What are my broadband options?

JonathanRyan

JonathanRyan

Messages
10,349
Name
Jonathan
Edit My Images
Yes
So bye bye Virgin. After 18 months of 100 meg fibre I'm moving a mile or so and they don't have cable. Bizarrely there's no fibre of any kind to the newish build estate. (USwitch says there is but when you go to each provider's website in turn it says there isn't - thank USwitch...)

My options appear to be
  1. Sign up with a firm I've never heard of that claim they have a 30 MB connection (Onestream - gut feel says they are lying - if Openreach haven't fibred it they haven't fibred it)
  2. Accept "6 - 7" MB from BT or similar
  3. Try one of the new Home 4G systems
Any advice? Is 6 MB enough for Netflix, iPlayer, Spotify and a bit of FB? I've never downloaded lots of stuff but do stream from the obvious sources.

Do the home 4G things actually work? Any other options?
 
Regarding presence or absence of fibre: cable was laid along my road many years ago for NTL (VMedia now) and I had discussions with the cable layer about where to put it, since I have a grass verge, no paving, at the front, so I knew precisely where it was. Some time later when I signed up with NTL I was told a few weeks later that there was no cable outside my house — obviously I resolved this, but suppliers do sometimes get their wires (cables?) crossed. If the estate is newish it would be worth asking other residents.
You can go to OpenReach web site and find which street cabinets (they are numbered) have fibre or not.
 
Last edited:
I think that service providers cannot tell you one speed and provide another, the law was changed just recently. I could be wrong though as I cannot remember when it comes into effect.
Look here
 
Last edited:
JonathanRyan said:
So bye bye Virgin. After 18 months of 100 meg fibre I'm moving a mile or so and they don't have cable. Bizarrely there's no fibre of any kind to the newish build estate. (USwitch says there is but when you go to each provider's website in turn it says there isn't - thank USwitch...)

My options appear to be
  1. Sign up with a firm I've never heard of that claim they have a 30 MB connection (Onestream - gut feel says they are lying - if Openreach haven't fibred it they haven't fibred it)
  2. Accept "6 - 7" MB from BT or similar
  3. Try one of the new Home 4G systems
Any advice? Is 6 MB enough for Netflix, iPlayer, Spotify and a bit of FB? I've never downloaded lots of stuff but do stream from the obvious sources.

Do the home 4G things actually work? Any other options?
Click to expand...

To ask the obvious? Do you have the phone number of your new house line, it so have you specifically checked based on that number rather than the more generic area supply info?

Edit ~ in case you or others may not know where to check ;)
https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/

This one gives the response of the providers and their ADSL and/or Fibre offerings
https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker

And the exchange that covers your postcode ~ the above will AFAIK be showing the results of service based on the Post Code but this names the exchange ;)
https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search

HTH
 
Last edited:
Box Brownie said:
To ask the obvious? Do you have the phone number of your new house line, it so have you specifically checked based on that number rather than the more generic area supply info?

Edit ~ in case you or others may not know where to check ;)
https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/

This one gives the response of the providers and their ADSL and/or Fibre offerings
https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker

And the exchange that covers your postcode ~ the above will AFAIK be showing the results of service based on the Post Code but this names the exchange ;)
https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search

HTH
Click to expand...

Thanks for that - very useful. After some digging, I find that the new property is served by cabinet 73 and my maximum speed is 7.5Mbps :(

Does that basically mean Onestream are "mistaken"? If so, I'll start looking at 4G options.
 
JonathanRyan said:
Thanks for that - very useful. After some digging, I find that the new property is served by cabinet 73 and my maximum speed is 7.5Mbps :(

Does that basically mean Onestream are "mistaken"? If so, I'll start looking at 4G options.
Click to expand...

Though I would have thought as a new estate "they" would have provisioned the various cabinets!

Having said that if you check the other samknows links that should tell you if the exchange is already configured for fibre..........but of course the unknown then of and/or when Openreach might do FTTC at your cabinet.

PS FWIW I get on ADSL 3.2 and my cabinet is FTTC enabled (I have been unable to justify the cost of fibre) the cabinet is approx 5.6 miles from the exchange based on my attenuation figure. So out of interest does samknows show your exchange as fibre enabled (NB I looked Canterbury up and it is fibre enabled) as based on your 7.5 speed you are pretty darn close to the exchange but as you report a cabinet you are not direct connected to the exchange. This latter being the one situation where (in the past) even if enabled you cannot be fibre service.
 
