Is all adsl equal in this day and age?

iviv

iviv

iviv

Soldato
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I'm about to move house into a block of flats, though unfortunately due to the age of the building, adsl is the only internet option that's going to be available to me. Looking through the major suppliers, Plusnet and Sky seem to have the best deals available.

While cheaper, plusnet only offer 8-16Mb with 2.5Mb guaranteed minimum, while sky seem to have a more optimistic 14-19Mb with a 10Mb minimum.

However, I thought that with adsl it was pretty much all down to the wiring and that different ISPs wouldn't have much of a difference since the physical wires were the limitation?
 
ISPs can declare an artificial limitation. I remember moving into a place that was deemed so far away from the exchange that 56k would be the only option. I pressed, and they agreed a 2mbit ADSL could be done after line testing. That turned the place from disconnected hellhole to 'just about internetable' in like 2008.

Later on I got fibre installed, even though it's a listed building. Suddenly bandwidth opened up from 2mbps on regular DSL to 36-72 mbps or whatever. Once the network nearby was upgraded to fibre, all it needed was an openreach engineer to fanny about with the main socket in my flat.

My advice is keep pressing and disputing.
 
Well, the building isn't listed according to historic england. The problem is that all the ISPs just say that superfast broadband isn't available in the area (despite being central london). Is there anything I would be able to do to get them to re-visit this? Location wise, I don't think it's a problem, I'm assuming it's just that they would have to do work connecting up the whole building? I'm not entirely sure how it all works, but I would be much happier there if I was able to get proper bandwidth.

Samknows lists the exchange as having BT FTTC and FTTP, along with vodafone, sky and talktalk LLU, so I'm guessing the problem is the building itself.
 
The problem is that a lot of Central London is on exchange-only lines due to the short distances involved, and this is more likely with older buildings. Openreach have all but stopped putting in new cabinets to migrate EO lines to FTTC as they focus on going full fibre. The downside is that it may take you a while to get connected.

You could try checking your postcode at https://threebroadband.co.uk

Do you have an analogue line at the moment? Put your number into http://dslchecker.bt.com and post the results
 
Hyperoptic will serve a block if there's sufficient interest, but it would take several months at the least to get the service up and running so it's only worth the hassle if you've bought a property.
 
To answer the question, all openreach resellers will supply the same last mile service (the bit between you and the cabinet/exchange). Some will air on the side of caution with minimums, but the end result will only vary based the equipment used at your end if you have a like for like profile/product.
 
ADSL is still an LLU product, so different providers use different DSLAMs and can do different things with profiles, bonding etc. They have a lot more control over the physical service than they do with FTTC. There is no Openreach ADSL product, there's just a copper line.
 
Caged said:
The problem is that a lot of Central London is on exchange-only lines due to the short distances involved, and this is more likely with older buildings. Openreach have all but stopped putting in new cabinets to migrate EO lines to FTTC as they focus on going full fibre. The downside is that it may take you a while to get connected.

You could try checking your postcode at https://threebroadband.co.uk

Do you have an analogue line at the moment? Put your number into http://dslchecker.bt.com and post the results
Click to expand...

I see, thanks for the details. I guess I just made the assumption that 'pfft, of course there's going to be high speed internet in London!'

Unfortunately I'm only going to be renting there for a year, and it's a private landlord rather than a landlord that owns/runs the whole building, so I'm guessing that getting whatever agreements are needed to get the building hooked up for some sort of higher speed internet aren't really going to be worth it. The link there to Three is an interesting option, though as I've already got an unlimited tariff with them for my phone I guess I could teather that instead, but I'd rather have the stability of a landline as well. I don't move in until Friday, so I've not got a phone line/number for the unit as of yet.
I guess I'll just go with Sky since they are guaranteeing a higher speed then!
 
