News Lords ask for input on broadband plans

Well she does exist.... http://www.parliament.uk/biographies/susan-garden/35605

 

Agreed. It's like a 10mb connection costs £20 p/month and gets 3MB download, and a 20MB costs £30 p/month and gets you bugger all on top. ITS THE SAME INFRASTRUCTURE, DON'T BE FRIGGIN CHEEKY.

 

This won't happen as it will be extremely bad for non-cable business.

Virgin Media: Up to 30Mb, unlimited usage, average speed 30.62Mbps - £27.50 p/m

BTs nearest service: Up to 20Mb, unlimited usage, average speed 12Mbps - £35 p/m inc necessary line rental

Guess who the discerning customer would choose...



/OT Having had to look up accurate plans and pricing, I see Infinity is available to me... is it time I subscribed to my fourth concurrent broadband connection?

 

What BT needs to do is stop selling homehubs with their broadband, and they also need to stop marketing them like they're the best thing since sliced bread. I have a HH2 and it's woeful. I'd be better off using bread as a router...

 

Average and minimum, please.

And more detail about 'fair usage', at what point and by how much the connection is throttled if you exceed that fair usage limit... stuff like that.

 

Well considering the cost for a full FTTP network in this country is about £29 Billion the goverment has shown no sign of investing this sort of funding.

Labour and roadworks will always cost the most in any prodject, using sewers is alot more hassle then its worth mainly due to companies having to agree on access and work permits etc.
VM have roughly 50% coverage in the UK, they do not want to increase this as it would give them SMP and be forced to offer wholesale access to their network, watch the amount of problems then appear it wont happen.

FTTC is going as fast as it can, considering BT where only given the green light back in 2009 to start a Fibre deployment, FTTC is the fastest option we have to play catch up, so anyone wanting a FTTP network would have to wait a few decades before it would be complete.

Depends what Fibre service you are with and what package you are on. Low prices in this country are great for the consumer but its hurt the consumer in the long run as tighter caps on bandwith and lower investment into faster services.

The simple problem with the 'best broadband in Europe by 2015' is what the targets the goverment have set, which will be very ambiguous and easy to achieve.

 

You mean, exactly like VM does?

Down to the times, what's throttled, when, and by how much...

 

i don't get why everyone moans about the fair usage throttles/policy. just think what would happen if they weren't there, a small portion of 'gimps' download more stuff then they could ever possibly play/use and everyone has an internet experience like they were back on dial up. I watch loads of movies/tv shows, download large files when i need to and game, never had a problem with throttling.

 

i live in a cable area and went for talktalk £15-£20 a month inc line rental for upto 24Mb / get around 8Mb moved up to talktalk pro for £30 due to needed over 40Gb a month. BT charged me over £40 for 2Mb and 10Gb limit a month. BT dont deserve any custom. oh and BT also overcharged me £150 while i was with them - and it took me 5 months to get it back.

 

I have a 30 meg virgin connection, which for the most part is connected at 28/30Mbps according to speedtest.net. It's pretty reliable and was just as reliable as when I had 20 meg previously with the same provider. Before that I had ADSL and it was horrible, although I know with ADSL your at the mercy of your own older wires and the older exchanges.

But even with a 30 Meg connection, I find that the limiting factor is often a combination the throttling operated by virgin and the speed of any services you are using, like steam as an example. On a good run from a download site or service I get about 3.6meg a second but often, steam game updates can crawl at 180 to 320k a sec! I know that’s likely to be a steam content server capacity issue but in this world of downloaded content, where everything is gigs and gigs in size it's annoying to constantly be restricted like that.

Another example, I once tried to watch a 14gig high def film over xbox live, but (see the virgin tm table linked below) if I download more that 5 gig between the hours of 3pm and 8pm, my connection gets gimped by a 75% speed reduction. I have had this hit me on steam purchases, where you get your 5 gig and then you spend hours and hours waiting for the next 7 gig.

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/tm-table-su-large.jpg

Sadly there is only one provider of cable here, so it’s a case of stay with them or suffer ADSL, which here is quite poor in comparison.

Frankly, for what I pay for my connection, it’s annoying how out of touch the DL policy is with how people now use the internet.

 

Deck is BT's FTTC service avalible to you?

Would be worth looking into as its a viable alternative to Virgins network, doesnt suffer Virgins traffic mangement.

 

They need to get their ass in gear then. Mine seems to drop below 1.5Mb/s at times and if someone dares browse a webpage with pictures on while I'm on BF3 my ping jumps to 1s.

(there may be minor exaggeration on web traffic but I clocked it at 1.32s today)

 

My speed is quite good on VM cable, only problem is the over the top throttling. My main concern looking to the future is price. My 20mbit is fast enough for what I do, but I could do with the price coming down. Currently I pay a LOT for phone/tv/net.

