BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

Qitarah said:
Either way thinking of moving to Virgin media, apparently I'm eligible for "up to 120 mbs" . Anyone know how I would get a proper estimate of my speed with virgin other than just "up to 120"? Also what's virgins traffic shaping policy like? ( I have read up on it, but In my experience what is written and the reality differ).

Thanks
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Virgin Media is awful. I had 120/12 for 6 months but the real downloading speed never get around 12MB/s but the speedtest did say 126Meg. The speed is awful every days during evening. I just glad to left them.
 
R3X said:
I get these results:

aos3lt.jpg


Does this mean I only get BT Fiber 1 (not 2 service) and will most likely only get 42-48mb speeds if I take out BT infinity 1 unlimited service ?

How reliable is that search via http://dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/adslchecker.welcome ?
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If you choose Infinity 1 you'll be limited to 38Mb as that's what it's capped at.

If those figures are accurate you probably won't get much benefit from paying the extra for Infinity 2, but that's a decision to made between your wallet and yourself.
 
Qitarah said:
After upgrading to BT infinity and going through the rigmarole of BTs contracted "engineers" not connecting things up properly and two more resulting visits until it got fixed my initial joy at 26 down and 4 up was short lived. My line was so heavily interleaved that my ping was pretty much double that of my old BT adsl was (5 down).

Either way thinking of moving to Virgin media, apparently I'm eligible for "up to 120 mbs" . Anyone know how I would get a proper estimate of my speed with virgin other than just "up to 120"? Also what's virgins traffic shaping policy like? ( I have read up on it, but In my experience what is written and the reality differ).

Thanks
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Infinity seems to take quite awhile to fully recover from interleaving after a fault and seems to have some rather funny settings for interleaving and fastpath :|

When we were first connected up the ping to the first hop was 6ms then we had a fault due to an engineer screw up and interleaving kicked in, etc. and was at 30ms to the first hop for 2-3 weeks then just as I was about to kick off it dropped to 15ms but stayed there for ages before eventually dropping to 6ms and now its dropped to 3ms.

Not that it makes much odds as BT's routing is so stupid we pickup an extra ~10ms for no good reason before getting out onto the internet.

Tracing route to bbc.net.uk [212.58.244.71]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms www.asusnetwork.net [192.168.1.1]
2 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 172.16.14.3
3 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms 213.120.158.174
4 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms 213.120.158.173
5 10 ms 11 ms 10 ms 217.32.145.106
6 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 217.41.169.247
7 10 ms 11 ms 10 ms 217.41.169.109
8 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms acc2-10GigE-9-2-0.sf.21cn-ipp.bt.net [109.159.25
1.221]
9 19 ms 16 ms 15 ms core1-te0-0-0-6.ilford.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.25
1.157]
10 15 ms 16 ms 20 ms peer2-xe10-1-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.
254.116]
11 17 ms 16 ms 17 ms 194.74.65.42
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 18 ms 14 ms 18 ms ae0.er01.telhc.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.109]
15 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms 132.185.255.149
16 17 ms 17 ms 16 ms bbc-vip116.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.71]

Trace complete.
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Yup my connection is still going from Somerset, South Yorkshire, London before getting out onto the internet :(
 
Well to add, I had the line for a good few months, what I posted makes it sounded like I just had it installed.

The first "engineer" did such a bad job it was not even funny, ended up having a line profile reset after everything was fixed. I ping low ish 30s at the very best to London based servers, and I live near Cambridge. Quite terrible, then again I do live around 0.6 miles away from the cabinet that I am connected to.

Was thinking of moving to Virgin, my house does have NTL fiber cables installed, so guess I would get decent ish speeds, but yer heard nightmare stories about VM anyways.
 
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bremen1874 said:
If you choose Infinity 1 you'll be limited to 38Mb as that's what it's capped at.

If those figures are accurate you probably won't get much benefit from paying the extra for Infinity 2, but that's a decision to made between your wallet and yourself.
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ahh thanks had a feeling that may be the case... cos I was able to add infinity 2 into the basket I take it if I want to enjoy 42-48meg I would have to go for the infinity 2 plan ?
 
bulldog147 said:
Virgin Media is awful. I had 120/12 for 6 months but the real downloading speed never get around 12MB/s but the speedtest did say 126Meg. The speed is awful every days during evening. I just glad to left them.
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Did you not try it after midnight ? should have been hitting 100meg+ surely?
 
R3X said:
Did you not try it after midnight ? should have been hitting 100meg+ surely?
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It was after 1am before I getting 126Meg but I getting fed up & tired to wait until after midnight to get maximum speed.

