new house, new connection options

sansnom

sansnom

sansnom

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hey guys

moving into a new house in about a month and wanted to get some ideas for phone line/internet and tv packages (tried the sticky but didn't really help)

Basically my options are:
1. Zen Fibre & Phone line and then a separate TV package (expensive)
2. Cheaper Fibre & Phone line and separate TV package (slightly better value for money)
3. Some sort of bundle fibre, phone line and TV package (probably best value for money)

If you were moving house and had a blank canvas with no existing ties to any providers and want to keep internet/TV/line payments to about £50 per month at most what would the ideal choice be?

Post code is HA1 and usage is probably around 30-50GB mostly with streaming and gaming. Priority is quality of service and reliability (no point skimping to £5/month internet if it goes down every 5 mins or has unplayable latency in games)

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While I'm at it as well, I thought I should mention that I'm also on the lookout for a new heavy duty router as there's usually a ton of things connected at any one point in time (about 6 phones, 4 laptops, 4 tvs, 3 appliances, wireless thermo, 2 media players and soon to be about 40 wireless LEDS) so really need a router that can multitask all this with breaking a sweat
 
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Sky Fibre is pretty good, they also have some good deals for new customers. You should be able to get something for £50 a month but possibly not with Sports/Movies.

I've been with Sky for just phoneline and broadband for about 4 years now, and I've not really had any cause for complaint with them. The only minor gripe with them is that their 1st line support for broadband is Indian, but to be fair they're one of the better Indian CS I've dealt with.

Both Zen and Plusnet have a good reputation for Broadband also, but as you've said you'll be paying more having a non-bundled deal.

The only other 3-way provider I'd maybe look at is BT, price wise they're not bad but CS leaves something to be desired, and their TV offering is not brilliant. But they are investing more and more money into services, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it get better over the next 12 months.
 
Scottland said:
Sky Fibre is pretty good, they also have some good deals for new customers. You should be able to get something for £50 a month but possibly not with Sports/Movies.

I've been with Sky for just phoneline and broadband for about 4 years now, and I've not really had any cause for complaint with them. The only minor gripe with them is that their 1st line support for broadband is Indian, but to be fair they're one of the better Indian CS I've dealt with.

Both Zen and Plusnet have a good reputation for Broadband also, but as you've said you'll be paying more having a non-bundled deal.

The only other 3-way provider I'd maybe look at is BT, price wise they're not bad but CS leaves something to be desired, and their TV offering is not brilliant. But they are investing more and more money into services, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it get better over the next 12 months.
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Thanks for that.

We are currently with BT (Infinity 38Mb Unlimited) where we are now and we swore we'd never go with them again. They've been dreadful with constant dropouts, appalling CS etc

We've also heard really bad things about Sky/Talk Talk and PlusNet but then we've also heard bad things about Virgin.

I guess, like with anything, it comes down to luck of the draw whether you have a poor experience or not?

Sky would probably make most sense as then everything is integrated and I'd only have to deal with one company but how is their usage policy and things like Throttling or traffic management? Do you game or stream much?
 
I think there's a little bit of luck involved, I can only speak from my own experiences but the CS from Sky has always been ok and any outages have been dealt fine. To a certain extent you're never going to get the same level of CS from a large company like Sky or TalkTalk compared with someone like Zen.


If you just wanted phone and broadband then Zen work out quite well price wise.
 
S2KIP said:
Sky support is good.

But their fibre pro package is the same cost as Zen 80/20.
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Yea I saw that but I figured Zen's would be much higher quality though Sky would probably offer a discount if taken with a TV package too.

Speaking of Sky, according to them I can only get a max of 40Mbps/sec yet according to Zen I can get the full 76Mbps...I thought they're based on the same technology (LLU)?

Virgin is saying I could get 100Mbps but that's different I suppose given that theirs is cable.

Question - does it even matter what speed package you get when it's FTTC? I don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting higher than 3MB/sec on a normal FTTC connection even close to an exchange
 
Sky do a Fibre Pro package which is upto 80meg, I'm on that and about 250m away from the fibre cabinet and can get upto about 70meg topping download speeds of around 8MB/s.

