FTTP 300MB vs 900MB

coolsurfer

coolsurfer

coolsurfer

Associate
Joined
11 Apr 2006
Posts
831
Location
Yorkshire
After months of battling with Openreach, my post code is finally showing as FTTP available.

Would my fellow ocuk members kindly advise whether I should go 300Mb or 900Mb and if I will notice any difference in day to day activity between the 2?

What should I get?!
 
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all depends on how quick you want to download large files

300 vs 900 is day to day browsing the internet or streaming movies and tv from Netflix etc doubt you'll notice a difference.

I went for 900 simply as I could afford it and like to download my games as fast as possible.
 
I'd say 900Mb, but then that's what I've got because it's what I chose.

It's also Mb for megabit, not MB, which means megabyte.
 
enigma27 said:
all depends on how quick you want to download large files

300 vs 900 is day to day browsing the internet or streaming movies and tv from Netflix etc doubt you'll notice a difference.

I went for 900 simply as I could afford it and like to download my games as fast as possible.
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spoffle said:
I'd say 900Mb, but then that's what I've got because it's what I chose.

It's also Mb for megabit, not MB, which means megabyte.
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Thanks both. And yes usually I’m the pedant who would spot incorrect units being used so thanks for that. I’ll blame it on the beer ;)
 
I have had the 300 upgraded to the 900 why? well why not great speeds up and down had for like 5 months now had no troubles. do wish it was cheaper but hey its better than what I had before 35 quid for a measly 17mb had to put up with this for over 4 years on a new estate surrounded by virgin and BT cable to the cabinet. then all of a sudden BT started putting in FTTP so happy now
 
On downloads it’s very unlikely you’ll notice any real difference between 330 and 900Mbps but on uploads the difference is massive - 30Mbps vs 100Mbps. This is simply because most of the sites you’re downloading from throttle individual users anyway to keep the QoS right for as many users as possible. And remember that almost all current WIFi can’t do better than 450-600Mbps so that will throttle you until you’ve swapped to WiFi6 clients.

On the other hand, if you do cloud backups or any kind of two-way data transfer (NAS to NAS backups, Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) it’s a marked improvement.
 
Without knowing what you intend to do with it, all you’re going to get is people explaining why they chose or would choose something, that may or not be relevant to your intended use, but we don’t know, because you didn’t tell us ;)
 
Avalon said:
Without knowing what you intend to do with it, all you’re going to get is people explaining why they chose or would choose something, that may or not be relevant to your intended use, but we don’t know, because you didn’t tell us ;)
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Fair point.
 
When my fttp was first installed (i order the 900 package), there was a problem with the profile so I only got the speeds of the fibre 150 package which was 150 down and 50 up. This took about a month to resolve. In the meantime, it was however a noticable improvement over the 77/18 I previously had using ADSL.

For day to day use (browsing forums, facebook, remote desktop, zoom meetings etc.) there's not much difference from the 150/50 package. Forums threads open slightly "snappier", webmail opens almost instantly etc.
Where I notice a difference is viewing content with a lot of photos (e.g. several photography forums), large downloads. When uploading batches of hi-res photos via ftp, wetransfer etc. the time saving can be a few minutes. I also have a few heavy internet users in my house with both sons heavily into gaming/streaming. Since getting the full 900, I no longer notice any difference in performance regardless of what they are watching/downloading as they can no longer saturate the link. This alone is worth the £30/month extra over the 150 package.
 
Similar to the above, when I upgraded at work from 200Mbps to 500Mbps I find that nothing really sits in the QoS queues at all, the connection is quick enough to just get the packets out the way before any limits are hit.

If you look at an average throughput for the month we are under 20Mbps, but it's so useful having the capacity.
 
Thanks all of you. I’m working from home permanently now though work tell me the VPN has a cap so it doesn’t matter how fast my connection is.

With my Nest door bell and Nest camera the phone notification on copper (~50Mbps) isn’t very fast and there’s usually a delay of 10-20 seconds depending on whether we’re at home or out and about.

We do like to do 4K streaming on Netflix. iPhones so iCloud back up and also drop box back ups of Camera roll on mine and Mrs phones as extra.


Hope to get into gaming when my 4 month old is a little older so Xbox Series X could be on the cards too.

I made a call based on all the above posts and went with 900Mb. They offered BT Halo 2 for free so getting a 4G dongle sent out in case I have issues and installing next Wed.

I need to learn about some of the fancier stuff you enthusiasts do like NAS drives for movie storage etc and perhaps online back ups? Gotta use that 110Mb upload somehow.
 
Something like google drive a really easy way of backing up your stuff online, select the folders you want saved and it syncs in the background. I think I pay £8/month for 2TB.
 
Webzta said:
Something like google drive a really easy way of backing up your stuff online, select the folders you want saved and it syncs in the background. I think I pay £8/month for 2TB.
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You could pay the same for unlimited via GSuite Business, you can easily saturate gigabit pushing/pulling data.
 
circa £20/mo now for 1 user unlimited enterprise google workspace to get the equivalent I think.
 
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