 

Here where I live in Canada, 100mbps and I pay what $60 CAD and unlimited usage
Poor *******s

 

BT FTTC for most houses should get 20-80mb/s (its not easy to do an avg speed with FTTC yet as due to distance the Drop off for VDSL is quite dramatic the farer you get from the FTTC box and line quality)
some unlucky ones will get 10-20MB/s (i know of 3 places where the DP box is more then 150 meters or so from there houses) still its better then 1mb/s, but then if your to far from the DP box you be stuck with ADSL still as VDSL will only work so far (300Meters aprox max)

and then there is Warrington where its not been even started to be rolled out yet at all (30-40% of the Warrington phone network is to far from the exchange so avg speed is 0.2-2mb/s on ADSL and None of the new houses are getting virgin cable)

yes the BTHub 2 Black and hub 3 are crap they are error prone with a lot of wifi products (i norm have to set the router to b/g mode as the N connection only works for about 2hrs to an day before you need to reboot the router to make it work again) but the problem is you Need N to use FTTC as you have more bandwidth then what wifi G can provide (about 20-25mb/s) good thing with infinity is that you can just go out and buy your own cable router with BT Infinity and not have to bother with poor ADSL routers as its all network cables

Virgin media cable the speeds you buy are Line rate speeds you pay for (normally unless the Node is overloaded then you have issues with Crap QOS that does not work on Virgin so you get packet-loss instead of lower speeds something that BT works Very well as i have seen it on an overloaded BT Exchange 7MB ADSL speed lock at an house but only getting 2.5mb but no packet loss),

only issue i have with the 90-95% throttling on usenet(5pm to midnight ish) that gets normaly partly bypassed using VPN {speed limit seems to be around 35mb/s with VPN active between 5pm-midnight }(they say p2p torrents are also throttled as well but does not seem to get throttled) and lesser issue is overloaded nodes on the outer parts of the network, last issue is Droping packets the Bandwidth provider (its the gateway that links Virgins network to the super pipes in the uk) seems to some times have issues and is dropping packets some times a lot of packets i wish they fix this issue as it would remove a lot of calls to india monkey support that do not understand its not my or there customers end that is the issue with packet loss (the Older 10-20mb DOCSIS 1.1 network does not suffer from this issue as they use an different bandwidth provider)

 

The government could do a lot without plunging in with a full £29bn roll-out of FTTP - for starters, how about making it mandatory for companies building new homes to install a fibre line along with the BT line? Or for BT to do the same whenever a new line is installed - that way, if the road is being dug up ANYWAY, the additional miniscule cost of laying fibre alongside copper should be incurred. I'm hoping that BT's FTTC equipment can also split out the fibre connection for FTTP. If not, that should be mandatory too, so that when the copper into homes IS eventually replaced, fibre is a plug in replacement.

 

I have 100Mb and it costs me £40 a month with unlimited usuage and no reduction in speed.

I downloaded 50gb of data on Saturday from Origin, and because of the poor speed's that I get from Steam I buy all my games on disc that require Steam as I have never had more than 20Mb download speed from Steam.

BT's Infinity will be good for those who can get it, and aslong as there are not to many people on it as it will still suffer from the contention issues that there ADSL customers suffer and also, what the cable customers suffer when they are on a over subscribed UBR.

There will always be issues in the UK with broadband speed's because of the different providers, but one comment above said that the goverment should give VM money to expand there network but the problem with that is, some areas that they went to you had the people with the attitude of NO IN MY BACK YARD, because of where VM wanted to put the street cabinet and those cabinets have to go in certain places due to the distance from the house to the cab, so those people are the reason that some only a small amount but still some areas cannot have cable because of them, and BT had the same issue with there cabinets for Infinity.

I think the sewage pipes would be the best bet to use, for providing to each house as they all have a sewage pipe but then there is the problem of the cables needing to be protected and not to many, cables being put in 1 pipe then not to mention who is actually going to want to connect those cables up after they are pulled through the sewage pipes.

 

Greetings!

I think that is the problem. The fact ISPs can market "up to" speeds and charge any customer with that "up to" speed the same, regardless what the effective speed is.
If a customer with "up to" 20Mbps gets 20Mbps, sure, he should pay 20.
However if a customer with "up to" 20Mbps gets only 3Mbps, he should only pay 3.
Only way I see to have ISPs increase the slow connections.

 

What VPN are you using sir?

 

Some of the new houses in Warrington aslong as you mean Warrington Cheshire, are getting Cable TV.

There are a few sites near me that are getting it because I go past them everyday and have seen them digging the roads and the footpaths in the estates.

As for bypassing the TM thing on VM's service, if you use SSL then you can get round it nearly 100% because they are not allowed to restrict SSL traffic and use I think it is port 443.

The bandwidth provider that links VM's network to the other countries and through out the UK though, is the same for all the Docsis platforms as far as I am aware, the only reason you may see a difference between the packet loss between a 10Mb customer and a 100Mb customer is simply, down to the fact that they are on different Docsis platforms but if they were both on the same you would see the same issue.