BT 40Mb Fibre

Malakite

Malakite

Malakite

Associate
Joined
3 Feb 2009
Posts
670
Location
Glasgow
Anyone have any experiences with the new BT network. I am currently with Be and am fairly happy with the service. No throttling, unlimited usage, decent support etc.

However BT have just popped a leaflet through my door advising that their fibre optic network is available in my area now. This would move me from 24/.5 down/up to 40/2 for only another £2 a month from what I am paying now.

Seems decent but dont want to jump in then find they have silly limits on the line or some such. Will give them a phone myself later to get their answers but would just expect the usual propaganda and sales pitch rather than honest answers.

So anyone have any experience?
 
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Ohhhh I'd love to know when BT would be doing my exchange; I've seen sites giving dates for general areas but nothing on specific exchanges.

Be the advance guard and tell us all that BT say (regarding caps, profiling etc....)

edit; which exchange are you on btw?
 
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* Option 1 delivers download speeds up to 40Mb, and upload speeds up to 2Mb from as little as £19.99 a month. It comes with a 20 GB monthly usage limit.
* Option 2 delivers equally fast download speeds, and upload speeds up to 10 Mb. It is available from £24.99 a month. It also offers unlimited downloads, subject to a market-standard fair usage policy.

Looking for their policy now...

BT Infinity website said:
B. Network Management
4. What is BT's Traffic Management Policy?

BT continuously monitors network performance and reduces the speed available to very heavy users (typically less than 1 per cent of all customers) during a given month to ensure that the service received by other customers is not impacted through extremely heavy usage by a minority of people.

Customers who are classified as very heavy users will experience significantly reduced speed at peak times (typically 5pm-midnight every day but these times may change depending on the demand on the network) for a period of 30 days, or for as long as very heavy use continues. This applies to customers on all Options.

BT Total Broadband Option 3 and BT Infinity Option 2 allow unlimited downloads and uploads within the monthly rental price, so customers on these products will not be charged for over-use. However, this does not preclude BT from reducing your speed if you are a heavy user in order to protect the experience for the rest of our customers.
Click to expand...

Looks like they've still got their traffic shaping on it :(
 
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I think it has the same pathetic FUP at the ADSL2+ product... 80gig (combined up/down) you get a warning letter, 100gig you get throttled to hell from ~5pm til midnight.

In actuality you get the warning email at around 60gig useage (unless unsolicited connections are really adding over 20gig a month) and they start throttling you from the warning email not when you actually exceed the FUP (tho its fairly light throttling until you actually exceed the FUP).

Once you exceed "100"gig (which is more like 80gig of actual up/down useage) the throttling between 5pm and midnight is pathetic, torrents and some perfectly legit applications that have been incorrectly identified as P2P get throttled to 3KB/s, video streaming is often a joke making stuff like iplayer close to or actually unusable, your ping and jitter will rise significantly (I'm assuming they use virtual "naughty boy" pipes that are quite congested), steam will bring your connection to its knees due to a bug in the traffic management system they refuse to acknowledge and most other traffic throttled to around 1MBit/s tops.

And just to add insult to injury this doesn't just happen on the remainder of a month where you exceed the FUP - it lasts 30days from the point of the last "infraction".

If your useage is under 80gig a month tho it will mostly be pretty sweet - I think they are rolling out products will higher useage limits on the FTTx infrastructure but don't think they are available yet and they are a LOT more money than the basic packages.
 
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out of interest, how do you use 80gig in one month? (I mean nothing by this question, just wondering what people do to use so much). That would be what, 100 divx films or 100 episodes of 24 in HD?
 
ISP's really need to stop using the word unlimited if its simply not true, it's not even like those limits are that reasonable any more, you can easily go over them if you watch a fair amount of online video, they need a new FUP with increased limits otherwise its silly, something like 250gb or more now for 'unlimited' style connections at least!

Any idea if LLU ISP's will ever roll out fiber?
 
duvet77 said:
out of interest, how do you use 80gig in one month? (I mean nothing by this question, just wondering what people do to use so much). That would be what, 100 divx films or 100 episodes of 24 in HD?
Click to expand...

