BT fattens fibre customer pipes for free - with a contract extension BT broadband customers who subscribe to the company's Infinity 2 package will see their fibre download speeds nearly double from tomorrow, the national telco has promised. Those punters will see current downstream speeds boosted from 38Mbit/s to "up to" 76Mbps on 12 April. BT has said for some time now that its Infinity …
Virgin Media's new traffic managment policy rolled out 2nd April renders their headline speeds complete lies for nearly 50% of every single day.
New policy between 10am and 3pm is that once you download 10 gigabytes (or only 5GB between 4pm and 9pm), your broadband speed is cut in HALF for 5 hours.
So if I start my 50mbit service downloading a game on Steam at 5pm, it will use up my allowance in 14 minutes (at 6mb/s), and then cut my broadband down to 25mbit until 10pm.
For this sterling service I am paying exactly the same amount of money that I was paying before the policy - there is no benefit to anyone who wishes to consume more than 5gb in one day.
I am going to take up BT on their new service very shortly.
i'm curious as to when you signed up for your VM plan? The reason that I ask is that I am getting a 'free' upgrade from 50mb to 100mb around the same time these caps come in place. So even when i do get throttled it will still be the same speed as before but it will be faster outside of throttling which is where the majority of my downloading will occur.
BT Infinity (Throttled P2P and capped at 40GB per month if you are on cheapest option whilst option 2 got uncapped after an initial limit).
Virgin broadband (We'll give you DOUBLE the speed but if you even dare so much as use it we'll throttle you to death!)
Everybody else on FTTC are more expensive but have clearly defined caps.
I will stick with Be for the time Be'ing. OK I am stuck at 11/1mbit but at least I don't have any limitations. It may take a little longer but I get what I am paying for. An unthrottled. Uncapped connection.
I'm quite liking bt infinity. Incidentally I inadvertently went well over 40GB just yesterday (only looking at one machine on the lan) as vnstat reveals. However I am on the 10/40 option.
daily
rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
yesterday 49.73 GiB | 46.87 GiB | 96.60 GiB | 9.38 Mbit/s
I get 14mbit from Be. Always the same speed, even between 4pm and 7pm. No caps and no throttling. BBC HD comes in just fine whatever time I watch. I have hit 300Gb+ per month on a few occasions. I pay less than £20 per month. I am happy with slower speeds that meet all my needs.
I've currently got 37mbs 8mbs up on option 2, and to be honest I don't need more.
I would prefer if BT upgraded some of the upstream systems to be able to handle the demand. I very rarely see full speed, and I certainly don't on P2P, up is throttled 24/7 to 1Mb/s and down is throttled, sorry, completely starved of oxygen to a level a V92 modem could exceed, until after midnight, and then strangled again once the sun comes up. Weekends seem to be 48 hours if strangulation.
Lets face it, the only reason you'd want 76Mbs is for torrents, and it's just not possible with BT. It would be interesting to see stats from Infinity customers to see just how many actually use the bandwidth they are supposed to have. I suspect very few. It's just willy waving at the end of the day.
Slightly OT but I was thinking of moving on to BT Infinity. My main usage is XBox gaming but I also use Netflix/iPlayer etc..
In terms of gaming it's the ping rate that's important to me - so, any gaming Infinity users out there? Are they a decent gamer friendly ISP?
Cheers.
Not had any problems at all with gaming using Infinity, Xbox and PC. The average ping for me is probably around 20-22ms, sometimes it creeps a little higher and I've seen it down at 16ms quite regularly. Not sure how "hardcore" you are, but for me that level of ping is more than fine! I've heard people say less than 50ms is optimum. Hope that helps.
Still stuck on a 1Mb/s line to the BT exchange, like hundreds of households nearby in the town in which I live - some get only 512Kb/s and quite a few are still on dial-up!!! BT have told me there are no plans to improve this in the forseeable future (the bar stewards).
I'm really getting sick of this constant BT bullshit while a huge number of their customers get piss-poor service.
You did not mention what other telecoms providers you contacted, following your "piss poor service". I would guess they would tell you even less than BT. Why do you think other telecoms providers (including BT) are not flocking to upgrade your local exchange and infrastructure? It costs money, with little prospect of a return - thats not good business.
Instead of blaming BT, blame your government. If we want to be serious about proper connectivity country-wide then that has to funded centrally. In the absence of a proper plan from government, I think BT, and Virgin are doing a great job of improving the broadband infrastructure. Sounds like your best hope in the near future though maybe 4G mobile.
