Bandwidth, speed, bt vs virgin

[Jux]

We've been with Virgin so long it feels like it's been since the internet was invented! First dial-up, but bb for 6 or 7 years.

We don't really have much of a problem with Virgin, though I know lots of people do. Our contract for bb is unlimited. We have some problems with buffering sometimes, and sometimes it's quite severe. We do get a message occasionally (on iPlayer) that there is insufficient bandwidth.

Our speed is supposed to be 10mbps but is probably no more than 8.

BT have just offered us speeds of 10-20mbps for half the cost of our Virgin bb. The saleswoman insisted that at their speeds we would have no buffering problems. First, I thought bandwidth was different to speed (she thought not).

Second, we're not cabled up here, so bb comes via the phone line, which is run by BT, so if they can offer such high speeds then I imagine Virgin could too. Is that wrong?

Saving the money would be jolly nice, of course, but we would have to surrender our 100year old email addresses which everyone who has ever known us knows, so not ideal (but facebook works so we can be found there).

I'm not sure how much difference it would make practically, as we don't tend to download films and stuff, just watch iPlayer occasionally, and dd watches stuff on YouTube.

Can someone explain in words of one syllable, please?! Thanks.

Ah ok....so you are not getting Virgin cable but ADSL.

In essence yes, you will get approx the same connection speed no matter who you are with.

BUT...that is only part of the story. Getting a 10-20Mbps connection speed is meaningless if the rest of their network is overloaded. Think of it like this. You want to go from A-B quickly. You have a nice shiny road from your house to the motorway where you can drive 70mph. But there's a big jam on the motorway. Your nice shiny road in effect makes little if any difference to your journey time. Does that make sense?

BT cannot guarantee that there will be no buffering problems anymore than I can walk to the moon. It's just not how the Internet works.

What I would do in your position is call Virgin up. Tell them that you've been offered a stonking deal by BT and as loyal long term customers you'd rather stay with them but times are tough and you are seriously tempted to save money. Ask what they can do. I did this with my ISP (Bethere) and they reduced my monthly cost from £22 to £12 to keep me.

Lastly use this checker to see if/when your exchange will be upgraded to fibre. If it's anytime in the near future I wouldn't change providers at all and tie yourself to a contract. Because this is going to give you way faster speeds and I can't wait for my exchange to be done!

Blimey! Our exchange is down for next year! We had resigned ourselves to what we have for ever, as we'd thought no one was actually putting in the infrastructure to make it better except in places who had really baaaad service, like outlying villages in Cornwall or Skye etc!

i will call Virgin and ask what they can do for us. We have a couple of Sim only contracts with them too. They've dropped one to a fiver a month, but the other's not much more really.

I get your lovely metaphor, which confirms what dh and I thought. Thank you for your lucid explanation, and for that link which has brightened me up a bit

Glad I could help. It's actually the more built up areas that get FTTC (fibre) first because it's commercially viable. It's the little remote villages which end up suffering because it costs more to lay the cables and there aren't usually enough houses to justify the investment.

Mine is down for next year too and I can't wait. I did get in a bit of trouble when I found out and posted on Facebook that I didn't know what I was more excited about. The prospect of fibre broadband or my wedding!

We are v.v lucky in that we have Virgin cable so have never had any speed troubles...

BT however - we are near the end of the exchange line so were on crawling pace....... and we are NC - not currently in the roll out plans for fibre - despite being suburban - maybe so many people are with Virgin round here it is not worth it.

I went from around 2mbps to around 37mbps when fibre arrived in the village I live in.
Part of the village has Virgin cable but Openreach fibre still got put in. Mind you I'm in what they call Market3 area so lots of demand.

37!!!! Wow! The stuff of which dreams are made!

Niceguy, yes, I can see that might cause a problem

I am getting very excited now. Cable! I love living in science fiction land!

Actually, 37 isn't that fast (for those lucky enough to have fibre service available)... where I am, it is now due at the end of the month (but had been listed as end of September). If someone has fibre direct to their home or office it can offer 100 or 110 Mbps (110 probably to 'beat' Virgin!), and Openreach announced 330 Mbps, too, but it would likely be hellishly expensive. Even getting a fibre direct to a location can have a installation fee of 1000 GBP (or higher - if more than 2 km from exchange)...

