Fibreoptic broadband
 

Thinking of upgrading to fibreoptic broadband, what difference will i find with speed offers, been offered upto 38mb or upto 70mb. Do abit of online gaming and watch movies online.

If top speed worth going for or will i only notice difference if having heavy downloading?

Can't comment on the gaming side of things, but if you got the full 38MB they're offering as the cheaper option, your connection would be fast enough to watch two different HD streaming videos simultaneously, and then some. That's fast enough for most, but it really depends how many people you've got in the house and what they're all likely to be doing at any one time.

Hmmm. Thanks. Mostly just 2 of us using it. One steaming video's and one online gaming or internet downloading. There's only £5 month difference for 7mb, but if i'm not going to notice anything then pointless.

Download Speed is one thing. Check out the upload speeds as well; you may need to know if you use cloud storage or upload pictures etc.

With Virgin, a big difference to ADSL is the latency; Ping times are a fraction of what is achieved via ADSL. The difference is it affects everything; Gaming and browsing, downloading, uploading, as its the time form you clicking something and something happening.

In terms of download speeds think anything above 50Megabits is pretty much unnoticeable except for downloads. I was orginally on on 10megabits along time ago and kept getting upgraded; it went to 20, then 50, then I moved house and it went 100 and I'm now on 120megabits and being honest I can't tell the difference except for downloads. Uploading is a bit quicker, but thats about it. The latency is very good throughout - always less than 25ms, nowadays it hovers around 10ms. It makes browsing very quick if on a wired LAN (WiFi can introduce latency) with a good-spec computer.

Edit: Bear in mind if you use WiFi; The throughput could be reduced significantly depending on signal and number of devices connected. If your wifi can only thoughput say, 50megabits or less (which is common; even if you have a 300megabit router), there's little point having a faster internet connection, unless you have alot of devices sharing it

My games console and pc are hardwired the rest is wifi. cheers for info. Still not sure then what to do. Did you notice much difference between 20 and 50?

Only real noticeable difference was when downloading stuff or when few people in the house were sharing the same connection simultaneously.

I have the 70mb with BT and can confirm it is FAF for gaming and downloading.

Remember you might not get the 38Mb speed you have been promised. The technology being used in this case is vdsl and is distance dependent. Get BT to give you a speed estimation first. You may not even get 38Mb no matter what package you buy. If you have the choice of Virgin cable internet then ignore this!

Just got sky fibre and running 40mb pretty impressed with it .......

FTTC is ok but your speed/sync will drop over time especially if your exchange is new to FTTC. This isn't something BT or the other ISP's make very clear.

When i signed up back in May i was sync'd at ~46mbits with 43MB download throughput and 10MB upload, i'm approximately 1KM from the cabinet. This was perfect for me as i was used to 4.5MB ADSL for years.

Today I get 34MB down and 8MB up, so the speed has dropped 9-10MB on the download in a few months. This is mostly due to new/other punters signing up to FTTC on my exchange. Not very good really.

G.Fast is being trialled by BT at the moment which could potentially increase speeds to a max of 300MB over the existing copper infrastructure, but that's years away from being commercially available, that's if they get the funding to go ahead with it.

Yep same here, started at 34Mb now down to 24Mb again through crosstalk from other customers

we got bt infinity and where told 70mbps max we average 64-66mbps time of day makes a bit off difference, 3laptops 1 playstaion 3 and 2 phones never had any buffering since, even on xmovies8

Yep crosstalk can be prevented by using vectoring, but again it's not applied to all exchanges and still being trialled by BT in England :rolleyes:

You will have to wait for G Fast



:D

Bt said if i go for the 76mb, that i should notify them if speed goes below that 70mb i'm sure thats what they said.

I will keep speed testing the line, when i get it.