Broadband speeds

[Symposium]

Help, do I need to complain to BT or is this insignificant? I just renewed our broadband with them and negotiated to pay the same price for another 2 years. However, I’ve just noticed that they have essentially downgraded us from 67-63 speed to 57-64. Is this worth complaining about or will we not notice the difference anyway? My son is the main gamer and the type of games he plays are mainly transport simulator types. Otherwise it’s just streaming Netflix etc or the younger ones playing Roblox.

The actual speed you get probably won't change. What's changed is how much they're saying you'll likely get as that's what they're legally obliged to provide and they want to give themselves a bit more headroom. Even if the actual speed does drop by that much you almost certainly won't notice.

No that average drop won’t make any appreciable difference to gaming. Latency is far more important- has that changed? Playing online games uses very little bandwidth- a 2-3mbps connection will handle the daily transfer on most games.

download speed affects things like downloading updates, new games, or if you’re trying to stream Netflix while someone else
is playing.

That’s really reassuring thanks. I just don’t fully understand this stuff.

I think the bigger issue is that is not a great speed anyway. If you’ve got a 4k TV that will basically consume your entire bandwidth.

If you’re in the countryside then I appreciate you may not have much choice but if you’re in any big city you should be able to get much better.

Netflix 4K is 15Mbps. 50+Mbps is fine.

we have been happy with our speed up until now, never had any issues. I’ve just had a slight wobble worrying it might slow down on the new contract and then give us issues. It doesn’t sound like that will happen though so I’ll probably just see how it goes.

I think you should consider complaining to BT, as while the speed drop from 67–63 Mbps to 57–64 Mbps may not seem like a big deal, it is still a negative solitaired change right after you have just renewed your contract and negotiated to keep it the same price level in the next 2 years.