Pro users can have login details given to them by Sky, standard customers can extract details and use hardware that supports MAC encapsulation.
What ISP is fastest / lowest latency - as I have to leave Hyperoptic
- Thread starter jeff83nz
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Pro users can have login details given to them by Sky, standard customers can extract details and use hardware that supports MAC encapsulation.
Go for PlusNet or Sky - have been both with (currently PN) and had no issues with either.
Where are you looking? It's £28.99pm (12m contract) until tonight on offer for the 80/20 plan.
PN don't support IPv6 still - it was in trial around 2016 but they moved some old data centre kit and dropped support for it again. I imagine it's on the backburner again for them until necessary. Bit daft really!
Line rental should be included, even if you don't want it, it's required.
Odd, I would have thought the install times would be provided by Openreach.
That's quite some statement to make, considering Virgin Media especially are renowned for having heavily congested areas.
Eh? It does include line rental...
Ofcom ruled this awhile ago now, that ISPs had to advertise their broadband package prices to include line rental.
Strange, you're right but when I looked earlier that deal wasn't listed.
Also I could select the broadband only deals earlier and now there unavailable.
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The broadband only deals are still there.
I think Plusnet must be one of the only mainstream providers that still let you have the line rental with another provider.
I had my line rental with BT and broadband with Plusnet for a couple of years.
I think Plusnet must be one of the only mainstream providers that still let you have the line rental with another provider.
I had my line rental with BT and broadband with Plusnet for a couple of years.
An expected max speed of 65Mbps in 2018, in London, is frankly pretty sub par. I was getting faster on Virgin in 2011.
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Some not brilliant advice in this thread.
It does matter which ISP you choose, even though BT owns the main network infrastructure - it still transits over the ISP network and some are much more over-subscribed than others. Some also have much much higher latencies than others (TalkTalk, I'm looking at you).
Zen is always my go to... for the price they offer the best service, speeds and pings.
BT and PlusNet aren't as far off as they used to be. The main discrepancy here is that their customer service is worse than Zen's.
Avoid TalkTalk and Vodafone like the plague, you'll hate it.
Only step up from Zen would be A&A... but they're unnecessarily expensive for your needs. And the difference isn't that great.
It does matter which ISP you choose, even though BT owns the main network infrastructure - it still transits over the ISP network and some are much more over-subscribed than others. Some also have much much higher latencies than others (TalkTalk, I'm looking at you).
Zen is always my go to... for the price they offer the best service, speeds and pings.
BT and PlusNet aren't as far off as they used to be. The main discrepancy here is that their customer service is worse than Zen's.
Avoid TalkTalk and Vodafone like the plague, you'll hate it.
Only step up from Zen would be A&A... but they're unnecessarily expensive for your needs. And the difference isn't that great.
I don't see how that's good advice either, I've switched between pretty much all the cheap and more expensive providers over the last 5 years at the end of each contract depending on which deals were available, exactly the same performance and pings every time. There's no way Zen is worth nearly an extra £20 a month over Plusnet imho unless you find yourself contacting customer services frequently, if that's the case you probably have a faulty line.
There's far more to a connection than just bandwidth.
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PlusNet are doing really well... probably the best budget ISP.
Don't even see any youtube slowdowns on it, which are a big problem at peak hours on TalkTalk and Vodafone.
Zen have supplied the most stable and lowest jitter xDSL lines I've ever seen... PlusNet have almost as good pings (maybe 1ms difference)... but sometimes show more jitter.
We're borderline semantics here though... with Zen being regularly 6-8ms with 1-3ms jitter and PlusNet being regularly 8-11ms with 1-5ms jitter and slightly more frequent jitter on PlusNet.
It's up to the OP if that's worth paying the extra for... for me, it is. Plus you're safe in the knowledge that if there's an issue, it'll be dealt with as well as possible, within the limits of what you can do with Openreach.
I don't think it's as simple as saying that big ISPs tend to be bad and small ones geared towards tech people tend to be good. Large ISPs like BT, Sky, TalkTalk can have on-net CDNs for the majority of VOD content that you might want to view which nobody the size of A&A are going to be able to do, and they also tend to have a much higher quantity of peering arrangements. This isn't a fluke - it's a necessity to keep running at the size they are without being drowned by transit costs.
There's also zero chance that the actual network engineers at BT, Sky, TalkTalk are inferior to the ones at Zen and A&A. Remember that TalkTalk run a wholesale division and a lot of other providers use them to get their traffic out of local exchanges and back into their core. If they didn't know what they were doing then they wouldn't have these commercial contracts.