Zen/BT/Plusnet go through BT Wholesale's IP backbone, whereas Sky/TalkTalk is through their own.
 
S2KIP said:
Sky wouldn't offer me any discount on Fibre Pro, I did however get 50% off line rental.
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Were you a new customer though? I was an existing ADSL customer with Sky and they knocked £10 of the Fibre Pro for me. I did go through to cancellations though.
 
Yes, and my new installation went through the executive complaints team as well, and they said there were no offers on Fibre Pro for new or existing customers.
 
APM said:
go through topcashback and see what deals they have on offer
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Will try that, I'm just more concerned about getting the right product at this stage as I still have plenty of time to order.

I want things like full documentary channels, entertainment channels like more4 etc and movie channels but in reality, sky's movie channels are pretty bad as they keep playing the same movies over and over and selection is very limited so I often end up just streaming content or watching local content off my media player.

At the same time, as I mentioned, reliability and quality of service is extremely important to us, more than pricing but within reason.

It just seems like everytime I think 'ah ok I'll grab this one' I do a bit of research and I find out there's all kinds of issues like VM throttling/high latency/low speeds or sky instability/low speeds etc
 
MissChief said:
Send me a trust message for half price Sky TV for a year sansnom.
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Thanks MC - let me do a bit more research on the providers if that's ok so I don't end up wasting your code or incase someone else wants it sooner (I still have about a month before I move into the new place so can't order atm)
 
Bit of an update
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So I've decided to go with Sky as a complete package (TV, Fibre & Line) as I just can't justify the £47/month for internet only from Zen and I'm not prepared to take the plunge on Virgin as there's just too many horror stories.

On that basis, I'll be either getting a code from MissChief or going through topcashback - speaking of which - how does that work exactly? Is it £120 cashback on top of the £75 credit and 25% off any TV package? How/when does the cashback get paid?

Moving on to my next dilemma's:
-My electronics cupboard will be under the stairs of an old victorian mid terrace. I'll probably have the Sky standard modem and router but also have an Asus N66u lying around somewhere.

Question is, are these good enough for my intended setup or do I need something better? Here is the intended setup:

4 smart tv's (connected via Ethernet to a switch) and also connected via HDMI over ethernet to receive picture signal
2 storage drives (1TB+) connected to router via USB or potentially 2 drive NAS (connected via Ethernet to a switch)
Asus Vivo Mini HTPC (connected via Ethernet to a switch)
Ethernet Switch connected to the router/sky hub
Sky+ box (connected to router via switch)
40 Ethernet ports around the house, 4 in each room (connected to switch) of which at least 1 port will be HDMI over ethernet

So basically I need some advice on:
-What the right cabling is (cat 6? Cat6A? shielded?)
-Modem, Router or Modem/Router
-Switch/NAS/Local storage via router instead
-Suitability of Asus Vivo mini as an HTPC
-Appropriate means to control the devices via Infra-red or other mechanism over the ethernet/coax cabling
 
Don't over complicate it.

Although you have a few devices it's nothing over the top, light bulbs aren't exactly high bandwidth and 40 of them shouldn't trouble any router from the last decade.

Cable wise last time I did this I though about 6 but still rolled 5e. I don't for see a situation where i'll regret that any time soon. Smart TV's use a few mbit to stream from online, playback of 1080p over the LAN won't break a sweat. As to the cable runs then in my set-up the balum's run two un-broken feeds from the matrix to each screen/PJ, this is totally separate to my LAN. For each room I pull 4 cat5e feeds, 2 for HDMI and 1 for data, the 4th is spare for either of the other two.

Control is interesting, at the simplest level Sky have a remote app you could use, or you can use RF with the magic eye set-up, beyond that it gets more expensive and complicated, that said pulling RG6 to each room at the same time is easy enough and magic eye kits and remotes are cheap.

With the Vivo what are you wanting it to do? An entry celeron based NUC can do HTPC duties up to 1080p easily enough, what are you wanting to do on top of that? Personally i quite like a flirc as I can use the Sky remote from a control perspective.
 
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