I moved away from N Wales to get higher speed and in most locations here on Merseyside had found that the speeds on offer (from Virgin) were 50 or 100 Mbps, but in the end, because my sister had found a lovely house ready to move into without lots of jobs / repairs, I ended up in one of the few roads where there is no Virgin connection. Still, it is 6 or 7 times faster than I had been getting.

It is worth having the 'grass is greener' conversation, but as has been stated, no ISP can actually guarantee you won't get buffering etc some of the time.

As for bandwidth - proper definition in networking terms concerns the speed of the data that may be carried at a specific time, typically shown as the peak speed that is achieved (eg 45 kbps back in the days of dial-up on a 56k modem, but nowadays from 256 kbps up to tens of Mbps on cable or fibre). However lots of ISPs have discussed the amount of data (where some may offer 2 GB, 10 GB, or some other arbitrary limit) allowed in a month. Landline services are usually far more generous than mobile allowances.

I'm using PlusNet and paying under a tenner a month (because I get a discount for having recommended it to others). It's not unlimited but they offer reasonable limits at realistic prices and for an extra fiver a month I could be switched from 60 GB/month to 120 GB (they don't count night-time traffic so I'm regularly hitting 150++ GB anyway, on the 60 GB account).

The fibre account they offer is 20 quid a month (for many areas, unless you are really rural and have no competitors like Sky/ TalkTalk/ Orange) with a limit of 250 GB (and still not counting night time traffic).

"maybe so many people are with Virgin round here it is not worth it."

BT was reported to have been very disappointed when fibre went live in Cardiff because hardly anyone wanted it. I can only assume that those who had wanted faster speeds already had Virgin, or might have been in an existing contract.

"it costs more to lay the cables"

Not just the cables (though with blown fibre, the installing is probably no more costly than copper) but the cabinet has to have a power supply to get data out of the fibre and interface with wiring going to a building.

In some places they have had problems getting planning permission for new cabinets (in areas where there are lots of subscribers, they add a new, bigger cabinet with air vents, alongside the existing cabiner) and have decided that if a council turns them down, they won't bother to offer fibre (parts of London are affected, such as *> Kensington and Chelsea

Fibre speeds certainly vary. Since having it installed the service got a speed increase and Plusnet upgraded my package for a lower price. 7pm 7/12/2012 68.9dl 8.4ul

There are other things that can affect iplayer though, such as the size of the ISPs link to Akamai or Level3 (content delivery network providers) and throttling the streaming speed during peek traffic times.

I shall wait and see what happens. All the other networks round here seem to be BT; that's all those my wifi can find, anyway. We're in a small town not too far from Exeter, but facilities are not great.

At the moment there are 4 of us in the house and we all have our own machines. Our tenant downstairs could be using our connection (I told her she could when she fell on hard times).

Could you help me estimate some sort of limit, with possibly all 5 of us using it all day? Then I can think about what sort of space I have for negotiation when things happen here next year.

There's no easy way to 'estimate' such usage. It will depend so much on what people are doing. For example, some days my usage can be low but today (having watched some frames from the final of the snooker) usage has hit 2.5 GB (and that's just me in the house, primarily caused by a single PC). I have at least a dozen systems in the house, and a few mobile phones (only one using the mobile network, rest using wi-fi) plus tablet, TV box with iPlayer, games system (that can connect to LoveFilm, etc) and so on.

There are utilities for most systems which will tot up how much traffic to/from that machine there has been, and you'd probably want to get figures for each day and total the lot for a week, to get a reasonable idea of what your family usage is. No really easy way, unless your ISP has a usage monitor - definitely worth asking them, or if not them, go on the ThinkBroadband.com forum for your ISP and ask the question as to whether there's an easy way.

Sometimes you can get figures from your router (and it's the common denominator for all the devices in the house using your ISP), so that's another way. Again, I'd recommend checking the figures every day and tot them up yourself by hand. It's possible that the router will lose the totals (eg if there's a storm and a brief power cut) and some families turn their router off at night (and most routers I've seen would just start next time at zero, so important to take a note... I'd also recommend not turning the router off. I know it uses some power whenever it is on, but regularly turning on and off could shorten its life and may affect the speed of a connection, since exchange equipment might consider the line to be unstable if there are frequent disconnections.