BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

sparkymark75 · 17 Jun 2020 at 19:12

the-evaluator said:
Time to talk to BT then I think. They may want to ship you a SmartHub 2 and see if that makes any difference.

Yeah I think so. The order did say by midnight tonight so I’ll see if anything changes overnight and if not give them a call tomorrow.

apachegoose · 17 Jun 2020 at 19:18

sparkymark75 said:
Plugged the BT Homehub into the ONT and plugged my laptop into it. Getting the numbers below, very slight improvement but that's probably because its as direct a connection as I'll get.

That's the old smarthub and your probably at its limits, especially the Upload. Just to confirm you have reset the ER-4, done minimal setup, and then run the tests either directly on the router or via a computer wired in only to that router.

You got about max settings for what the old superhub can do, and less from the ER-4 which does seem like either you have a messed up config on the ER-4 or one / both of your switches have got messed up. Process of elimination is needed as it really doesn't seem like anything is wrong with your FTTP connection its your hardware.

sparkymark75 · 17 Jun 2020 at 19:45

apachegoose said:
That's the old smarthub and your probably at its limits, especially the Upload. Just to confirm you have reset the ER-4, done minimal setup, and then run the tests either directly on the router or via a computer wired in only to that router.

You got about max settings for what the old superhub can do, and less from the ER-4 which does seem like either you have a messed up config on the ER-4 or one / both of your switches have got messed up. Process of elimination is needed as it really doesn't seem like anything is wrong with your FTTP connection its your hardware.

Well plugged directly into router doesn't fix it so I don't think it's either of the switches. I'll see about resetting my ER4 tomorrow and starting with a basic setup. I did have SmartQueues on it but disabled that a few weeks back. I reset the router twice today just in case there was any lingering SmartQueue stuff still running.

apachegoose · 17 Jun 2020 at 19:57

sparkymark75 said:
Well plugged directly into router doesn't fix it so I don't think it's either of the switches. I'll see about resetting my ER4 tomorrow and starting with a basic setup. I did have SmartQueues on it but disabled that a few weeks back. I reset the router twice today just in case there was any lingering SmartQueue stuff still running.

Don't know why I just suddenly thought about this now, when I should be watching the TV. But have you turned off Hardware offloading? At a guess the Er-4's speed without it will be about what you are getting.

sparkymark75 · 17 Jun 2020 at 20:17

apachegoose said:
Don't know why I just suddenly thought about this now, when I should be watching the TV. But have you turned off Hardware offloading? At a guess the Er-4's speed without it will be about what you are getting.

Yeah I thought about that earlier and checked but all seems okay.

HungryHippos · 17 Jun 2020 at 23:39

sparkymark75 said:
Finally managed to get the upgrade to Fibre 900. They either fixed the database issue or changed something at the exchange as the max available was 330 until I checked again yesterday. Gave them a call, told the best they could do was £67 per month. Called again, this time to cancel (was out of contract), was offered it for £55pm, which is a fiver cheaper than I was paying for the 300 package.

Upgrade went live overnight, wired speed tests seems to top out around the 500-600Mbps range. Upload speed is excellent though. I know technically you should get the max speed straight away but did anyone find their speeds improved over time?

I am on their 150mbps service at the moment for £33/month. I can get the 900mbps service now but as it's just me using it, it feels a bit ludicrous paying almost double for the extra speed, when everything is pretty fast anyway.

Tempted to get it though but only if the price is right, even if just for one contract cycle so I can bask in the glory of gigabit internet. Although I think my powerline adaptors won't even be able to keep up with it!

Do you know if there is any real work involved in upping the speed? I think I must have some form of FTTP to allow the faster 150mbps service.

the-evaluator · 18 Jun 2020 at 08:57

HungryHippos said:
Although I think my powerline adaptors won't even be able to keep up with it!

Yeah, they definitely won't keep up. Absolutely no chance.

HungryHippos said:
Do you know if there is any real work involved in upping the speed? I think I must have some form of FTTP to allow the faster 150mbps service.

Moving someone from one FTTP package to another is just a soft change so requires more than a few buttons to be pressed.

You can get 150Mbps on G.Fast but if the 900Mbps tier is being offered to you then I'd assume you already have FTTP. What piece of Openreach equipment does the WAN cable from your router go to?

HungryHippos · 18 Jun 2020 at 09:05

the-evaluator said:
Yeah, they definitely won't keep up. Absolutely no chance.

Moving someone from one FTTP package to another is just a soft change so requires more than a few buttons to be pressed.

You can get 150Mbps on G.Fast but if the 900Mbps tier is being offered to you then I'd assume you already have FTTP. What piece of Openreach equipment does the WAN cable from your router go to?

There's a big white box on the wall that it connects to, my FTTP was run approx 10 months ago so should be reasonably current equipment wise (hopefully).

the-evaluator · 18 Jun 2020 at 09:31

If it's a big white box then that sounds like an ONT so it seems very likely that you've got FTTP. If BT are offering the 900Mbps tier then the upgrade should just be a button pushing exercise.