Last edited:
JonathanRyan said:
Thanks for that - very useful. After some digging, I find that the new property is served by cabinet 73 and my maximum speed is 7.5Mbps :(

Does that basically mean Onestream are "mistaken"? If so, I'll start looking at 4G options.
Click to expand...

Is 5G coming there this year?
 
If you get another viewing it may be worth having a look for a connection box under the stairs, a director at work bought a new build last year and is seemingly restricted to a single provider who had cabled the estate. They apparently have sole rights for a time period to recoup their costs.
 
They don't put chuff all in new estates.
You'd think they would wouldn't you, while the roads are dug up and gas, leccy, water and drainage are being installed you'd think they'd stick some cabel/fiber or something in.
Nope, BT is obliged to provide a phone line and that's it, despite developers notifying likely cable suppliers, they won't put FA in till they know what they demographic is and they don't know that till the place is sold out.
I was ******* amazed the only data connection my new house had in the 21st century was 2 bits of 5h1tty copper wire..:shifty:
 
Box Brownie said:
Though I would have thought as a new estate "they" would have provisioned the various cabinets!
Click to expand...

Yeah - you'd think :) If you don't mind I'll DM you my postcode - see if you can make sense of it.

Ricardodaforce said:
Is 5G coming there this year?
Click to expand...

Possibly. But that will be a while. Worst case, Three will cost me £25 a month on a 12 month contract so £300 all up. If I can u/g to 5G for a reasonable price then I'll just treat that as sunk cost.

Mozthecat said:
If you get another viewing it may be worth having a look for a connection box under the stairs, a director at work bought a new build last year and is seemingly restricted to a single provider who had cabled the estate. They apparently have sole rights for a time period to recoup their costs.
Click to expand...

Nope - we're moving in a week. No more viewing - just packing :)
 
ADSL2/2+ is OKish provided your wiring is up to spec.
Here we are a good three miles from the exchange and can get about 6mb down and almost 1mb up on good days.
You might easily get 2x times that.
6mb is more than enough for HD youtube on 1080p - you can't do much else online while doing that though.
Plenty of rural areas like round here can barely get 2mb and there's no mobile cover at all let alone 3G/4G, which are decent alternatives especially if not big downloaders.
On the plus side ADSL is relatively cheap especially if you change regularly (use gmail or your own domain so not their tied in address).
Your power provider e.g. SSE here might have a good deal or look at such as Post Office or Tesco(?) around £20/month.
 
4wd said:
ADSL2/2+ is OKish provided your wiring is up to spec.
Here we are a good three miles from the exchange and can get about 6mb down and almost 1mb up on good days.
You might easily get 2x times that.
6mb is more than enough for HD youtube on 1080p - you can't do much else online while doing that though.
Plenty of rural areas like round here can barely get 2mb and there's no mobile cover at all let alone 3G/4G, which are decent alternatives especially if not big downloaders.
On the plus side ADSL is relatively cheap especially if you change regularly (use gmail or your own domain so not their tied in address).
Your power provider e.g. SSE here might have a good deal or look at such as Post Office or Tesco(?) around £20/month.
Click to expand...

First World Country Problem :)
Those speeds you stated are unbelievable!
I'm on 150 Mbps and Edinburgh is introducing Gigabit city wide
 
kendo1 said:
First World Country Problem :)
Those speeds you stated are unbelievable!
I'm on 150 Mbps and Edinburgh is introducing Gigabit city wide
Click to expand...

Yes, I've been using 100 meg because I'm too cheap to pay for 200 but have to admit I was tempted when Virgin said I could have 500 the other day.....

6 seems a little Dickensian :)
 
JonathanRyan said:
Yes, I've been using 100 meg because I'm too cheap to pay for 200 but have to admit I was tempted when Virgin said I could have 500 the other day.....

6 seems a little Dickensian :)
Click to expand...

Just go back to dial up :)
 
I have to wonder why anyone really needs 100mb+
They simply won't do anything for more rural areas though and it's wrong because in many ways we'd benefit more as other services are also absent or miles away.
 
4wd said:
I have to wonder why anyone really needs 100mb+
Click to expand...