The evening between 6pm and 1am is very bad on you tubes buffering, very slow downloading and some high ping as well (over 40ms) and some sites took ages to load or not working. It's not my pc as I did try pc, laptop and tablet, all the same.
 
got the HH3 and its shocking, wireless dropping in and out all the time.

ive tried setting it to different channels and also experience the same issue, do you think its worth upgrading to something either different or one of the newer home hubs?
 
I got hh5 and it pretty rubbish. Netgear DGND3700v2 is far better wifi than hh5. The latest firmware on hh5 is terrible, dropping connection more often and you cannot turn off auto updating on bt hh5.
 
bulldog147 said:
It was after 1am before I getting 126Meg but I getting fed up & tired to wait until after midnight to get maximum speed.

The evening between 6pm and 1am is very bad on you tubes buffering, very slow downloading and some high ping as well (over 40ms) and some sites took ages to load or not working. It's not my pc as I did try pc, laptop and tablet, all the same.
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hmm really surprised, I am in the middle of debating going virgin or going bt/sky or plusnet.... such a shame one can't test out these services for a week and just cancel each service one has to bite the bullet and make do for 18 months.

have to admit am reading this plusnet special offer deal over at hotuk deals and it sounds tempting to go plusnet...
 
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I left them as I got 6 months left on my contract after fourth times visited from virgin tech guy is enough and enough and virgin finally let me go without penalty fee charge.
 
bulldog147 said:
I left them as I got 6 months left on my contract after fourth times visited from virgin tech guy is enough and enough and virgin finally let me go without penalty fee charge.
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That took quite a bit of effort but am glad to see they let you go :)

I do admit currently Virgin customer service is pretty poor in general for anything other then cable tv, if I compare it to my BT land line which has never gone wrong in donkeys, I am kind of tempted to stick with the BT line due to no issues but virgin @ 120mb hard to resist lol
 
R3X said:
That took quite a bit of effort but am glad to see they let you go :)

I do admit currently Virgin customer service is pretty poor in general for anything other then cable tv, if I compare it to my BT land line which has never gone wrong in donkeys, I am kind of tempted to stick with the BT line due to no issues but virgin @ 120mb hard to resist lol
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In my honest, if the 120Meg was fine in the last 6 months - I would stay with them because don't need phone line. But, FTTC does need a line rental at all the times.
 
@thread

R3X's figures look strange, but I've noticed this with friend of mine also. The ADSL2 figures seem very high (my friend is estimated at 19Mb/s, even though he barely got 6Mb/s), but his FTTC numbers are around 55Mb/s.

On the other hand, my line is estimated at 73Mb/s for FTTC and 5-7Mb/s for ADSL2. My real ADSL2 figure is 11Mb/s (no fibre installed yet).

Does anyone else find this odd?
 
parityboy said:
@thread

R3X's figures look strange, but I've noticed this with friend of mine also. The ADSL2 figures seem very high (my friend is estimated at 19Mb/s, even though he barely got 6Mb/s), but his FTTC numbers are around 55Mb/s.

On the other hand, my line is estimated at 73Mb/s for FTTC and 5-7Mb/s for ADSL2. My real ADSL2 figure is 11Mb/s (no fibre installed yet).

Does anyone else find this odd?
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That's pretty normal.

My ADSL2+ was estimated at 7.5Mb to 11.5Mb but I am getting 15.8Mb on my ADSL2+ (with snr of 3dB) default BT set snr of 6dB would get me around 13.5Mb. So, I believe that estimated by BT is only a guide (with snr of 6dB or more with default)
 
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My ADSL2+ figures on the availability checker are 5Mb-7Mb, FTTC 79-80Mb. On ADSL2+ we were getting about 7-8Mb with normal SNR and upto 11Mb with the DG834 and tweaking the noise targets.

When I had FTTC installed the engineer showed me the line stats on the handheld tool they have and theoretically the line was good for IIRC upto 119Mb up and 125Mb down - at the time he said they were about to role out an "Infinity 3" product that would be upto 160Mb but so far no sign of anything faster than 80Mb in my area :S (not that I'm complaining as 80Mb is pretty adequate for now).
 
Rroff said:
My ADSL2+ figures on the availability checker are 5Mb-7Mb, FTTC 79-80Mb. On ADSL2+ we were getting about 7-8Mb with normal SNR and upto 11Mb with the DG834 and tweaking the noise targets.

When I had FTTC installed the engineer showed me the line stats on the handheld tool they have and theoretically the line was good for IIRC upto 119Mb up and 125Mb down - at the time he said they were about to role out an "Infinity 3" product that would be upto 160Mb but so far no sign of anything faster than 80Mb in my area :S (not that I'm complaining as 80Mb is pretty adequate for now).
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How far away is your FTTC cabinet? My FTTC installation tomorrow (Thursday) as BT estimated my FTTC will be 79.9Mb/20.0Mb Range A and 76.6Mb/19.9Mb Range B
 
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