HungryHippos · 18 Jun 2020 at 09:43

the-evaluator said:
If it's a big white box then that sounds like an ONT so it seems very likely that you've got FTTP. If BT are offering the 900Mbps tier then the upgrade should just be a button pushing exercise.

Yup that rings a bell, it must be the ONT box. I'll see what BT will offer me but I reckon they'll want a boat load of cash for the 900mbps service!

the-evaluator · 18 Jun 2020 at 09:47

What role are your Powerline adapters playing? If they're connecting your PC to the router than save your money and don't bother with the 900Mbps tier. You won't get anything like 900Mbps through them.

Ayahuasca · 18 Jun 2020 at 09:48

HungryHippos said:
Yup that rings a bell, it must be the ONT box. I'll see what BT will offer me but I reckon they'll want a boat load of cash for the 900mbps service!

You may be able to get it for £50 if you do what @spoffle did.

HungryHippos · 18 Jun 2020 at 10:08

Ayahuasca said:
You may be able to get it for £50 if you do what @spoffle did.

Was his a retention deal? best I could get out of them was:

£54.99 - 900mbps
£49.99 - 500mbps
£47.99 - 300mbps
All on 24 month contracts

My current contract ends Feb 2021, so they said there is a 14 day cooling off period on this one.

I went for the 900mbps one as I need to check how well it works anyway, if it's really limited by my powerline speeds then I may have to reconsider, but I can basically trial the 900mbps service for up to 14 days.

Then I could drop back to my current contract and get a slightly better deal on the end of contract re-negotiation.

Ayahuasca · 18 Jun 2020 at 10:12

He managed to get them to take £5 off the monthly 900mbps price. If they won't offer it right now over the phone, I think your only hope would be to upgrade and then call up a few days later saying you've realised you don't need that speed and they might offer it at a reduced cost, instead of downgrading you.

HungryHippos · 18 Jun 2020 at 10:16

Ayahuasca said:
He managed to get them to take £5 off the monthly 900mbps price. If they won't offer it right now over the phone, I think your only hope would be to upgrade and then call up a few days later saying you've realised you don't need that speed and they might offer it at a reduced cost, instead of downgrading you.

Yeah was thinking that actually, they won't want to go through the hassle of changing my package and contract about too much

the-evaluator · 18 Jun 2020 at 11:08

HungryHippos said:
I went for the 900mbps one as I need to check how well it works anyway, if it's really limited by my powerline speeds then I may have to reconsider, but I can basically trial the 900mbps service for up to 14 days.

It will be. The Powerlines are going to be a pretty big bottleneck.

BigT · 18 Jun 2020 at 11:25

Got to echo the powerline bottleneck concerns and also potentially WiFi. Unless you have an optimal 4x4 access point and exclusively modern Wifi clients on it, you're never going to get close to some of these internet speeds on any single device. As a rule of thumb that's stood me in good stead if I want >100Mbps on a device for whatever reason then it gets wired with a proper ethernet cable. All that WAN bandwidth for a specific device has only a few real use cases in the home environment anyway and it's basically big downloads, normally 'Linux ISOs' from torrents or newsgorups or game installs/patches. I will also concede that if you have lots and lots of devices using big chunks of bandwidth then its useful - here I'm thinking large families doing heavy streaming simultaneously. I know kids who listen to music on their poor quality phone speakers by streaming 4K youtube videos instead of a music streaming service at 100x the bandwidth required to get the same end result!

sparkymark75 · 18 Jun 2020 at 11:25

Ayahuasca said:
He managed to get them to take £5 off the monthly 900mbps price. If they won't offer it right now over the phone, I think your only hope would be to upgrade and then call up a few days later saying you've realised you don't need that speed and they might offer it at a reduced cost, instead of downgrading you.

I had to threaten to cancel to even get the 54.99 deal!

sparkymark75 · 18 Jun 2020 at 11:27

apachegoose said:
That's the old smarthub and your probably at its limits, especially the Upload. Just to confirm you have reset the ER-4, done minimal setup, and then run the tests either directly on the router or via a computer wired in only to that router.

You got about max settings for what the old superhub can do, and less from the ER-4 which does seem like either you have a messed up config on the ER-4 or one / both of your switches have got messed up. Process of elimination is needed as it really doesn't seem like anything is wrong with your FTTP connection its your hardware.

I factory reset my EdgeRouter 4 this morning. Got it setup with the basics to give me internet access. Plugged my laptop into the EdgeRouter and still only getting just over 600Mbps. Going to give BT a call to see what they say. Think I've exhausted every option on my own network.

Caged · 18 Jun 2020 at 11:28

I'm not surprised that getting a deal can take a bit of effort to be honest - hopefully other more mainstream providers start offering the gigabit services (even FTTP would be a start) and then there will actually be a bit of competition on the Openreach network.