Me neither. I almost certainly don't. But after living with it for 18 months (and 40 meg before that) I'd rather avoid cutting my speed by a factor of 20 if I can avoid it. Especially as data use if rocketing - I watch more iPlayer than I do live TV, I don't own any CDs any more because Spotify and I bet my Alexas are chewing up the bandwidth every time I ask them a hard question.

But yes, the sooner we find a way of swamping the country in gigabit without digging it up and killing people the better. For one thing, it would cut down on commuting since lots of jobs can be done from home - and with home deliveries etc you could choose to live somewhere you liked :)

kendo1 said:
Just go back to dial up :)
Click to expand...

 
But iplayer works perfectly well on 6mb, and probably well enough on 3mb
So why is investment going into GB speeds when we can't even sent a text or make an emergency call if the line goes down or get crushed by a cow down the field.
 
4wd said:
But iplayer works perfectly well on 6mb, and probably well enough on 3mb
So why is investment going into GB speeds when we can't even sent a text or make an emergency call if the line goes down or get crushed by a cow down the field.
Click to expand...

Capitalism, basically.
 
All this speak of 100 - 200 Meg speeds is frankly the same as Megapixels in a camera, do you really need them ???

We have sky here, 40meg speed constant, the wife can watch iplayer downstairs, I can watch sky sports upstairs on one monitor and browse the web/youtube all at the same time, we never get anywhere near the 40meg limit, even Netflix is only an average 4-5 meg speed.
 
We're in exactly the same boat, we bought a new build house in 2016 and still don't have a fibre connection. We average about 5 to 6Mb, which is enough for HD playback on YouTube, iPlayer, Netflix etc as long as you're not doing anything else online at the same time. Downloading something like a film via our sky box is best done overnight, it takes forever.
 
We’ve just had this same journey, moving from virgin 200+ to a new build with 7mbs max, yes it’s is ok for streaming, however get used to buffering circles and if you have Sky Q, dream on if you want to download uhd content or use demand. With the many devices that require Internet now, (hive, Sky, netflix, laptop, tablets etc) it soon gets choked up. In the end we got the Three Ai Cube, which at £25pm and I have been impressed, Sky Q, uhd etc works fine. Where we live we are getting about 30mbs, although I know it is capable of higher. The upside is that in an evening I get Upload speeds of about the same, great for backing up photos to the cloud. Another bonus is that if we go away to a cottage or camping, we can take it with us
 
Last edited:
4wd said:
I have to wonder why anyone really needs 100mb+
Click to expand...

Often, a single user doesn't, however, say there are 5 people in your household, all of whom are watching high res video, or trying to game etc; the higher bandwidth benefits every user simultaneously, with no obvious slow down.

Speed isn't the only benefit of fibre either - on a full fibre connection, or high quality cable service like Virgin, the latency is often very low. I get Hyperoptic where I am, and my ping is often <5ms. In real world scenarios, I get more like 15 to game servers, but that's still a LOT less than the FTTC service I used to be on, and even less than ADSL at my mothers.
 
ChrisHeathcote said:
In the end we got the Three Ai Cube, which at £25pm and I have been impressed, Sky Q, uhd etc works fine. Where we live we are getting about 30mbs, although I know it is capable of higher. The upside is that in an evening I get Upload speeds of about the same, great for backing up photos to the cloud. Another bonus is that if we go away to a cottage or camping, we can take it with us
Click to expand...

Based on what I've found out, I'm inches from buying an AI Cube. My only concern is that a friend is on Three and they get very poor reception a mile or so from my new house. We think the house will be better but the Cube can't take an external aerial. I'm wondering if I need to pay more for EE.
 
7 mb is fast enough for 1080p streaming but not 4K streaming I don't think.

Its actually good, I was living with under 1 MB until BT went mad and put fiber all the way into my house and now they slow it down to 76 MB unless I pay more.
 
JonathanRyan said:
Based on what I've found out, I'm inches from buying an AI Cube. My only concern is that a friend is on Three and they get very poor reception a mile or so from my new house. We think the house will be better but the Cube can't take an external aerial. I'm wondering if I need to pay more for EE.
Click to expand...
Don’t forget to take into account the data limits. When I was with virgin I was using about 300gb/m due to heavy streaming etc. You could always buy a 4g router that does accept an external aerial and then get a sim from Three to put in. I may be wrong but I think the normal router will take an aerial. Last thing if you order online rather than in store, then you have 14 days to return. Would give you a chance to check signal
 
'k I just ordered a Vodaphone Gigacube :)

In the end I was swayed by the fact that there's a Vodaphone mast almost literally in sight of the house. They are claiming I might get up to 80 meg over 4G. I bet that will burn through my allowance pretty fast.... 30 days to return if they are fibbing.

