Virgin or BT Infinity?

fluff said:
@jake108 - BT Infinity is a BT Retail ISP offering. FTTC is the technology. You should make it clear or perhaps you're not aware of the countless FTTC offerings from decent ISPs? http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband.html

It's 1Gb/s between the cab and the exchange.
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Whoa sense a bit of hostility there! I come in peace!

1Gbit/s from the cabinet and exchange? When we were in London (just passing - on our way to Reading, Telford) pretty sure the bandwidth was a lot higher than that. Now I could always be wrong (RE: Caveat above in the other post) if I am I will gladly hold up my hands and say I am. But that contradicts the trainer, the powerpoint presentation and the technical specifications. There is accommodated bandwidth based of specified usage for central CABS in city centres etc which is based upon anticipated usage. Some CABS have larger or multiple "pipes" that feed into them too.

What do you mean by decent ISP's? BT is a decent ISP *As half of the overclockers community has a chuckle and re-reads what i've just written*. Yeah sure it's not a perfect company or ran by a demigod that can overrule OFCOM but there is a lot worse out there.

Yes some people have genuine complaints and some people just don't like BT but the same can be said for ANY company whether it be Microsoft, AOL, Virgin Media, BT Retail, BT Open Reach, BT Wholesale, Netgear, Oracle, Cadburys (Kraft), JP Morgan or even Kelloggs.
 
jake108 said:
As beyond - as above the D-Side?
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Thanks Jake, I mean if adsl was suffering from congestion, would fttc also suffer. Basicly is the backhaul for adsl and fttc the same? Or is there a dedicated backhaul for fttc?

The engineer that installed my fttc said he was given an uncapped fttc line to play with and got about 180Mbps down and 76Mbps up.
 
anticonscience said:
1Gb every two hours for hosting Black Ops? Are you insane?
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Like I said I could be wrong as iv only read it around the net from several sources who have monitored their bandwidth.
Its been broken down to this:
(b is bits not bytes)
A average user sends like 50-70kbs when connected TO a host
Which must mean a host is downloading from one user at 50-70kbps
Say if your hosting a 4 player game. 3 players are not on your local network.
Your now connecting to 3 players downloading at 50kbps each(ill use 50 as its a lower figure)
Thats 150kbps download rate your using (im not gna include the amount your uploading)
Thats 0.51Gb in on hour and thus over 1Gb in two hours.

Is this a acceptable way of explaining it?
Again please tell me if im wrong!

Thanks

Oh btw I didnt ever think there would be more than say 30 houses on one cab. I know in my area iv always seen quite a few cabs every two or three roads! But dunno if its just my area.
But I understand your theory jake108 thanks.
 
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I doubt an average user sends 50-70 KILOBYTES per second to a host as the majority of people with a BT ADSL product have 448Kb/s upload speed.
 
on a p2p game such as black ops you are both wrong.

On average each user need 125kbps

this is why P2P is so poor Vs Dedicated servers.

It will lag, the games developers get round this by building tricks and prediction into the game.
 
John24 said:
Thanks Jake, I mean if adsl was suffering from congestion, would fttc also suffer. Basicly is the backhaul for adsl and fttc the same? Or is there a dedicated backhaul for fttc?

The engineer that installed my fttc said he was given an uncapped fttc line to play with and got about 180Mbps down and 76Mbps up.
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The network I have seen shares the same source for a vast majority of the area and cabs. When they are retrofitted or upgraded it would normally filter down to ADSL in the same CAB too. This would not make a difference to ADSL sync speeds or anything though. They would just be more bandwidth available.

Some engineers are lucky gits bet he had a dedicated BT contract too as an employee. I never got this :(.

Amrit said:
Oh btw I didnt ever think there would be more than say 30 houses on one cab. I know in my area iv always seen quite a few cabs every two or three roads! But dunno if its just my area.
But I understand your theory jake108 thanks.
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No problem. Usually in cities the ratio of houses to cabs is higher. Out in the sticks there can be about 10 per cab. It just really depends where you are and the density of population or businesses.

Not all cabinets are standardised throughout the country though, some have different equipment inside, different feeds, different configurations and come from different era's.