Have you looked at 4G? With a Vodafone unlimited SIM, in central London you should see 70-150Mbps download and 20-80Mbps upload speed. If you’re in a 5G enabled area then it could be even faster. Huawei, Mikrotik, Draytek and TP-Link all make excellent 4G SIM enabled modem/router/WLAN devices that you put the SIM in the back and it just works. No faffing about and no data caps.
 
My current Three mobile plan is unlimited and I'm pretty sure it allows tethering, so I was planning on seeing how that worked when I moved in, worst case I could probably just use that since there wouldn't be any difference between just tethering off the phone vs using some sort of mobile router, right?

That said, how would 4g be for latancy?
 
The only difference between tethering from the phone and a router-type device is that it’s a seamless experience and you can use the ports on a router for wired as well as wireless devices as well as sharing music/data from USB etc. If you had something like Sonos I think you’d struggle with a tethered phone solution.

Latency has never been an issue for me and we use either TP-Link MR-200 or Mikrotik SXT-LTE units for working on sites for anything up to a year.
 
iviv said:
That said, how would 4g be for latancy?
Click to expand...

Highly varied unfortunately depending on a lot of factors - where I am right now during the night I get a pretty solid 26ms latency to stuff like bbc.co.uk on Virgin Mobile 4G and ingame pretty stable netgraph with negligible to no packetloss but during the day more typically:

Code: 
Pinging bbc.co.uk [151.101.192.81] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 151.101.192.81: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=48
Reply from 151.101.192.81: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=48
Reply from 151.101.192.81: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=48
Reply from 151.101.192.81: bytes=32 time=41ms TTL=48

And will see sporadic spikes to like 76ms during the day and during gaming some slight packetloss though so far it has been still pretty negligible - so far haven't had any disconnections while playing online on 4G as used to happen a lot a few years back.

But some places where I've stayed a few days for work or family reasons, etc. I've had far poorer experience on 4G with lots of packetloss and ping spikes into the 100s of ms, etc.
 
If it's only you then plug in a little TP Link travel router into your current Wi-Fi router and put it in wireless client mode, and connect that to your phone's hotspot. You get the benefit of the wired ports and a persistent Wi-Fi connection for devices around your home, but the WAN connection is your phone when you're in the house. You can probably power it off the USB socket on your router as well if you wanted.
 
Well, my only PC doesn't have a wireless card, and I don't have anything else that really needs internet connectivity, so if there's not going to be a performance benefit to getting a 4g router then I think I'll just stick to tethering directly from my phone for a week, see how things cope, and if it's not great then I'll have to go adsl.

Thanks for all the time and advice guys!
 
Caged said:
Have a look at Three’s 5G plan which has launched today. £35/month, unlimited.
Click to expand...
Yeah, Google must have noticed me researching and posting about it because I got a few items on my news feed today about that service from Three! Popped down to my local store at lunch, but apparently I'm not living in a 5g part of London :(
 
iviv said:
My current Three mobile plan is unlimited and I'm pretty sure it allows tethering, so I was planning on seeing how that worked when I moved in, worst case I could probably just use that since there wouldn't be any difference between just tethering off the phone vs using some sort of mobile router, right?

That said, how would 4g be for latancy?
Click to expand...


Had to do this myself and it isn't much worse than the latency i got from my previous wired connection. You do get noticeable packet loss at points, and the ping is higher, but for actual latency it's not much over my wired connection which apparently suffered no packet loss, average ping was about 20-30ms, yet felt like playing with a 100-200ms connection, despite ping saying otherwise.


I wouldn't recommend it for gaming on a competitive level (nor my old connection for that matter) but it will suffice for a happy go lucky person that isn't fussed about getting rolled by players with better internet.



As far as downloading goes, it's far better than my ADSL was, and streaming is fine with it.
 
As a quick update to the thread, went with adsl in the end; turns out that Three's 4g service in central london is pretty garbage. Had a connection, but was struggling to get over 3Mb/s during 'peak' hours, and would finally peak around 20mb/s in the early hours of the morning once there weren't as many people using it. The ADSL is usable at around 14Mb/s with sky.
 
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