BT Full Fibre - 150Mb vs. 300Mb vs. 900Mb

[David87]

Moving to a new house soon that's got a proper full fibre connection with BT. They do three options: 150Mb, 300Mb or 900Mb and these respectively cost £40, £50 or £60 per month. I'm thinking the 300Mb is probably best - I'm not sure 150Mb is enough (despite my current connection being around 75Mb and it's fine) and the 300 is only £10 more. 900 is obviously way faster on paper, but am I right in thinking that without hardwiring stuff, the extra speed will mostly be pointless over Wi-Fi? Will be using the BT mesh discs to get a decent signal everywhere.

[Captain_Morgan]

What issues are you experiencing with your current provider?

What speed does your current provider supply?

[bunchofkeys]

As you say, unless you're hardwired into the router, you're not going to see the top end bandwidth through Wi-Fi.

Depends really on what you want to do with your Internet connection, but i would say that the middle option probably does everything you need.

[TEKNOPUG]

Get the 900. It has 110mb upload versus only 49mb for the 300.

[camel_landy]

TEKNOPUG said:

Get the 900. It has 110mb upload versus only 49mb for the 300.

...or go for the 150 on the basis your current 75 is fine.

If you find it's too slow, simply ask them to upgrade it.

M

[LooneyTunes]

bunchofkeys said:

As you say, unless you're hardwired into the router, you're not going to see the top end bandwidth through Wi-Fi.

Even if you hard wire, you will find services at the other end are limited. We have a 300 service but, although it speed tests at that, never see anything close to that with real-world downloads of big content (e.g. console games). Never have noticeable issues if everyone is using it at the same time for gaming/films/work. Having come from a 50ish connection. 150 would probably be fine too, but wasn’t available when we ordered.

[xeny]

David87 said:

I'm not sure 150Mb is enough (despite my current connection being around 75Mb and it's fine) .

How much too much do you buy at the supermarket?

The only thing that would nudge me to the 300 is if the upload speed is significantly faster or I was WFH with large media "assets"

edit:

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&... may be worth a read: "How fast does your internet need to be?"

Edited by xeny on Monday 21st June 07:02

[Captain_Morgan]

Internet “speed” is a bit of a misnomer it’s really measuring throughput.

Think of it like a pipe the larger it’s cross section the higher it’s capacity.

As others have said once you get to a critical point you’ll find it’s the other side that becomes the bottle neck rather than your connection.

For perspective a 4K video stream uses about 25 mb/s, a video call/conference is 4 mb/s

Unless you are regularly manipulating large files I would suggest 150 mb/s is more than sufficient for home and wfh use.

[superpp]

I've got fibre to my house too.
BT also have lower speed packages.
The 70mb connection is around £30 depending on offers, possibly cheaper and does OK in our house (2 WFH, 4K netflix, Xbox etc..)

[quinny100]

Go for the 150Mbps and see how you go. Regrades on FTTP are very quick to deliver and are largely non-disruptive - downtime should be no more than a few seconds when the new settings are applied.

Many a business premises with several hundred users are running on 100Mbps leased lines with well under 50% utilisation. Most people tend to overestimate their requirements.

[loudlashadjuster]

150 mbit is perfectly fine for just about everybody.

If you've not got a better connection than that now then you're not one of those people. Just save yourself some cash

[TEKNOPUG]

FTTP should be synchronous but BT in their wisdom have made it asynchronous. Therefore the upload speeds are far less than the download (whereas in most countries they are the same). For WFH with cloud environments and transfer data, I've found that higher upload speed is far more beneficial than a huge download speed. If 75 down was also 75 up, fine. But it's more like 75/18. I don't need 910 down but I want the 110 up

YMMV.

[Richyvrlimited]

quinny100 said:

Many a business premises with several hundred users are running on 100Mbps leased lines with well under 50% utilisation. Most people tend to overestimate their requirements.

generally those are uncontended synchronous links, not the same as consumer broadband.

[theboss]

Average utilisation is pretty meaningless in any case

My colo averages about 1Mbps on a 1Gbps synchronous link. That doesn't mean I'd be happy to save a bit of money by downgrading the link to 1/10/100Mbps

[hyphen]

Get the cheapest, then use the savings to hardwire as many devices as possible to the modem.

[HayesDC2]

I have BT Full Fibre 900, wireless I get in the region of 200 - 550 although for actual downloading e.g. via an xbox it sits at about 300-400 over wifi.

Wired I have seen over 1Gb again downloading on an xbox.

[stevoknevo]

I moved to a new build recently and was going to go for 74mb, called them and they offered me 150 at £35pm with first 3 months half price, worked out £4 cheaper than 74mb over the contract - complete overkill for me as I live alone and share care of my two young kids half the time, but everything connected to it via wifi generally sees 142/30 at all times. Save yourself some money and opt for the 150 package, unless you need greater upload capacity.

[ooo000ooo]

I have 150mb and 900mb in the house, a WiFi disc for each in my office. Laptop randomly picks which one it wants to use and the only way I can tell the difference is fewer ads on the one that has a pi hole on it.

[AJB88]

I've just moved from a house with Vodafone Gigafast 200 to one with Vodafone Gigafast 500 (had to take over the old owners contract). As many have said using devices on Wifi your not going to get the best speeds, I'm hardwired as much as possible.

Were quite a heavy usage family but 200 was more than enough for us.

[sbk1972]

Due to location, age of housing estate, etc I only get 15Mbs on my broadband connection. I would be happy with any of these lines :-)