Is gigabit broadband worth it?

You have to ask yourself whether you want it or need it. You're paying a third more for it, when you may not even notice any difference. If I download a lot and regularly then I'd go for it, but I hardly ever download stuffy and usually just stream. When I do download the odd steam game, I'm okay with waiting an hour or more for it to complete.
 
FL630 said:
So the only real way of getting faster than 500+mb is to have it hard wired to the router?

Shame. I'm still sorely tempted if it is true as Rroff says that multiple heavy users won't affect me.
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Decent WiFi... like Ruckus... will easily deliver good pings and 300Mbps... I have an R500 and R600 at either end of my house and get 300Mbps in the key areas on wireless... but yes, any faster and wired is the way
 
I regularly saturate my 200mbit. If higher tier was in my area I would take it.

If it was available I'd leap on Gbit internet.

I've hard wired all appliances except Alexas, phones etc.

Decent wifi worked well as a stop gap though. I had an AC1200 USB adapter and for the money it was exceptional, ping and throughput is better with the cable, but wireless was still great even for gaming.

Decent APs let you scan for the least occupied channels too. But still, please hard wire, pretty please. The geek in me is depressed about power lined gigabit.
 
crinkleshoes said:
Something wrong with your connection then... I regularly exceed 100mbit without even trying.
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In my experience general speeds are much closer to the 100Mbit end of the spectrum than the gigabit one - some of the big CDNs etc. can easily hit 400+Mbit/s but a lot of stuff is still hosted on boxes with 100Mbit or shared gigabit connections to the net.
 
Since taking on this 1000/1000 connection... I have found it easy to exceed 100mbit - most places have been regularly in the 200-500mbit range, with a few being able to saturate the connection
 
Christ I just had a thought. I used to download at 5Kb/s.

Now I download at 24Mb/s

Nearly 5,000 times faster. Progress is awesome.
 
WantoN said:
Christ I just had a thought. I used to download at 5Kb/s.

Now I download at 24Mb/s

Nearly 5,000 times faster. Progress is awesome.
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I know right? I remember waiting to download (and failing) the trailer for Star Trek Armada back oh so long ago. And because it was 50MB in size, it wasn't possible to download in 1 hour at 4-5Kbps (would have taken 2 hours 15 minutes odd), and it would also auto disconnect every hour back then as well. Finally had to resort to using a download manager back then to download it in chunks. Now? Pfff. 6 seconds max. :)

Sorry for going off topic there.

Now back on topic. Gigabit probably isn't worth it if the household isn't going to saturate it often. For example, I have BT Infinity 2 here (maxed 80Mbps connection), and because I'm the only one in the household left who does stuff heavily online, that line barely saturates 20Mbps much less all 80Mbps. The only use it'll get is when you need to download a large file or game. Otherwise, you'll barely get much "more" use from a larger pipe.

:: edit ::

So you'll just be paying more for something you hardly use much (if small household). Might as well save some for a new GPU instead from the money saved by going a lower pipe.
 
WantoN said:
If you're at all handy there are plenty of ways to get a cable where it needs to be.

Your landlord would never know and it wouldn't look untidy. I'd opt for DLine trunking round the skirts or ceiling, or pop a hole and chase it through and paint over with a colour match. Or negotiate with the landlord by either a) saying you want to repaint in magnolia, is that ok? Or b) hardline would add to rentability and you'd be happy to cover the cost.

It's criminal to have 1gb internet and not use a hard wired connection.
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Didn't read any further in the thread because this man speaketh the truth. Wire the place yourself, it won't cost much but will add a few £'s to the rental/sale value. If you're feeling 'buff' maybe ask for a rent freeze for doing the work?
 
WantoN said:
If you're at all handy there are plenty of ways to get a cable where it needs to be.

Your landlord would never know and it wouldn't look untidy. I'd opt for DLine trunking round the skirts or ceiling, or pop a hole and chase it through and paint over with a colour match.
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Please don't do any of this without having a word with your landlord first. At the very least it's just common courtesy, and at worst you may be in breach of your tenancy agreement, even if you think he'd "never know."

If one of my tenants wanted to install ethernet cabling I'd have no problem in principle, but I'd want to know exactly how he planned to go about it, and if he just went ahead and did it without so much as a by-your-leave (even at his own expense) I'd be a bit ticked off to say the least.
 
I'm quite sure my Landlord would be fine with it, he's really decent and always happy to support. My main issue would be how to do it? My wall has a few blank sockets in the wall which would be easy to change into Ethernet outs, but the router lives under the stairs and would require the wires to go up one floor and across maybe 5 meters of flooring. The way the flat and rooms are laid out means there is no real alternatives to the current setup.

I could run a flat cable but that would require me to pull up the carpets which would be equally disruptive.

Anyone with experience wiring an existing building?
 
WantoN said:
Oh really, I thought the most they offered in most places was 76mb, will investigate.
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BT offer those tiers if you can get FTTP, otherwise you can only choose Infinity Option 2 which is 76MBps.

I've not had higher than 76MBps but BT seem to have a better network as I've not had slowdowns in all my 4 years with them. Each month we go through about 1TB max of internet and no complaints.
 
CaptainCrash said:
Please don't do any of this without having a word with your landlord first. At the very least it's just common courtesy, and at worst you may be in breach of your tenancy agreement, even if you think he'd "never know."
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Which is why I suggested he do exactly that.

Chasing cables is down to the build, sometimes it's rediculously easy, sometimes it's got some tricky bits. In terms of terminating you have several options.

