Has self-isolation has shown up the frailties of home broadband?

[GodAtum]

IMO, working from home the past few months, has shown up the frailties of home broadband. I'm sure many people, like myself, only really used the internet in the evenings and weekends. Now there is an increased reliance on the internet for home working. Under a "normal" situation, if my broadband went down, I could go into the office or my local Starbucks and use their wifi.

Now, with broadband reliability being very poor I can either failover to 4G or get another separate line installed (eg cable).

 

[Mujja]

Been a virgin media customer for years and it's been several years since there was a broadband outage. Phone line was down for a day last month but I think that was the first time ever. I have a work mobile so not really an issue.

Speeds in my area have always been good, max throughput anytime of the day. Probably helps there aren't too many families in my street and the ones there are don't have any teenage kids who will be streaming Netflix an YouTube all day.

If you were permanently working from home then it would your responsibility to make sure you had what was needed. If you've been asked to temporarily work from home because of the lock down then I don't think it's reasonable for an employer to expect you to have "reliable" broadband service, the same way a proper work environment with no interruptions from children etc.

If you need a backup or more reliable service ask your employer if they will pay for all or part of the service. We've had people asking for office desks, chairs, monitors, headsets etc shipped to their homes. I'd be doing the same if I wasn't already permanently working from home.

 

[Rroff]

So far I've not really seen any impact - there was one evening when it was slow and that outage with VM for a couple of days but other than that I've seen full speeds on my connections and minimal additional latency (the fixed lines are 2-3ms higher than normal and 4G around 5-10ms higher than I normally see but doesn't cause any issues).

Might be a different story if I was back living where I was with multiple full speed fibre lines - out here we have to make do with spreading the load over multiple 30-40Mbit connections

 

[b0rn2sk8]

What’s the source for broadband reliability being low generally?

I know Virgin have had some issues on their cable network but it’s my understanding that BT FTTC/P and ASDL products have in the main been solid. It’s also worth remembering that the vast majority of the country are not on Virgin....

 

[the-evaluator]

I've not noticed any differences with my broadband since lockdown. I've been home based for about 10 years so am very reliant on my internet conneciton, in the 5 years I've been in this house we've had more outages due to power cuts than anything else but we're talking single numbers here.

I definitely wouldn't say that my home broadband is unreliable, far from it.

 

[Avalon]

IMO, working from home the past few months, has shown up the frailties of home broadband. I'm sure many people, like myself, only really used the internet in the evenings and weekends. Now there is an increased reliance on the internet for home working. Under a "normal" situation, if my broadband went down, I could go into the office or my local Starbucks and use their wifi.

Now, with broadband reliability being very poor I can either failover to 4G or get another separate line installed (eg cable).

What data are you basing your opinion on? It’s just it seems to be at odds with what every ISP who has published data shows, same with the mobile and transit networks. What has changed is the way the bandwidth is used, but this idea that the residential broadband reliability ‘is very poor’ isn’t one I recognise.

 

[blueacid]

Agreed - I looked at some of the usage graphs and followed the industry press releases; generally the opinion held was that while daytime use was far greater than normal, the traffic in the day was still far behind the evening peaks (which hadn't really appreciably changed).

I've not really noticed any unreliability here, my connection has been spot on via Hyperoptic.

 

[blueacid]

..saying that though, yes, during a power cut I did have to switch to using 4G via my phone & used my laptop not my desktop - I don't have any UPS or similar. But, had I had one I'd have surely been okay.
Not about to buy one, when I can use the battery in laptop & charge my phone from a powerbank.

 

[Caged]

I've had no issues with my connection at all. No slowdown, no dropout, it's been rock solid for all video/audio conferencing and pushing files around. This is BT FTTC.

I've seen leased lines from certain providers with a poorer reliability history than my home connection.

 

[Ayahuasca]

No outages here on a gfast connection, speed is always as it should be as well. The UK infrastructure is far behind where it should be, but it seems the openreach network can cope just fine as it is.

I think we may actually get more issues when more and more people are offered gigabit upload speeds, there will be so many people essentially running their very own seedboxes with that upload bandwidth.

 

[RSR]

I've had no outages and its been very stable, even though I have swapped ISP but I am struggling for bandwidth on FTTC. So I will be proceeding with FTTP / FTTPoD or LL once things start to open up and orders can be placed.

 

[Martini1991]

My connection's been absolute fine.

However I suspect it's highlighted issues with the types of connections available.
It's insane that we live in a world where I can get a service that's 40 times faster than someone for about twice the price lol.

I'm on Virgin 350Mb and yet some have BT 8Mb, and some can only get like 50Mb connections etc.

 

[Rroff]

My connection's been absolute fine.

However I suspect it's highlighted issues with the types of connections available.
It's insane that we live in a world where I can get a service that's 40 times faster than someone for about twice the price lol.

I'm on Virgin 350Mb and yet some have BT 8Mb, and some can only get like 50Mb connections etc.

Some around here would beg for 8Mbit ADSL - I'm 1 of 4 houses in the village that are connected to a different exchange and get FTTC albeit 30-40Mbit max while all the rest get very slow ADSL.

Even 30-40Mbit is painful after having multiple 80/20 lines though.

 

[PiKe]

Noticed some traffic shaping on Vodafone broadband, only able to pull about 40mbit from newsgroups during regular hours, becomes uncapped after midnight or so.

 

[Vince]

I'm on kcom - Formerly Eclipse Internet which back in the day was one of few isp's for home that allowed multiple fixed IP addresses. Some 20 years later I am still here but in that time I don't think ive really had any seriously problems and only 2 outages I can recall at my last property. We can also get 350mb virgin which has been really quite tempting over these past few months. Although my firewall does a great job of prioritising things like h.323, video etc the line has without a doubt at times shown it could do with an upgrade. The problem for me is the giving up my IP's and talking virgin into giving me at least 2 fixed addresses, then its all the roconfiguring the firewalls at the offices and here it's just a ball ache. Virgin will do one on a package at about £50 a month which doesn't sound too sad or at least didn't until they stopped talking to new customers.

Not sure if they have that sorted yet but my try and give them a shout again tomorrow. Also my isp is clearly massively throttling youtube which can be seriously annoying at times.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

No problems for me. Not once in the last 5 years has my service been down.

Not even a single hour.

 

[beachBOYken]

Since lockdown (VM internet)

Full speed, when I have checked

Had the outage a couple weeks back that was nationwide where the internet kept dropping for 1-2 minutes.

Also had one short outage last Friday afternoon

Other than that it's been fine, touch wood.

 

[WJA96]

WE have multiple business/WFH lines with Daisy, Zen and Virgin and not one of them has gone down or suffered any drop in speed or capacity since the start of the lockdown. Broadband connections do go down and 4G/5G is a decent backup. I am a firm believer that you do get better service from the like of Daisy, Zen and A&A and that justifies the extra cost.

 

[Duke]

Apart from that one off VM problem a few weeks ago I rarely get any problems with the service so no real concerns here. I guess if I worked from home permanently my employer would contribute towards broadband costs (my old place did this), so could use that to get a 4G sim & router as a backup or for work use only maybe.

 

[SexyGreyFox]

Virgin user here with no problems since it was Cable & Wireless.