I am glad I do not live on that tiny island. This is so damm pathetic. Then again, what else can a monopoly do? They are burning a gazillion and covering the equivalent of an average city with a junk feed. If there was a real competitor (or 2 or 3) in that market, you would get FTH now, or you would have had 100Mbs a decade ago.
BT should just cut the crap and start telling the truth. Our Exchange FTTC date moved 'out to the right' by three months. Some have now gone out 12 months. No reasons given, and not reflected on the BT website earlier today either. Even their 'Chat with us' contact didn't know, but Samknows did!
Cme on BT, get some decent project managers in there and stop trying to out Vermin, Vermin. I'm fed up with 210kbps outbound and occasionally 3360Kbps inbound. My ISP doesn't even support ADSL2+ on our exchange - so they lose a customer the moment Infinity arrives.
Hardware all in place, no bloody infinity! Oh and do I get a discount for not wanting their wireless 'thing'? I've got a proper wireless device that doesn't look like a hacked 1980's BSB squarial!
This post has been deleted by its author
...so long as the backbone links are not in place to support more than a tiny fraction of the user base actually using the network at any given time.
The biggest speed bump I ever saw was going from Virgin's 50Mbit fiber service to Cable & Wireless 10Mbit MPLS over SDSL, generously paid for by my employer.
Headline rate only one fifth the speed? Ha!
All well and good... I have BT's "UP TO" 20 Meg broadband. AKA 1 Meg broadband (on a good day)
I have no option for Virgin, and no way of upgrading
BT ought to invest in rolling out Infinity to the customers who have no options before they invest in upgrading Infinity for the lucky ones that already have the option
Well why would they?
From their commercial point of view it's far better to nick customers off Virgin as that grows their share of the market, you have no option but to use a BT service so you're not worth the effort unless Virgin suddenly start putting fibre in new areas (not going to happen) or a government sock puppet gets a bee in his bonnet about crappy broadband in your area wrecking the 'digital economy'
It sucks donkey balls but that's the reality of a competitive market.
Around the New Year I checked the availability of Infinity and at the time the BT site informed me it would be available from March 29th. On March 29th I checked again and its now June 30th. BTW I live in the outskirts of London not a remote island on the west coast of Scotland.
Is it that hard for BT to be able to offer realistic estimates for the availability of the service? The cynic in me wonders if offering jam just around the corner is an attempt to keep customers away from VM.
There have certainly been cases reported in the press of BT selling upgrades they've been unable to actually provide, terminating the conventional DSL and leaving customers high and dry - even suggesting they use internet cafes in the meantime. I'm sure they are not doing this intentionally, but this would seem to point to a lack of communication between the sales and marketing departments and the reality on the ground with regards to the necessary exchange and cabinet upgrades - coupled with the lousy customer service for which BT are famed.
Been on Infinity Option 2 for about 8 months, and I've never been throttled in any way. Download 200Gb/month easy (this is SFTP though and not P2P) and have never had an issues. The only downturn I do see in speed is in the evening when my FTP service provider is under heavy traffic loads.
More than happy to sign up for a another contract to jump from 38.5Mb to nearly 76Mb :)
I've been a customer of both VM and BT, and their networks are plagued by congestion/traffic "management "(BT) and packet loss (VM) in quite a few neighborhoods.
In particular, VM's consumer forum is littered with people complaining about the issues and their dates for "fixing" this is shifting every time someone requests info from them.
I was an Infinity Option 2 customer for 18 months prior to just signing with VM last month, and even though they don't have packet loss (which kind of makes a non-traffic managed 100mbit connection useless), the connection got "managed" down from 36m down/8.5m up all the way to 7m down/2.4m up during peak periods - every day.
Oh, and BT don't tell you you have to pay them £30 to cancel Infinity - it's apparently in one of the many pages of fineprint attached to the ordering process but never is it mentioned unless you attempt to give them the boot.
Regardless of what the connection speed is, these companies have serious network infrastructure issues, and they are not really pushing the boat out on getting their routing and switching infrastructure up to the job of serving all of us existing customers - no - they're just adding more "high-speed" pipes to an already clogged system.
I have a Virgin feeder running past my _window_ (neighbours had it, new neighbour didn't carry over the contract) and yet FTTC locally has just been pushed back from June to September - after already sliding by a year.
Needless to say, mentioning this to BT cuts no ice and they still try and waffle on about how I may be without service for weeks if I change to another provider, etc etc.
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