Internet speeds

[Evosparki]

Advice for anyone here reading this and wanting to move home or leave their parents house I'd highly suggest you try move somewhere with gigabit internet, even if you don't need/want gigabit speeds then the ISP's 100-150Mb speed is very reliable and often quite cheap for the speed range.
Hyperoptic is becoming common around city area apartments, check their coverage of which apartment blocks they're connected to then check if there's any homes for sale/rent there. Same goes for other gigabit ISP's as well.

I'm paying £36/month (special deal they do like once or twice a year for a week or two), for almost always 600-850Mb speed both ways, 24/7, no usage restrictions, from all games servers/patchers/apps etc.
My current 12 month contract is actually up next week so I'm hoping I won't have to pay more than £38/month for another 12 months, as the usual contract is £49/month or a bit less if you shop around other websites.

My previous ISP's were BT 76Mb, and before that at my parents house I had Virgin for 14 years I always had their fastest deal as soon as they became available since 56k dial up, to 512k, 1, 2, 4, 10, 20, 50, 100.

 

[neodude]

I'm on the fastest Virgin package, Vivid350. Moreso for the double upload of 20Mbps compared to the next package down at 10Mbps. I run a Plex server and have Crashplan constantly uploading. I'd give almost anything for Gigabit up and down.

 

[Deleted member 651465]

I'm on the fastest Virgin package, Vivid350. Moreso for the double upload of 20Mbps compared to the next package down at 10Mbps. I run a Plex server and have Crashplan constantly uploading. I'd give almost anything for Gigabit up and down.

Crashplan is horrible at uploading, even with the limits turned off.

I tried to backup my NAS (admittedly it was several TB) and it was still going 6 months later! Annoyingly the FreeNAS support for Crashplan was hacky and the entire backup failed at 98.xx% so I had to look at other options. I went to Backblaze and a Synology NAS and it took half the time to get it uploaded.

 

[neodude]

Crashplan is horrible at uploading, even with the limits turned off.

Mines is currently showing 17Mbps upload and I rarely see it below 10 except when family are streaming from my Plex server.

I've got 10TB backed up with 6TB left to go.

 

[bledd]

Once you go over about 10Mbps, it's hard to tell the difference if you're one user in general browsing.

The places you'll notice a difference are download/upload speeds, video streaming (up to ~20Mbps per concurrent device). Once you add more users into the mix, then your capacity needs increase.

A colleague of mine was on 300Mbps, but moved down to ~75 to save money. 1 user, Steam download speeds are the only thing he notices any difference on.

 

[Duke]

Well we do have an old NTL cable box (from back in the day) into the Front room and would assume that is where Virgin would cable the new DOCSIS3 into as the trunk is already there for it underground.
My bedroom as at the back of the house and there is no way I can see Virgin cabling there without Excess Construction Charges for cable and trunking beyond the 'normal' entry point to the house.

I'd power line from the Front room to my switch upstairs so it's fairly simple to deployment. In honesty though, it would be an unjustifiable outgoing when we have an already functioning service from Sky. Better money saved to get myself on the property ladder in an area where house prices and rental is at silly amounts per month.

Shawrey

They will run the cable from the box which is attached outside the house around to wherever you want it (within reason). So if its a detacted house and you need TV/BB in a upstairs back bedroom for example, they'll just run a cable to there along to the back then up the wall and in. Within the room itself you can then specifiy where the box should be as well.

 

[Beasty]

Once you go over about 10Mbps, it's hard to tell the difference if you're one user in general browsing.

The places you'll notice a difference are download/upload speeds, video streaming (up to ~20Mbps per concurrent device). Once you add more users into the mix, then your capacity needs increase.

A colleague of mine was on 300Mbps, but moved down to ~75 to save money. 1 user, Steam download speeds are the only thing he notices any difference on.

Yep I'm the same, I can comfortably stream 4K still so don't notice the difference.

 

[feck199]

I'd have thought Kcom would have had sufficient backhaul infrastructure/NNI link speed to support the higher bandwidths offered, given they have the monopoly in the Kingston/Hull area. I would find it hard to believe there would be a congestion issue as their capacity management should have adequately anticipated the influx of higher speed connectivity to their Network.

A solid gigabit router should be all that's required. Ubiquiti EdgeRouter's seem widely recommended for their feature set and price point.

Shawrey

I have suspected that Kcom just did not want people hosting a mass of torrents etc and felt they needed to limit the upload. Personally, I like newsgroups but the upload is hurting my plex.. In the early days of the roll out they didn't limit the speed, I saw many speed tests of speeds closer to 1Gb.

If you can take out a business line which is almost the same price, they offer much better upload speeds upto 125Mbps afaik.

If you believe all the PDF's that Kcom provide on their pricing website, on the 250Mbps package EIR speeds for the Bundle Phone+Internet was 250Mbps (It must be a misprint). The EIR speed on the 350 limited edition was 100Mbps and the new 400Mbps package drops this to 50Mbps.

I'd say they are making new packages, offering higher speeds and hoping they can oversell the bandwidth but if they run out, it doesn't matter as they only promise 50Mbps to new customers.

FYI currently on the 350Mbps and getting
Download: 333.18 Mbit/s
Upload: 29.81 Mbit/s

Moving to the 400Mbps any day now, depending if I really see close to 33-35Mbps upload I'll stay on it if not I think I'll ask to be switched back due to the EIR.

 

[feck199]

If you are using over 400Gb of data then I would definitely say you’ll see a benefit. That’s a lot. That’s like downloading 15 full length movies per day, 7 days per week.

I would say its quite easy to hit over a TB or more. Even more so when you count upload.

My mum has gone over 400Gb, I get the emails warning me of 50% usage each month on her account, I think she's on the 750Gb package now and that's just from iPlayer, iTV etc been used in the background. I bet half the time she's not even watching it.