#fixbadbroadband campaign

[#1]

just seen this , thought it may be of interest

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7683-new-fixbadbroadband+campaign-aims-to-shame-providers-into-fi...

[#2]

Fingers crossed we are soon to have fibre here and toes crossed it will be a FTTP connection as the box is smack bang in front of the house but here's the thing, if we sign up with plusnet again for say their minimum 17mbps package, will we actually get that sort of speed (which is more than enough for what we need) or will we be fobbed off with a slower one. We are 'copper connected' at the moment and struggle to get 5mbps so I'm just wondering that even with fibre is that "up to" marketing wheeze all ISPs seem to employ going to apply here?

Hate to spend even more of my pension on empty promises.

P.S. Thanks for the link 

[#3]

Worth a read

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/general/f/4539118-which-can-your-trust-them.html?vc=1

[#4]

@DaveyH did you try the link for the Which speed test https://broadbandtest.which.co.uk/?utm_source=whichcouk&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=broadbandlaunc...

i got a interesting result

[#5]

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Minivanman wrote:

Fingers crossed we are soon to have fibre here and toes crossed it will be a FTTP connection as the box is smack bang in front of the house but here's the thing, if we sign up with plusnet again for say their minimum 17mbps package, will we actually get that sort of speed (which is more than enough for what we need) or will we be fobbed off with a slower one. We are 'copper connected' at the moment and struggle to get 5mbps so I'm just wondering that even with fibre is that "up to" marketing wheeze all ISPs seem to employ going to apply here?

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@Minivanman If you do join the lucky 2% (approx) of FTTP coverage, then the upto 17Mbps copper-based service won't apply to you.

On FTTP you'd get the advertised speed, i.e. on PN presently 80/20 or 40/2 Mbps Down/Up.

[#6]

Ah right, thanks for that. 

[#7]

that which speedtest is not giving correct readings, it said i had 80 meg down and 90ms when i ran another speedtest with another 3 sites they all recorded 68/19 20ms.

[#8]

At those speeds, some which I can only dream about with my copper coated 5mbps, does it really matter?

Serious question.

[#9]

@Minivanman  That depends on what you want to do on line, and how many there are in your household using the same connection.  If you are getting a steady 5Mbps, you'll be able to watch videos and do all the boring things like banking, surfing, emails etc.  If there are two of you connecting at the same time, then at busy times your speed might drop, and if you both want to watch videos, you might encounter buffering (2Mbps is normally the minimum requirement for streaming).  I'm not a gamer but I understand that in that world the higher the speed the better, and the ping is important.  Should you have a couple of teenagers living with you, no speed is fast enough according to my friends who are in that situation.

[#10]

Sounds fair enough @Jonpe and as you say it's possible to manage OK (which we do) on 5Mbps although buffering and complete hangups can be annoying at times. The main reason, and like many others I suspect, is that even though it's just myself and the Mrs with no gamer in sight we both have Tablets and we often stream programmes to the television via one of those Fire TV sticks as well so.....

What we get just about copes but half hoping that once we get some decent speed from fibre we can invest in a 4K television or whatever. 

[#11]

Five years ago I was tasked with upgrading a Financial Markets trading floor which was the branch office of a foreign bank. They'd taken over a cheapskate British brokers company who'd developed their IT on a shoestring led by the CEO who'd formed the original brokers company. The foreign bank wanted to go from 20 personnel up to 50 people.

When I arrived I found a 5 Mbps business ADSL broadband link handling most of their web browsing and internet market data feeds and their service was slooow. They were a bit shocked when I recommended they scrap ADSL and go for an uncontended 10 mbps optical fibre (with a potential to go to 1 gbps at the flick of a switch). At the time of placing the order they still didn't believe me, but I told them I'd refund their installation costs if they were not happy.

The ping time latency on the fibre was sub 10 msec, their old broadband link was around 40 msec. When they were running their acceptance trials with over 30 people on site they were very happy (astonished) with the data link speed and accused me of ordering a 100 mpbs link at a greater cost.  Fortunately the vendor's engineer was on site and he confirmed it was just 10 mbps.   It's the uncontended low latency which does the trick.

I never did tell them I'd persuaded the vendor to install the service free of charge, with just monthly rental. 

[#12]

You just wanted to see their faces when they demanded their installation costs refunded as you'd promised, and you handed them a cheque for £0.00.