BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

Every single engineer I have spoken too bar one, knows the square root of chuff all about what they are doing and thats a fact.

Sending out standard phone engineers for broadband faults is a complete waist of time, which BT are good at, even when they send out these so called "Broadband trained" engineers out, they still don't have no clue unless it's obvious what's wrong.
 
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Hi Guys,

BT are installing our new office line on 02/11 and we should have our infinity 10 days after that.

We have a server running pfsense which handles our firewalling and VPN back to our data centres. Does anyone have any experience with Infinity & pfSense? Should I replace the businesshub and use some sort of transparent VDSL modem?

Any advice would be appreciated.
 
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I have been really disappointed with my connection. This is just horrible it has been over a week now and it is still not fixed :/.

I use to get 77 down 15 up. Definitely something wrong with it. Where do I go to deal with this problem? I ended up calling customer service a year ago for another problem but I spend 40 minute being re-routed :/
 
One on going issue I have with my home hub 3 is one of my computers seems to negotiate at 10mbps every now and then.... have to restart the hub, to get back to 100mbps.

Cable is Cat 6...
 
Read somewhere (engadget I think?) it's via BT Wholesale, not GEA like Sky/TalkTalk. Basically worthless in the grand scheme of fibre offerings.
 
Head office don't seem to want to get involved, RE ping issue:

Hi Chris,

I do partially agree with the areas you highlighted and the routing and also contention will always bring on latency issues. Looking back myself I have had similar issues with a different provider and this was while sorry to admit it playing World of Warcraft and I ended up tunnelling my own traffic to the servers in Holland.

Yeah I’m glad you do realise that WAN networks are hugely different to a LAN. A lot of people on the community forums need to learn what is classified as acceptable boundaries. I doubt all the ‘networking gurus’ in the world could make a network that would be as efficient as what people expect.

I will keep this in mind and keep an eye on the forums if the issue does not improve then I will take it on and ask for it to be looked at by one of the architecture teams.
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Prior to that:

Hi Chris,

Just read that and a few threads from start to finish. As much as I don’t fully agree with some of the networking grasps outlined by a couple of people on the threads I do see what they are getting at.

Personally I come from a security network background its what I’ve studied and put into practice in a lot of different forms. Anyway, as far as the routing is concerned my hands are tied and our suppliers (BTW) would not look at this as a routing or network fault. I understand the hops may seem rather pointless but the way the network is built it does have a reason behind it, be it for security or anything else. I’m also finding it hard to work out what the real difference would show to the end user, I could understand if the hop went into hundreds but for the sake of ten to fifteen milliseconds personally I don’t see the cause for concern.

I get the general feeling from one user its because he is a gamer as he was pinging jolt.co.uk that from experience hosts game servers.

If you could explain how you believe this is end user service affecting then I could possibly make a case.
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I think if we could build enough evidence of the lenglthy routing issues I could present it to Gavin at BT (Executive Level Complaints) and hopefully he could push it to the network architechture team.
 
volkan said:
Hi Guys,

BT are installing our new office line on 02/11 and we should have our infinity 10 days after that.

We have a server running pfsense which handles our firewalling and VPN back to our data centres. Does anyone have any experience with Infinity & pfSense? Should I replace the businesshub and use some sort of transparent VDSL modem?

Any advice would be appreciated.
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If this is for an office I would highly suggest paying out a bit more and getting a reliable provider. During the last few weeks this forum has been full of people having issues with BT connections with no way to get information or even speak to someone who knows what they're talking about. This may be fine for a home connection (and let's face it, the Infinity is great value too) but for an office, do you want to be able to phone directly through to someone who has a clue? If so, pay a bit more. You get what you pay for.

Resellers like Zen, ADSL24, Goscomb etc give you proper business support, guaranteed bandwidth on their backbone, UK support with people who know what they're talking about, static IPs (even a /29 if you want) and more importantly no traffic shaping (they don't touch your connection at all) so you have no worries regarding your question about pf and VPNs.
I'm not saying BT will do it, but with people beginning to use VPNs more and more to get around traffic shaping and restrictions, one day they may suddenly decide to limit all VPN traffic and then you're screwed. For an office I just wouldn't risk it.
 
Anyone know of any good bandwidth monitoring applications, that can break usage down by time? I want to know if it's viable to switch to someone like ADSL 24 then use my business to pay for the line.
 
MilanoChris: Cheers for chasing that up.

A better reply than I expected, but not considering 15ms of routing fluff as a fault is just a fundamental difference of opinion. Not sure how you would present a case to suggest otherwise.

Surely though, there's a basic inefficiency in traffic bouncing up to Sheffield and back. You wouldn't send traffic from customers in Kent to Roubaix, France and back before venturing out onto the wider internet, so why would you do it in the UK? If traffic between Amsterdam and London was suddenly being routed via Frankfurt on a permanent basis, then it would probably be treated as a fault. If BT routed all their traffic from London to NY via Sheffield and back increasing latency from 70ms to 85+, you'd probably get someone to fix that straight away.

Yes, it's partly a gaming issue, but it's also just plain wrong?

Also, potentially related to: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/06/21/bt_major_outage/

Outage in Sheffield mysteriously causes issues for people in Bristol and parts of London. But it's "unrelated"! Hmm.

In summary, I'm still grumpy, nothing will change and I'll eventually just move ISP.
 
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ci_newman said:
You sound like a grade-A arse and a PITA customer. The BT Engineer was just doing his job :rolleyes:



Is that using the Infinity 2 profile? Either way, 35Mbps on an Aluminium line is pretty good! Your ping time will vary depending on the speedtest server that you're using anyway :).
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Yes it is on the Infinity 2 profile, I'm very happy with it as the predicted speeds were 25/5.
 
Veeeeeeeeery slow downloads tonight. Can't get faster than 10mb/s down, yet SpeedTest shows 70mb/s. Don't know what's going on.
 
Internet is VERY slow tonight, websites are sluggish, seems to be happening more and more now, only going to get worse.
 
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