The biggest difference on a working connection is the quality of the support offered - which mainly comes down to the ability of the person getting your support ticket to understand what the problem is and to route it to the team that are capable of resolving the issue, and the features that you can pay for (static IP blocks, IPv6, advanced failover options). It's entirely up to the end user to decide where to spend their money, but if I knew I had a working FTTC service with no line faults, I wouldn't have an issue moving to TalkTalk for my internet connection if I was happy to give up IPv6.
Edit: It's also pretty much a given that your latency is determined by proximity to London as not a lot of peering happens in Manchester. So when comparing pings it's very important to give a rough idea of your geographical location.
There's also zero chance that the actual network engineers at BT, Sky, TalkTalk are inferior to the ones at Zen and A&A. Remember that TalkTalk run a wholesale division and a lot of other providers use them to get their traffic out of local exchanges and back into their core. If they didn't know what they were doing then they wouldn't have these commercial contracts.
The biggest difference on a working connection is the quality of the support offered - which mainly comes down to the ability of the person getting your support ticket to understand what the problem is and to route it to the team that are capable of resolving the issue, and the features that you can pay for (static IP blocks, IPv6, advanced failover options). It's entirely up to the end user to decide where to spend their money, but if I knew I had a working FTTC service with no line faults, I wouldn't have an issue moving to TalkTalk for my internet connection if I was happy to give up IPv6.
Edit: It's also pretty much a given that your latency is determined by proximity to London as not a lot of peering happens in Manchester. So when comparing pings it's very important to give a rough idea of your geographical location.
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Fair points @Caged - nothing much to disagree with there. However I have wholesale contracts with TalkTalk, Zen and a few others (not PlusNet) and am familiar with their setup. Zen pride themselves on focusing on quality over quantity... where others often get the cheapest they can, as long as it hits a lax SLA.
TalkTalk pings are really high though in my experience... for a VDSL connection, at least. I've dealt with fastpath ADSL2+ connections that are better on latency.
Just ran a quick ping from a client's office router... their primary connection is PlusNet and backup is TalkTalk.
To BBC:
PlusNet = 10ms
TalkTalk = 20ms
For TalkTalk, that's actually lower than normal... in my experience. I'm used to seeing it in the 25-30ms range, perhaps they've improved something since I last checked.
A Zen line in the same town is getting 7ms.
I don't have any Vodafone connections to test anymore, as we ditched them all, but was used to seeing similar things.
I definitely wouldn't go TalkTalk unless it was a leased line... their LL offerings can be good in the right area and for a competative price.
TalkTalk business support is great, but can sometimes be slow... their end-user support depends heavily on which agent you are lucky or unlucky enough to talk to... similar to PlusNet. With Zen I've only dealt with a trainee agent once and he was happy and quick to escalate to someone who knew more than him.
TalkTalk pings are really high though in my experience... for a VDSL connection, at least. I've dealt with fastpath ADSL2+ connections that are better on latency.
Just ran a quick ping from a client's office router... their primary connection is PlusNet and backup is TalkTalk.
To BBC:
PlusNet = 10ms
TalkTalk = 20ms
For TalkTalk, that's actually lower than normal... in my experience. I'm used to seeing it in the 25-30ms range, perhaps they've improved something since I last checked.
A Zen line in the same town is getting 7ms.
I don't have any Vodafone connections to test anymore, as we ditched them all, but was used to seeing similar things.
I definitely wouldn't go TalkTalk unless it was a leased line... their LL offerings can be good in the right area and for a competative price.
TalkTalk business support is great, but can sometimes be slow... their end-user support depends heavily on which agent you are lucky or unlucky enough to talk to... similar to PlusNet. With Zen I've only dealt with a trainee agent once and he was happy and quick to escalate to someone who knew more than him.
I'll back up what Crinkleshoes said. I was with talktalk and used to get around 22ms pings but now i get 12-15ms pings with peak times tending to give higher pings. I'm with plusnet atm. They have been fairly reliable except at xmas time where i had issues but thier support was some of the best ive delt with and they helped fix my issue, compared to other ISPs when you talk with non English speaking people that just want to get you off the phone asap.
To put things into perspective, a 20ms difference in ping is 0.02 of a second. I can appreciate if you play latency-sensitive games where performance really matters then you may want to pursue the lowest ping, but in every other situation if you didn't have any way of seeing the latency figures you'd be unable to tell the difference between 10ms and 30ms.
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I'm weird... I can tell the difference... I even have a local DNS server to minimise lookup time.
my ping on talktalk fttc is 13ms, i had bt before and they were 10ms. very little in it. if zen can get 7ms then thats very good and maybe what the OP should consider as it should be even better for games.