Firstly, don't covert any existing sockets, especially electrical ones. Instead, fit new boxes. I use standard metal back boxes and combine this with shallow surface mount boxes for extra cable play, though I've chased three cat6 cables into a deep back box and surface mount plate with two connected and one for redundancy. In fact that's for my main PC and it worked lovely.

I buy a lot of my gear for this sort of thing from a shop that rhymes with BrewTix, its a chain that's everywhere, not always the cheapest, but usually has been for me, shop around.

You could use those brushed cable entry boxes, I think they're ugly and awful so I'd terminate into proper RJ45 plates with a punchdown. I bought a proper Krone tool but there's cheap alternatives. It's actually very easy.

When I wired our lounge and conservatory I had never run ethernet before, it only took a little YouTubeFoo before I was confident.

Going up through floors is always trickier, but often you can get up behind a wall and come from there, it will take some investigation. If you're not super confident get a sparky to take a look and run the cables, you can do all the terminations yourself to save money (sparks I've met don't tend to do it anyway).

Basic tools you'll need are an electric Drill with hammer function, masonary bits, punchdown tool and suitable wire strippers. Parts you'll need are Cat5e/Cat6 cable, Backboxes (either surface mount or proper ones), faceplates (RJ45 or brushes).

If you're not confident that's cool, we all have things that we aren't comfortable with. Mines plumbing, I hate it with a passion, I've never sworn so much as when I fitted the dishwasher.

You don't have any NTL boxes around do you? I discovered here they often used cat5 for telephone wiring and I've managed to piggy back onto those for a connection upstairs.

Long post, sorry.
 
moogle said:
BT offer those tiers if you can get FTTP, otherwise you can only choose Infinity Option 2 which is 76MBps.

I've not had higher than 76MBps but BT seem to have a better network as I've not had slowdowns in all my 4 years with them. Each month we go through about 1TB max of internet and no complaints.
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Ahh that's interesting. I've stayed with VM as so far service has been good, though its worsening. It'd be nice to have a viable alternative. I would happily sacrific some download for better upload.
 
Yeah if you can get the FTTP give them a try, I've yet to have an issue relating to congestion with them which is why even though I hate the customer service and lack of deals for existing customers, I'm willing to stick with them.

You could then yo-yo between BT and VM every 12 months to maximise the cashback and deals they always have on for new customers. :)
 
WantoN said:
Which is why I suggested he do exactly that.

Chasing cables is down to the build, sometimes it's rediculously easy, sometimes it's got some tricky bits. In terms of terminating you have several options.

Firstly, don't covert any existing sockets, especially electrical ones. Instead, fit new boxes. I use standard metal back boxes and combine this with shallow surface mount boxes for extra cable play, though I've chased three cat6 cables into a deep back box and surface mount plate with two connected and one for redundancy. In fact that's for my main PC and it worked lovely.

I buy a lot of my gear for this sort of thing from a shop that rhymes with BrewTix, its a chain that's everywhere, not always the cheapest, but usually has been for me, shop around.

You could use those brushed cable entry boxes, I think they're ugly and awful so I'd terminate into proper RJ45 plates with a punchdown. I bought a proper Krone tool but there's cheap alternatives. It's actually very easy.

When I wired our lounge and conservatory I had never run ethernet before, it only took a little YouTubeFoo before I was confident.

Going up through floors is always trickier, but often you can get up behind a wall and come from there, it will take some investigation. If you're not super confident get a sparky to take a look and run the cables, you can do all the terminations yourself to save money (sparks I've met don't tend to do it anyway).

Basic tools you'll need are an electric Drill with hammer function, masonary bits, punchdown tool and suitable wire strippers. Parts you'll need are Cat5e/Cat6 cable, Backboxes (either surface mount or proper ones), faceplates (RJ45 or brushes).

If you're not confident that's cool, we all have things that we aren't comfortable with. Mines plumbing, I hate it with a passion, I've never sworn so much as when I fitted the dishwasher.

You don't have any NTL boxes around do you? I discovered here they often used cat5 for telephone wiring and I've managed to piggy back onto those for a connection upstairs.

Long post, sorry.
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Thanks for the detailed reply. If this were my own house I would be more than confident to give it a shot, I quite enjoy stuff like this. As a tenant I may ask my landlord when he drops by next Friday.

The current empty boxes in the wall are blank plates with plastic boxes installed. No trunking leading into the wall so I think they'd be suitable as they're not electrical.

As an experiment, I bought the "best" TP-Link powerline adapters. 90 down, 220 up, 3ms ping. That's better than the 50/70/5 on wireless. Perhaps I'll try some different plug sockets to see if I get an improvement. Bought them off the jungle so no big deal to return them if they don't meet expectations.

Edit: I think the wiring in my flat is junk for powerline. Perhaps any electricians reading can tell me what's going on. I tried the powerline adapters from downstairs (router) to upstairs (my pc), get the speeds above. The status LED shows red, which I believe is a warning of poor power socket choice. I assume upstairs and downstairs run on separate ring mains.

I therefore plugged both power line adapters into the same plug, literally 6 inches apart, and find the same issue, red LED (which equals bad speed).

Any idea?

Edit 2: Hyperoptic will move their line in to anywhere in the flat for £30. That anywhere could just so happen to be 2 meters from my computer. Hello 1Gb internet!
 
Last edited:
Landlord dropped around today to fix a few things and we got chatting about hard wired connections.

He seems open to the idea of fitting a network cable into my room but it'll be fair job as we have to route along the floor under my room.

Either way, the battle to get my full gigabit internet is not over!
 
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