BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

scgf said:
I have the same product with Plusnet, £23 a month cheaper than the Aquiss product. I pay £31.99 a month with £140 payment card incentive:

fv8z0dv.md.jpg
Click to expand...
Nice one, any chance of what is your BQM is like? Someone saying my BQM is very high spiked almost 160ms - see mine here live BQM: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broa...hare/40abf5aa64c7269e6b157203af517df67f0a1540
 
I use my own equipment - a TP-Link ER605 router, and a Deco BE25 mesh system for wifi. I have no idea about BQM and it’s not something I’m bothered about since I have zero problems and everything works without a hitch. My speeds are always what I posted, and have been for the past couple of years or so since fibre came to my neck of the woods.
 
Finally found out why it caused high spiked. The AMD Ryzen 3700x PC does doing it. But I did try on my old PC, Intel Sandybridge i7 2700K running on Firefox and the upload has now stopped high spiked from TBB BQM.

https://www.speedtest.net/result/18722609072.png

You can see both download and upload just low latency now.

Must have be better Intel ethernet network card on it than AMD ethernet network card.

Intel network card: Qualcomm Atheros AR8151 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (NDIS 6.20)
 
After a bit of advice - my Virgin contract is coming to an end and I’m going to ditch them and go FTTP.

I’ve got the option of both Openreach and Community Fibre based connections - I was going to go back to Zen (Openreach) as they were excellent for the FTTC connection I had at my old place, but the Vodafone 900Mbps up/down option for £30pm feels like a no brainer - what’s the general consensus?

I’d want to use my own equipment (UniFi UCG Max) rather than an ISP supplied router - I know this isn’t an issue with Zen but is it easy enough to get the PPPoE details out of Vodafone or are you tied to their router?

Cheers!
 
Matteh said:
After a bit of advice - my Virgin contract is coming to an end and I’m going to ditch them and go FTTP.

I’ve got the option of both Openreach and Community Fibre based connections - I was going to go back to Zen (Openreach) as they were excellent for the FTTC connection I had at my old place, but the Vodafone 900Mbps up/down option for £30pm feels like a no brainer - what’s the general consensus?

I’d want to use my own equipment (UniFi UCG Max) rather than an ISP supplied router - I know this isn’t an issue with Zen but is it easy enough to get the PPPoE details out of Vodafone or are you tied to their router?

Cheers!
Click to expand...
If you are happy with Zen before, then I can see why not go back to Zen.
 
Yeah, that’s a fair point and probably what I will do - 900/900 for £30 seemed like a very good deal compared to 910/110 for £50.
 
Matteh said:
Yeah, that’s a fair point and probably what I will do - 900/900 for £30 seemed like a very good deal compared to 910/110 for £50.
Click to expand...
Then there's Plusnet (Openreach) at £30.99 for 900/110. Personally I wouldn't want to pay more to Zen for effectively the same product. I absolutely wouldn't touch Vodafone with a bargepole! Plusnet support is excellent and you always get to speak to someone who knows what they're doing should you need support. They're also more than happy for you to use your own equipment and will actively support you should you wish to go that route. Over the past few years I have been with both Plusnet and EE and when switching either way there has been no difference whatsoever - apart from the cost and the 'extras' EE has, like TV.

Do you run any servers or anything on your network that would benefit from a 110Mbps upload? I have a NAS and run lots of docker services like Nextcloud and when outside my network connecting to my NAS I have never found 110Mbps to be in any way restrictive. Access to my OnlyOffice server is faster than accessing Office 365 (or whatever they call it now), or Google Docs. Think what you might need to do with that symmetrical connection should you have it. Clearly 900Mbps upload is better than 110Mbps, but for most it's just a number and would have no impact on what they do. Ping and jitter are way more important - and on my Plusnet FTTP broadband I'm currently seeing a ping of 5ms with both download and upload, and 0ms jitter.
 
Last edited:
Zen do offer IPv6 and a static IPv4 address, which PlusNet don't do (they used to offer IPv4 but stopped IIRC). However I wouldn't use Zen due to their Manchester/London gateway ping pong.

Things like Cloudflare Tunnels negate the requirement for static IPv4 these days, though there are rare requirements such as public cloud allow lists, but again do not apply to the vast majority of people.
 
ChrisD. said:
Zen do offer IPv6 and a static IPv4 address, which PlusNet don't do (they used to offer IPv4 but stopped IIRC). However I wouldn't use Zen due to their Manchester/London gateway ping pong.