I know what you're saying but think about it, if they're going to claim unlimited it needs to at least scale with speeds to be reasonable otherwise people will just hit limits quicker, for instance if you have a house with multiple users all watching HD iplayer, youtube, doing odd downloads, gaming, net radio, steam etc, it can really add up, 80gb is only like 2.5gb a day, thats nothing in a house full of people doing medium to heavy use.

I calculate i can at just 450kb/s download about 39gb a day, thats 1.2tb a month with just current speeds, obviously downloading that much is extreme 24/7 use but if thats what i can get unlimited now on my average adsl2 connection, why the heck should we accept a fraction of that when high speed fibre rolls out, its really not scaling anywhere near reasonable is it?
 
Radiation said:
I know what you're saying but think about it, if they're going to claim unlimited it needs to at least scale with speeds to be reasonable otherwise people will just hit limits quicker, for instance if you have a house with multiple users all watching HD iplayer, youtube, doing odd downloads, gaming, net radio, steam etc, it can really add up, 80gb is only like 2.5gb a day, thats nothing in a house full of people doing medium to heavy use.
Click to expand...

yeah, I was looking at it from my perspective where I'm the sole computer user; I suppose a house of students or whoever could easily rack up that amount of downloads.

PS. I total agree that they shouldn't use the word unlimited if there's a limit.
 
Well looks like i'll be staying with Be. Just gave them a call, the woman I spoke to didn't really have a clue what she was talking about. Started with a sales pitch and straight into wanting my details to book a install before answering any of my questions.

Once down to it she could not give me any details on their fair usage policy, just kept directing me to their website. I told her that i wanted more detail than the website provides and was looking for the definition of a 'heavy user' as described on the website. I was told they dont have a set limit and the only reason you would have to be worried about it is if I was a pirate downloading non stop all the time!

Even after she agreed that they send letters to people once a limit is reached she refused to admit that there is a set limit for the throttling and that is only taken 'case by case'.

So they basically want me to take the service without knowing how much I can download and if I do go over their 'unknown' limit I must be a pirate...

Sticking with Be it looks like.
 
Student? Streaming some tv, bit of music, play afew games and make afew downloads and i average 90 a month, then again I stream hd. Renting movies online, even compressed, are ~15Gb each alone, 2/3 each month really adds up. 800mb for a *cough* "hd" episode of 24 sounds a lot like the chronically compressed itunes store while a 720 episode ast a reasonable bit-rate is almost double that, 1080p ofc is even higher.

You're correct though, but unless someone can be bothered to pay a lawyer to challenge the limits of the "unlimited" service it won't change (just not worth it). The truth is though, there's simply no point in having a faster line if you can't use the bandwidth. Then again, that's how bt made it half the expected price.

Stick with Be, it's still the only truly unlimited network outside of virgins 50meg areas. People have ben going over 1tb a month of years but you really shouldn't use a home line to back up your server :D
 
duvet77 said:
out of interest, how do you use 80gig in one month? (I mean nothing by this question, just wondering what people do to use so much). That would be what, 100 divx films or 100 episodes of 24 in HD?
Click to expand...

We've often used 100-160gig a month, tho the average is about 60.

Only ~25gig of that is my personal useage, that includes downloading atleast one game a month on steam (MW2 for instance was 11gig), a few hours streaming iplayer, spotify, around 100 hours of online gaming, renting movies from iTunes, etc. game patches, and so on... my brother does similiar and my dad makes fairly good use of the internet for iplayer, etc.

I struggle to see how anyone can justify more than ~200gig a month tho personally... you'd have to be warezing HD movies and pirating full games pretty much non stop...which is just sad... as things move on and more online services are in HD, etc. it will become more reasonable.
 
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Does anyone know if other providers will have FTTC soon? BT are putting FTTC into my town now but I don't want to go with them, if O2 or BE offered VDSL then I would jump on it.
 
As this is being done by BT Wholesale why not just wait for a half decent ISP to start offering the services?

Bandwidth on 21CN should be cheaper after the initial setup costs for the ISP so we should see increased bandwidth allowances from not just LLU providers.

I Easily use over 50GB a month just because I don't get any TV reception and end up streaming a lot of stuff.
 
tbh I was amazed how much of my bandwidth is iplayer etc and games (on plusnet it gives you a brakedown)
seems like they use quite a bit.
if it's the same FUP and QOS they have on their ADSL2+ I'd avoid this like th plauge!
 
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