I still remember living on the west side of Newcastle and had to work on a cabinet near me. At the time I shouldn't of as it was not what I was contracted to do. But at the time I was merely filling in when people were off sick etc. Inside I found a half eaten twix and a bottle of unopened cola. The lines were covered with like a white filament for some weird reason. When I asked apparently it was to keep the cables "warm" during the winter. Sure they were pulling my leg. :D
 
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Lowercase use of kbps doesn't make the distinction between bits and bytes. Bytes is often used in networking when discussing throughput.

Anyway, the average user should be able to upload at 125Kb/s.
 
jake108 said:
The network I have seen shares the same source for a vast majority of the area and cabs. When they are retrofitted or upgraded it would normally filter down to ADSL in the same CAB too. This would not make a difference to ADSL sync speeds or anything though. They would just be more bandwidth available.
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A win win for adsl and fttc users in the same area then. Providing the bandwidth pool is large enough.

jake108 said:
Some engineers are lucky gits bet he had a dedicated BT contract too as an employee. I never got this :(
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Sorry I worded that badly, it wasn't his own line, just one he got to play with somewhere. His own line is 2Mbps adsl BT gave him the option of having instead of the £300/year shares they took away! Better than nothing I suppose, hopefully his exchange get fttc one day.


Do you have any experience with the openreach modem? Like getting any stats from it. Would be handy to have some stats to keep an eye on for troubleshooting purposes.
 
My last experience with Virgin was about 5 years ago when the new ADSL became available in the area. It is still the worst experience of broadband I have had, always problems with connection. Really put me off Virgin for anything again.

Since then had Nildram, Zen and Bethere all excellent service. But just before xmas decided to try a 50mb virgin connection. Speed is excellent, full 50mb all times of day, ~4.8mb upload, pings as low as 14ms. At the moment I cannot find fault.
 
John24 said:
Do you have any experience with the openreach modem? Like getting any stats from it. Would be handy to have some stats to keep an eye on for troubleshooting purposes.
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It isn't possible until someone manages to "crack" it.
 
John24 said:
Do you have any experience with the openreach modem? Like getting any stats from it. Would be handy to have some stats to keep an eye on for troubleshooting purposes.
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I think I know the piece of kit you are referring to, except it isn't really a modem - just a receiver. As it is CPE (Consumer Premises Equipment) I have only ever seen these in the first build and the later revisions. We would use testing kit similar to test the connections but this would have the debug / troubleshooting info / stats. This is not CPE - as it is considered engineers or technicians equipment.

Doubt I would be installing these devices in the homes of users though. Not sure the release box would contain these features by default. Might ask some of the customer service engineers who do the field installs if the CPE can have these features or some way to enable them. Have not spoken to anyone about this is in ages though, the only time I really communicated with anyone about the consumer version was before the official announcement.

Mainly do back-end and mid-end work. I am trained on how to setup the feed and told how to setup the release "modems" if I need to. But don't really have that practical experience of yet... sorry.

Don't get me wrong though - the CPE consumer kit is very good, doubt a normal user would ever need it IMHO. Power users like yourselves would though.
 
I work for BT (recent starter) at the moment you can get fibre to cab which offers speeds upto 40GB but the plan is 60% fibre to house by 2015 this will offer speeds upto 200Gb depending on transmission equipment and take up.

Im currently with Virgin and i cannot fault there broadband as they have built a new network it is up to date but they have no plans of fibre to house.

But there are a lot of rumours going around about Virgin since the buy out...put it this way its going to keep me in work :)

oh and Amrit there a lot more than 30 houses to a cab on my first day i went to one that 700 lines E side and it seemed that nearly everyone was jumpered, that was including the jumpering to the Dslam (fibre cab).
 
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Sayso said:
I work for BT (recent starter) at the moment you can get fibre to cab which offers speeds upto 40GB but the plan is 60% fibre to house by 2015 this will offer speeds upto 200Gb depending on transmission equipment and take up.
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You should read up on the difference between GB/Gb/MB/Mb before you misinform your customers. ;)
 
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