I'll let you all know :)
 
UPDATE:

1. Got the Vodaphone Gigacube. Plugged it in at my old address (where it's not even guaranteed to work) and 30 seconds later I had 12 meg connection. Pretty cool device and if 100GB/month is enough really not that expensive.

2. Went to the new house last night. Just inside the door is an OpenReach socket. I don't think I've ever seen one of those where there wasn't some sort of proper broadband. Next step: talk to neighbours :)
 
We too have an Openreach socket, I believe it identifies the Master socket. I also believe that all new builds are wired for FTTC, however it depends if the cabinet is connected. Typically with new build estates they aren’t. Our estate is about 4 years old and it is only just getting connected (allegedly), it took them 6 years at our last house!
 
The street cabinets have their number printed on them and you can check (via Open Reach web site I think but I can’t find the link at present) if it is fibre or when it will be.
 
When I was at my previous address I had BT infinty 2 and I had a connection around 74mbps.
I moved quarter of a mile from the last place but in fairness I was closer to the BT green cabinet back then.
When I moved here with BT my connection was 55mbps.
I moved to Plusnet in February because BT were way too expensive and the deal they offered me was still more than with Plusnet.
Since then my connection has been a constant 74mbps and I am hoping that Plusnet are still competitive when the contract is up for renewal as I'd rather not risk losing the speed again.
As far as I am aware all the other ISPs do is pay BT for rental space at the exchanges and they all use the same equipment so I can not fathom out why there is a speed difference.
 
I've been told ISP's multiplex their domestic connections (generally 50:1) at the exchange on to one fat connection back to themselves. If one ISP has a fully populated block, made up of HD movie streamers, you'll get reduced bandwidth 'cos everybody else is hogging it. If the block of a different ISP is not filled, or filled with low capacity users, you can get a significant speed increase at the same exchange due to that mux's spare capacity.
 
hashcake said:
When I was at my previous address I had BT infinty 2 and I had a connection around 74mbps.
I moved quarter of a mile from the last place but in fairness I was closer to the BT green cabinet back then.
When I moved here with BT my connection was 55mbps.
I moved to Plusnet in February because BT were way too expensive and the deal they offered me was still more than with Plusnet.
Since then my connection has been a constant 74mbps and I am hoping that Plusnet are still competitive when the contract is up for renewal as I'd rather not risk losing the speed again.
As far as I am aware all the other ISPs do is pay BT for rental space at the exchanges and they all use the same equipment so I can not fathom out why there is a speed difference.
Click to expand...
And BT owns Plusnet so presumably they should have the same potential speed at any given address?
 
Riiiight. So I said I'd be back with an update. 2 weeks in and things are looking good.

  1. There is no fibre on the estate. Nobody has done it, nobody plans to do it. Max through the wire is 7 meg but "guaranteed" is 2.
  2. Vodaphone Gigacube works well (here). V are just plain lying about their speeds though. They checked the address and said "up to 80 meg". I've never seen more than 14 with the window open and the tower practically in sight.
  3. 100GB of data is *probably* enough for me but the over allowance prices are terrifying so 200GB is way safer.
  4. I also got a Three AICube to trial (14 day return on that if you order via the web - 30 on the Vodaphone). Right next to the Vodaphone it's not as good BUT 10meg unlimited for the same price as 14meg capped at 100GB. Pretty sure the Vodaphone is going back and I'll keep the Three.
  5. Huawei make decent kit (though spies tend to.... :) ). Both modems set up and working in under 5 mins. The Three one has *limited* Alexa built in which is a nice bonus.
  6. All up, considering that I really don't need a landline, I'm getting "unlimited" 10 meg for 30 quid a month. I can stream Netflix in HD without any spinney wheels which is good enough for me. YMMV as they say in the colonies.
  7. The Gigacube has better WiFi than the AI Cube - any recommendations for a simple WiFi extender? It reaches all over the house but could be stronger.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top