6 ms·

I was talking to A&A about speeds when I upgraded to FTTP. The upgrade was mostly for reliability -- my FTTC line suffered badly from local interference. They

I was talking to A&A about speeds when I upgraded to FTTP. The upgrade was mostly for reliability -- my FTTC line suffered badly from local interference. They currently do an 80Mbps down, 20Mbps up service on both fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). When I asked about gigabit (which is available on the BT FTTP platform) - the answer I got gave me the impression they want to make sure their backbone network can deal with that kind of traffic before they launch anything like that. The other thing they mentioned was that the high-bandwidth services most people use (I guess Netflix and the like) have an upper limit to the data rate -- and it's nowhere near gigabit. I'm not entirely convinced that the difference between 80Mbps and gigabit would be noticeable on anything but heavily-seeded torrents (e.g. Linux ISOs) or backups being sent to providers with similarly fat pipes. It's a great marketing strapline though, and clearly many customers see the headline "up to a gigabit, only from XYZCo!" and decide based on that.

minimaul 5y ago
It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home. Especially the difference between A&A’s fastest 160/30 service and Openreach’s 1000/115 - the extra upload is more important than the extra download for me! edit: A&A’s issue with gigabit at the moment is caused by one of their strengths - A&A make firebrick routers, which are what they run their broadband platform on. It gives them more control and great monitoring. But the higher bandwidth versions aren’t ready yet, so they can’t really sell faster services yet.
- blibble 5y ago
  > It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home. does it? just checked my router, my WFH VLAN has consumed 21gb down/7.7gb up in the last 64 days so 2xmonitor fullscreen citrix is using about 300mb down/120mb up per day and my gaming VLAN used about 20kb/s when playing Overwatch I doubt you will notice any difference between 160/30 fibre and 1000/115 fibre!
  - aaronmdjones 5y ago
    > and my gaming VLAN used about 20kb/s when playing Overwatch I gather GP was referring more to the /size/ of the games, not the amount of traffic consumed while playing them. Most of the major AAA games are more than about a hundred gigabytes these days. My installation of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is 153 GB for example.
  - minimaul 5y ago
    WfH for me includes pushing content and containers about - 115 up helps a LOT there. MSFS is actually a bad example, the download servers are wacky at least in the UK - you won't sustain more than about 250mbit. But other titles from services like Steam download in a lot less time - I can max out my line quite happily from Steam - and do with alarming frequency!
  - tokamak-teapot 5y ago
    I thing the gaming issue isn't the bandwidth while playing - more the huge downloads (new games and updates) that many games require these days. (yes latency is important too - just discussing bandwidth here)

minimaul 5y ago

It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home. Especially the difference between A&A’s fastest 160/30 service and Openreach’s 1000/115 - the extra upload is more important than the extra download for me! edit: A&A’s issue with gigabit at the moment is caused by one of their strengths - A&A make firebrick routers, which are what they run their broadband platform on. It gives them more control and great monitoring. But the higher bandwidth versions aren’t ready yet, so they can’t really sell faster services yet.

blibble 5y ago
> It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home. does it? just checked my router, my WFH VLAN has consumed 21gb down/7.7gb up in the last 64 days so 2xmonitor fullscreen citrix is using about 300mb down/120mb up per day and my gaming VLAN used about 20kb/s when playing Overwatch I doubt you will notice any difference between 160/30 fibre and 1000/115 fibre!
- aaronmdjones 5y ago
  > and my gaming VLAN used about 20kb/s when playing Overwatch I gather GP was referring more to the /size/ of the games, not the amount of traffic consumed while playing them. Most of the major AAA games are more than about a hundred gigabytes these days. My installation of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is 153 GB for example.
- minimaul 5y ago
  WfH for me includes pushing content and containers about - 115 up helps a LOT there. MSFS is actually a bad example, the download servers are wacky at least in the UK - you won't sustain more than about 250mbit. But other titles from services like Steam download in a lot less time - I can max out my line quite happily from Steam - and do with alarming frequency!
- tokamak-teapot 5y ago
  I thing the gaming issue isn't the bandwidth while playing - more the huge downloads (new games and updates) that many games require these days. (yes latency is important too - just discussing bandwidth here)