Stick with Be or move to fibre

slambo69

slambo69

slambo69

Soldato
Joined
28 Feb 2006
Posts
3,819
Location
London
My contract with Be is coming to an end, and I am not sure whether to renew or go for fibre optic with another provider (it came online recently in my area).

I am not a massive downloader, but I care about gaming. Would going fibre give me a noticeable drop in ping?
 
Im not sure, Im going to guess FTTC, my technical knowledge here is lacking...Its bt infinity I was looking at.

I will check my ping when I go home, thanks for your reply.
 
Be pings in Arbroath are ~27ms, iirc Aberdeen is ~33ms. However at uni (Janet i.e. pure fiber) they're 7-9ms.

If you don't mind BTs cap and want low pings it's great, if you want decent pings and no cap BE is great. Actually if you want competent support you probably want BE over BT anyway, but your contract doesn't renew so you can always stick with them and change whenever you want really.

Incidentally - BT still do not consider high pings/packet loss a line fault (go figure) where as BE (and almost most everyone else) do and will pay for a bt engineer to come fix things.

Remember, once BT upgrade the exchange you'll soon have other options e.g. zen.
 
Thanks azuse, are you in aberdeen yourself? If not BT, what other fibre optic providers? Do you know if you can tell Be that you are more insterested in gaming and they will change your ping?

Also I dont actually know how to ping any website...
 
I'm in a similar predicament as you but my cab has not been completed yet. I've heard/read Sky are okay to go with and if you have Sky TV, I believe there are some deals to be had.
 
BT only throttle torrents on VDSL I believe. Certainly not had a problem with anything I do, even with downloading over 600GB in the last couple of weeks.
 
Torrents are rubbish anyway.

Think I have done over 300Gb in the last month now. Speeds a bit up and down tonight but still managing around 8.5 MB/s
 
I'm on BE and I've had plenty of issues with websites not loading and so on. I've decided to give fibre a go and I've ordered Sky Fibre Broadband. The total cost each month with Sky will be extremely similar to the montly cost of BT + BE so for the extra speed it seemed an easy choice to make.

If you have Sky Fibre in your area and you want to leave BE or just want to have fibre broadband, then do it! :)
 
BT throttle loads from 4pm till about 10pm in the week and all day weekends.

You could also go with

plussnet
sky
BT

I'm with virgin TBH as speeds are amazing.

Ive downloaded 900GB since Sunday night.
 
Sky Fibre out of the ones you've listed.
They already confirmed no FUP or STM.

They dont seem to mind either how much rubbish I DL.

If you're thinknig of virgin check the UBR in your area first, all fair and good Advertising 50meg IF its useable.
 
If you have fastpath already on with Be then switching to VDSL2 (aka Fibre) isn't going to make much difference. Fastpath ADSL and Fastpath VDSL2 both have around 4-6ms first hop latency.

The main thing would probably be latency + routing from Scotland down to London and the difference between the ISP you choose and Be. With BT Infinity in SW London, my traffic goes to Sheffield before heading back down to London so my latency is a fair bit worse than with Be. With you... I'm not really sure where they could take your traffic to stuff it up! :)

Summary:
- VDSL2 is has about the same first-hop latency as ADSL2 (both with fastpath on)
- You can't manually control fastpath/interleaving on 'fibre' - you can with Be ADSL. DLM might automatically add interleaving and there's nowt you can do about it
- The extra bandwidth is nice if you share the connection with others and don't want your gaming to be affected by their use
- If your ISP has stupid routing to London, you might be annoyed

Summary summary: If you don't know how to ping a website, then the above is probably a bit too detailed for you, so 'fibre' probably won't be worse, and might be better especially if you have others sharing the connection.
 
passey89 said:
BT throttle loads from 4pm till about 10pm in the week and all day weekends.
Click to expand...

Any idea what these things are? I can say with absolute certainty that on BT VDSL, usenet, HTTP, HTTPS and SSH traffic are not throttled since I always pull in excess of 70Mbit speeds through these at any time of day regardless of how many hundreds of gigs I may or may not have just pulled down.
 
Phemo said:
Any idea what these things are? I can say with absolute certainty that on BT VDSL, usenet, HTTP, HTTPS and SSH traffic are not throttled since I always pull in excess of 70Mbit speeds through these at any time of day regardless of how many hundreds of gigs I may or may not have just pulled down.
Click to expand...

P2P.
 
Yes P2P is but he said they "throttle loads". Not sure if he meant loads in terms of bandwidth or loads of protocols - I'm not aware of anything other than P2P. Just wondered if anyone had found anything other than P2P was shaped - I certainly haven't.
 
Phemo said:
Yes P2P is but he said they "throttle loads". Not sure if he meant loads in terms of bandwidth or loads of protocols - I'm not aware of anything other than P2P. Just wondered if anyone had found anything other than P2P was shaped - I certainly haven't.
Click to expand...

He was referring to P2P. Nothing else is shaped/throttled.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom