[Closed] BT fibre broadband - is it OK ?

I was with BT years ago and then tried a few different ISPs about 5 years ago or more I went back to BT, they’ve been fantastic no big issues but the odd time I’ve had to contact them again it was painless.

No massive issues with their broadband - make sure it is FTTC not Fibre to the Premises as the latter will tie you to BT and a very small number of other small suppliers, which will make it more expensive for you in the longer term.

I've had unlimited FTTC with BT for about 3 years. No problems.

yeah, is def fttc

(is the BT hub OK drac ? current router won't do vdsl so I'd need to buy one if I was going with somebody other than BT - theirs is "free")

We are fttc, (i think) it works fine a good stable 30mbspeed.

when we had sky, we were getting 0.5mb so 30 feels amazing to us.

our router plugs into the phone socket.

the only issue is you have to sign an 18month contract, and when it finishes service continues but the price doubles.

irrelevant if you intend to stay with em long term tho.

We are happy with ours.

Their hubs are crap to be honest I’ve had them all from version 4 but switched to a third party version last year.

Happy here

Set up is a pain as call centres are a bit useless, but once running ours has been excellent, even the hub seems fine, 3 years now

Good work folks  - I'm in

webchat was helpful; we'll see how painful the setup can be

(my current ISP can do fttc but is an extra 50% cost for a nominally slower service plus a setup fee plus buying a new router and no quidco cashback - no contest, sadly)

Went through similar to you. Was with Zen who are excellent but expensive. Moved to BT ADSL then VDSL when it became available.

The Homehub router is crap though...

Hope you remembered Topcashback/Quidco.

Had mine since Mid-January.

Seems fast, reliable and reasonably priced.

BT sport for nothing is a bonus too.

I got £95 cash back and thanks to this thread I have just remembered to claim my £125 reward card.  Which basically makes it 1/2 price this year i think.

BT Infinity 2 to the cabinet around the corner.  Reliably fast and can download, stream from two TV's and the kids gaming without issue. 20mb broadband did struggle.  The new SuperHub (Hub 6) is an improvement and is fine - much easier to navigate the settings and parental controls (which use mac addresses - so stops your smart arse son re-naming his computer to bypass the time out).

It's not particularly cheap though.

Fibre to the curb? What's connecting the last bit (from the end of the fibre to your home?) Is it copper or coax? What speeds do you get with this setup?

We have a muddled mix of technologies here and our area got fibre to the node then copper from the node/pillar. Helps to have a decent RSP and I'm getting 80down and 34up. Our National Broadband Network has taken so long to sort out, it looks like 5G might storm in and kill it fairly soon.

Any ISP you go with for FTTC, if it's going down the BT line, it's going to be the same quality of connection to the cabinet, exchange and maybe beyond as it's all provided by BT Openreach, which is where the speeds and reliability come in. After that it's down to connection to the ISP's servers and beyond for the actual quality of service to the Internet but other than throttling policies, ISPs don't tend to mess up the connection anywhere near as much as the provider of the physical cable to the house.

So anyway... consider PlusNet.

Owned by BT, but very good customer service (and useful guys on their support forum who are good at kicking BT's arse to fix problems with the line) and better prices.

I'm with PlusNet on FTTC. Call centre are always good and they know their onions. Only slight frustration is that you can't alter the DNS servers on the router, it's locked down to their DNS servers. I used Open DNS to run parental controls. So if you want to do anything clever factor in the cost of a new router.

Fibre to the curb? What’s connecting the last bit (from the end of the fibre to your home?) Is it copper or coax? What speeds do you get with this setup?

We have a muddled mix of technologies here and our area got fibre to the node then copper from the node/pillar. Helps to have a decent RSP and I’m getting 80down and 34up. Our National Broadband Network has taken so long to sort out, it looks like 5G might storm in and kill it fairly soon.

It's fibre to the cabinet, the last bit will be the same bit of copper that's been handling their phone line since whenever. It can be outside your house or a few miles away depending where you live.

Distance from the cabinet to your house seems a bigger contributor to speed than the material or ISP. My old house had a fibre link from cabinet because it was a new build and for a while at least they future proofed them with fibre, which is technically FTTP (fibre to the premises) but 'FTTP' means something else in the UK anyway they still get 74Mbps download which is the pegged max of OpenReach fibre at the moment. A client of ours who has to rely on a few miles of old copper across a few fields to his office gets 12Mbps from a 74Mbps cabinet and it fails fairly often - such is life.

Virgin offers much higher speeds if you want them, I think they're topping out at 350Mbps now, need ideal conditions of course, but you can only squeeze a pint into a pint pot - I've got 150Mbps at home and will speed test as such, but we rarely get download speed of more than about 50Mbps because there's always a bottleneck somewhere, even if it's just the server at the other end (Xbox network for one).

Anyway, I've gone off-track. BT are a fine ISP, Zen has better customer service, but BT own OpenReach and whilst they should treat all ISPs the same, they don't.

Only slight frustration is that you can’t alter the DNS servers on the router, it’s locked down to their DNS servers. I used Open DNS to run parental controls. So if you want to do anything clever factor in the cost of a new router.

I've got an older Technicolor FTTC router from PlusNet and you can alter the DNS servers using telnet commands.

Yeah there's a whole load of threads on PlusNet website about trying to access hidden setup pages and telnet commands but for the new router the only option seems to be to set it locally on the devices. Which TBH I can't be bothered with.

OP, I think you've already pulled the trigger, but i am a happy BT FTTP customer (new build development) for what its worth.

That said, the set up of that brand new service was to date, the worst customer service experience I have ever experienced with any firm of any kind ever. Too boring to go into here but I did recently renew the BT contract to a marginally cheaper tariff for another 2 years with them as the product has been stable and ideal for us as a young family. Speeds are 51 dl/10 up as advertised on Infinity 1 (iirc) and hasn't shit the bed once. Router hub has been great.</span>

I know that the FTTP customer dept is currently UK based <span style="text-decoration: underline;">only</span>, but I'm not sure about the regular FTTC customers like you and if they are screened as all other BT customers aka, potentially overseas call centres which i'm sorry to say are generally utterly appalling in BT's case. And i say this as an ex BT empoyee.

OT but STW, your forum is awful since that update sorry. Don't know whats happening with the random scripts above in my text there. Your quote function is also balls.

Infrastructure is all the same, you're just deciding who you want to ring when something breaks.

OT but STW, your forum is awful since that update sorry. Don’t know whats happening with the random scripts above in my text there. Your quote function is also balls.

Really? Doesn’t seem to cause me any problems, and since the change I’ve only had a couple of problems with the extra script, and that seemed to be because I included the original poster’s user name. Are you sure you’re using the quote function properly? You tap the quote marks, paste the quote, tap return then tap the quote marks again to set the cursor back to full page width, works every time for me.

MInes generally 55-60mbs and once you use your own hub drop-outs become reduce markedly.

OT - on the quoting, I think it depends on the browser. If the browser copies the text with formatting, then you'll end up with the HTML tags for formatting in the post. Copy it into a text editor, copy that and then paste and no problem. Of course a button to do reply quote and you just chop out what you don't want would be far better, like most forums 😉

On topic though - drop outs, there's a few things at work. The line in to your router/hub and potential noise on it, the wifi, and connection from ISP to exchange and/or cabinet.

In my case I've got the old BT Openreach fibre modem between the socket and the router. That's the box that actually deals with the signal from the cabinet via the copper wire. It's located as close as possible to the master socket. The main cause of line drops will be this part of the signal and either affected by the copper outside, or your wiring inside.

If different hubs make a difference, it might be wifi that's dropping out. That's the access point part of the hub/router. You can just turn off the wifi in it and get a decent wireless access point that you connect (wired) to the router.

FTTC speeds will depend how far the cabinet is. Mine is literally a few doors down the road and I get 76ish down, 20ish up. Basically max speed for the cabinet. Occasionally I get issues with the wiring outside, often because BT have been fiddling with something, and it causes brief disconnects. If there are too many then the system will throttle the speed back to something supposedly stable. In theory it restores if the line improves, but sometimes something needs kicking to bump it back up. This is usually down to BT and I get PlusNet guys to give them a prod. It's better than BT in a way as normally they'd insist on sending an engineer (with threats of charging if they can't find anything wrong with their equipment). PN seem to know the direct route to the guys on the ground and they go fiddle with some kit somewhere without needing you to wait in.