Things like Cloudflare Tunnels negate the requirement for static IPv4 these days, though there are rare requirements such as public cloud allow lists, but again do not apply to the vast majority of people.
Click to expand...
I use DDNS and CNAME records with my domain registrar to point specific addresses using my own domain to my network for external access to my NAS and to other server apps I might be running. In many years it has never caused me an issue. When I had the option of a static address with Plusnet I tried it and subsequently cancelled it. It didn't offer me any advantages over a DDNS address - and in some respects a static address is more of a security risk than one that regularly changes.
 
Last edited:
scgf said:
I use DDNS and CNAME records with my domain registrar to point specific addresses using my own domain to my network for external access to my NAS and to other server apps I might be running. In many years it has never caused me an issue. When I had the option of a static address with Plusnet I tried it and subsequently cancelled it. It didn't offer me any advantages over a DDNS address - and in some respects a static address is more of a security risk than one that regularly changes.
Click to expand...
I'd argue that exposing services on your NAS to the internet is a higher security risk than having a static IP.
 
I've thought long and hard about this. I have nothing on my NAS that is critical or irreplaceable, I do regular versioned backups of all my data both locally and off-site using the Synology cloud, I have all the necessary security enabled on my NAS and in several years have only had a handful of attempts to gain access which have been thwarted immediately. IMO you can wear a tinfoil hat and make access difficult for yourself or compromise a little and have ease of use. I prefer the latter given my use case. Now if I were hosting data for other people, or my data was valuable I would re-assess what I do.
 
scgf said:
Then there's Plusnet (Openreach) at £30.99 for 900/110. Personally I wouldn't want to pay more to Zen for effectively the same product. I absolutely wouldn't touch Vodafone with a bargepole! Plusnet support is excellent and you always get to speak to someone who knows what they're doing should you need support. They're also more than happy for you to use your own equipment and will actively support you should you wish to go that route. Over the past few years I have been with both Plusnet and EE and when switching either way there has been no difference whatsoever - apart from the cost and the 'extras' EE has, like TV.

Do you run any servers or anything on your network that would benefit from a 110Mbps upload? I have a NAS and run lots of docker services like Nextcloud and when outside my network connecting to my NAS I have never found 110Mbps to be in any way restrictive. Access to my OnlyOffice server is faster than accessing Office 365 (or whatever they call it now), or Google Docs. Think what you might need to do with that symmetrical connection should you have it. Clearly 900Mbps upload is better than 110Mbps, but for most it's just a number and would have no impact on what they do. Ping and jitter are way more important - and on my Plusnet FTTP broadband I'm currently seeing a ping of 5ms with both download and upload, and 0ms jitter.
Click to expand...
All very fair points - I'll take a look a Plusnet too, thanks. Regarding upload - I do run a fairly substantial homelab, parts of which are replicated to my parents house. I do run services for files and media which I access via VPN and both myself and my wife work heavily from home involving a lot of video calling and in her case, uploads of video. We do of course manage all of this on 25Mbps up at the moment, so regardless of which connection choice I make the upload capacity will be a significant improvement - but you are right - I won't touch the sides of 900Mbps in reality.

ChrisD. said:
Zen do offer IPv6 and a static IPv4 address, which PlusNet don't do (they used to offer IPv4 but stopped IIRC). However I wouldn't use Zen due to their Manchester/London gateway ping pong.

Things like Cloudflare Tunnels negate the requirement for static IPv4 these days, though there are rare requirements such as public cloud allow lists, but again do not apply to the vast majority of people.
Click to expand...

I don't have a requirement for IPv6 right now - though at some point it is something I'll want to play with more... but probably not for some time. The gateway issue you mentioned is potentially a concern though, I'll look in to that more, thanks.
 
Whilst I'm still stuck on FTTC at the moment and am having to renew both lines for this year, the whole pricing situation for FTTC is absolutely bonkers compared to FTTP.

How is that I am looking at 25-30 quid a month for an 8mb connection whereas a 500mb FTTP connection would set me back 21.99 for a 12 month promotional price (rising to 24.99 after that...).

I've managed to keep the prices relatively alright for the last 2 years here (both have been under 27 quid each) but it's such an effort to find a supplier that isn't awful, isn't just chomping at the bit waiting to raise prices in March/April or has some weird clause where they actually charge you an extra 5 quid fee per month to rent a router that you can't opt out of...
 
Caged said:
If you can only get 8Mbps then 5G might be a better option for you
Click to expand...
Can't get 5G where we are either - and whilst it's better for download speeds it's a bit average/crap with latency. At least with the 8mb I have a really low ping in games still.

We've got two lines currently, one is a little faster (no idea why, I think they connected us to the wrong exchange when we had the extra line put in which is actually closer than the 'right one') and is actually alright for most things. But it's completely manageable right now with two lines, it's just frustrating seeing the cost of it all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom