year. You can't expect a telecomes provider to stay in business very long if they supply services to you at cost price. £7.77 a month is a small margin IMO.


Btw. your maths is wrong. 12 months to a year not 10. So effective wholesale cost is £7.22+Vat pcm. Plusnet retail ex vat line rental is £14.99 pcm. So that leaves £7.77 margin to plusnet.

That's a very small margin.

I never cared for ISP customer service, I rarely ever need to call up my ISP/telecoms provider. But I have changed to plusnet (and my relatives) countless times and each time it went fine. For me the value for money alone is decent enough.

ov_sjo said:

You get what you pay for.. ultimately it comes down to if you value what they offer you. I've been with A&A for about 15 years and at times I have had challenge myself to re-visit the question, but now they're offering the 1TB services then it's a no-brainer for a techie.

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Have to agree with this and add that speed isn't everything. After 3 years with Virgin Media on their maximum package and battling for 9 solid months to resolve an issue with packet loss after their "traffic management" kicked in and over utilisation, I swapped to a bonded VDSL service from A&A about 4 months ago. I only went bonded as I'm 1.3km from my local cabinet.

Yes it's a lot of money (£120 a month) but I'm confident knowing that I'm never going to get filtered or traffic managed as it's used to keep the transits running below peak loading which translates to me getting full upload/download as well as minimal latency. A nice bonus is that I also got a static IP Netblock (8 IPs with 6 live).

Where does all that money go? Well, they've just upgraded their core network to run at 40gbit between their two main London POPs and also in the process of upgrading all their transit links from multi-gig to 10gig links. Also most of the kit used on the backend is designed by themselves so they know each and every part of their network. That's where the investment goes but keeps them niche enough to focus on the customer.

Ultimately it comes down to what you want as the end user