BT 40Mb Fibre

ubersonic · 10 Mar 2010 at 08:19

ISPs have imposed caps in some country's yes but when they do its usually something sensible, in the case of Comcast (US ISP) its 200gb per month on a 24mb service and only applies if your in an area with a "sub par" network.

ISP's stopped stating their contention ratios because with the introduction of Datastream and then LLU services ISP's now have full control of it (as opposed to either 20:1 or 50:1 on IPstream) and telling your customers your offering a 100:1 service (as some UK ISPs are) is not a good marketing strategy.

You can still get a 20:1 IPstream service but you wont get it for £14.99 a month. At the end of the day you get what you pay for and sadly in this country you pay more for less

tolien · 10 Mar 2010 at 14:42

I guess you've missed places like Australia then.

It didn't make sense even on IPStream because BT Wholesale didn't need to go near 20:1 on the home services and with CBC you were going to hit congestion on the Centrals long before the exchange. Got link to the ISP offering 100:1?

SiriusB · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:01

While an increase in usage cap would be nice with a faster service; you should all understand that just because a service is faster, does not automatically mean you should download more.

The biggest complaint you get from most people is the time it takes to download something. I would say those who complain about the amount they can download is a minority. The point of a faster service is to download stuff much faster. You get your movies/games/whatever quicker so you can enjoy them sooner. It is not an invitation to download everything you possibly can.

Audigex · 11 Mar 2010 at 05:06

duvet77 said:
out of interest, how do you use 80gig in one month? (I mean nothing by this question, just wondering what people do to use so much). That would be what, 100 divx films or 100 episodes of 24 in HD?

You'd be surprised what you'll use when you get a faster connection. It's the same as the bigger hard drive = more stuff phenomenon.

I had an 80gb hard drive, did me for years and I never thought I'd need to expand it. Got a 500gb drive and suddenly I'm using 450gb? If you've got it, you'll use it.

The same applies to downloads. I'm on a university LAN, meaning my internet speed hits an actual throughput of about 94Mb/s most of the time.

Using it, I managed to fill (yes, fill!) a 1tb drive in under 2 months. I've now gotten a 2tb to go with it, and that's filling up at a rate of about 300gb/month. I'm fortunate, the university only gets ****y about filesharing - they couldn't care less about usage since the connection is limited by the 100Mb/s routers in the accommodation - the infrastructure is gigabit, and the faculty buildings have a seperate connection.

When steam downloads at 10 MB/s (note the capital B, ie 80Mbps), you can pull so much crap through the pipe it's ridiculous.

I've got no idea what I'm going to do when I go home and have to put up with a supposed 5Mb connection

starfighter · 12 Mar 2010 at 04:15

I agree that ISPS should be made to be more upfront about bandwidth, so traffic shaping etc should all be made clear at the point of sale. TBH I prefer a straight cap, nice and simple.

You don't get BT saying you can make 50 calls then after that you can only phone land lines. Traffic shaping is just complicated and silly. (although is slightly better for the ISP as they can run their pipes at maximum for more of the day, rather than buying more pipes just for the 1 hour it is busy).

I don't think many people disagree the way the hide the restrictions is a bit iffy. What I do disagree with is that ISPs or BT is somehow ripping everyone off.

It is going to cost billions to fibre up the country, taking your laptop to an Ethernet port in a datacentre isn't the same as having to run fibre to Grandma Goggins house 10 miles from the exchange so she can pay £10 a month that will likely not make the money back for a long time.

Trust me if there was money to be made companies would be fighting over installing fibre but they aint because home users want to pay £10 for unlimited internet.

The reason LLU is so cheap is because Ofcom artificially increased the price of BTW pipes to help LLU grow, in theory now 21CN is out we should see them catch up with LLU but if everyone gets fibre and VDSL and starts downloading fast who knows.