FTTP Thoughts?

Housey

Housey

Housey

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Joined
21 Feb 2006
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Surprised to say we have the ability to order FTTP at home. I say this as we are very rural and a small cluster attached to a really small exchange (circa 300 properties on our exchange) but sure enough we have it. I actually walked around the grounds with the Openreach engineer looking at where they were installing our fibre trunks and helping him work out what was what based on the plan he had! :D

Ive been a Zen customer for 10 years but they are around 20 quid a month more than BT for what seems on the surface the same product. I do note however that Zen seems to quote higher upload speeds which for me is worth having. I also know Zen is superb should an issue arise but that is so rare. So I’m guessing both lines will perform exactly the same (uploads aside) but are there any other considerations, contention for example?

Thoughts?
 
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Contention is unlikely to be an issue I'd say. Sky will be doing FTTP later this year on the Openreach network but I gave no idea on pricing whatsoever.
 
Happy with Zen here, was on ADSL with them, they were excellent during the FTTP process, lot of communication from them at different stages. But they are expensive, but I feel it’s worth it for me personally.
 
Just ordered the Zen Ultimate Full Fibre 4 package, so 300Mbps down and 50Mbps up, which should be a significant improvement over my current 16Mbps down and around 1Mbps up!
 
BT's actual service is faultless in my experience. Never any contention that is noticable, no peak time slowdowns etc. I think the traditional complaint seems to be the customer service but whether that's worth £20 a month is entirely up to the person spending the cash.
 
That support is worth the money as we suffer from issue with water ingress and noisy phone lines so need the Zen levels of support.
 
So was installed today and it is utterly borked and I am VERY annoyed at the amount of time I have wasted today. I am currently getting around 2.6mbps on what should be a 300mbps line. I am told that something is wrong (like I hadn't worked this out) and it seems that the provisioning has been done wrong by someone, I have to say I fear Zen. I am been told to wait for overnight changes but right now I am angry as **** at the whole process because it has got in the way of a massively busy day for me and left me with a service twice as expensive and 8 times slower.

Will give it till the morning, but the dogs of war are in their kennels and will be sent in in due course if I do not get my 300mbps. Line sync tests showed I should get 330mbps too, I have a fast line but right now something is messing my internet up. :(
 
Been through all that. 4 machines, 2 routers, direct connect to modem etc the issue is network side Zen have confirmed sol
 
Engineer in morning, couldn't do today as I was in meetings all day.

Broken systems in network somewhere so need BT/Zen to fix.
 
Housey said:
Sorry, engineer visit is tomorrow, Friday 13th. What could go wrong....but performance way off still.
Click to expand...

When I had mine installed it was the engineers first solo install. He had a bit of a nightmare in the end. I think he had to terminate the connectorised Fibre 3 or 4 times as he was unable to get a light/satisfactory light source through the cable and he had to go back to the cabinet in the pavement a couple of times as well. Could it be something along the lines of a poorly terminated connector?
 
I still think it is config. The BT Openreach engineer did some very thorough testing and I made him wait 2 hours as I worked to get it working with Zen and all the tests their end showed I had a strong like that should deliver easily the max 300/50 (they said 330/55 was expected) I pay for. It seems Zen have not provisioned it correctly, they should have done it as a new install not an upgrade in their words. I have no idea what this means or the impact of doing this, but my username and password would not work and I was told after testing there was a problem at my local exchange which would need a visit. This was Tuesday and then Tuesday evening I got a call saying it's all OK now, try again. It worked, but the performance was rubbish. I was told give it 24 hours, I did and first speedtest around 6am Wednesday was bang on the money at 300 down, 54 up. Next one was 120 down....then 96....then 220 then 46. I was out all day yesterday so only spoke to Zen whilst heading home around 7:30 and the engineer visit was agreed as we had exhausted all avenues my end.

Direct link to MacBook from BT Fibre modem removed my router as the issue, problem still there. Used 3 machines, 1 x PC and 2 x MacBooks (all via cable then wifi) and that helped remove the machine as the issue. I have been in this game long enough to know when the problem is not my end. Engineer will be here 8am so hopefully he can get to the bottom of it but I suspect its some crappy kit in the exchange..

5 mins ago
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