New Fibre Provider

[boyse7en]

Looking at changing my home broadband provider from BT Fibre to another Fibre supplier

Am i right in thinking that all the different companies are selling exactly the same product? i.e.. it the same line, same exchange, same network etc. and only the price and "extras" make the difference?

Any recommendations between EE, TalkTalk, Plusnet and Onestream (never heard of them before)

[Mr Pointy]

boyse7en said:

Looking at changing my home broadband provider from BT Fibre to another Fibre supplier

Am i right in thinking that all the different companies are selling exactly the same product? i.e.. it the same line, same exchange, same network etc. and only the price and "extras" make the difference?

Any recommendations between EE, TalkTalk, Plusnet and Onestream (never heard of them before)

Are you talking about Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) or Fibre to the Premises (FTTP)? Not everyone can get FTTP & everyone except Virgin uses the same infrastructure installed by Openreach (apart from a few small private installations mainly on new-builds & the independent kingdom of Kingston)

[megaphone]

If it's just standard fibre, down the copper Openreach cable, then you have a huge choice. They will all have the same speed, if the BT service is good now, any other service will be good. Just go with the best value, look for cash-back deals on Quidco or similar, change at the end of the contract to a better deal.

I change my ISP every year/18mnths, I never pay more than around £20/m for BB and phone.

[annodomini2]

Mr Pointy said:

boyse7en said:

Looking at changing my home broadband provider from BT Fibre to another Fibre supplier

Am i right in thinking that all the different companies are selling exactly the same product? i.e.. it the same line, same exchange, same network etc. and only the price and "extras" make the difference?

Any recommendations between EE, TalkTalk, Plusnet and Onestream (never heard of them before)

Are you talking about Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) or Fibre to the Premises (FTTP)? Not everyone can get FTTP & everyone except Virgin uses the same infrastructure installed by Openreach (apart from a few small private installations mainly on new-builds & the independent kingdom of Kingston)

Some of the FTTP providers use their own infrastructure as well as Virgin.

[OlonMusky]

megaphone said:

If it's just standard fibre, down the copper Openreach cable, then you have a huge choice. They will all have the same speed, if the BT service is good now, any other service will be good. Just go with the best value, look for cash-back deals on Quidco or similar, change at the end of the contract to a better deal.

That isn't necessarily true, since each provider deploy their own traffic shaping policies and you can have situations where on the same cable BT will deliver close to max during 99% of the time whereas a competitor will throttle during peak times.

[Initforthemoney]

Exactly.

We use an independent provider that is almost twice the cost of the bargain basements and our connection is at max 24/7 and has been stable for around 6 months.

Get what you pay for.

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Zen internet

[Initforthemoney]

Trustmeimadoctor said:

Zen internet

Unfortunately, they are going the same way as BT, Plusnet and the like.

[wiggy001]

Initforthemoney said:

Exactly.

We use an independent provider that is almost twice the cost of the bargain basements and our connection is at max 24/7 and has been stable for around 6 months.

Get what you pay for.

True, but this is massively overkill for 99% for customers.

[cml24]

I thought local loop unbundling meant there are now several providers in most exchanges?

Therefore, bt/open reach only provide the copper from exchange to property. Everything 'upstream' of the exchange is owned by the provider, eg Sky.

Or am I wrong?

[heisthegaffer]

I've mentioned this before that I had to cancel my Vodafone fibre contract mid term as it was so bad and signed up to BT fibre immediately afterwards.

Loads better, to the point I'm sure Vodafone must have had a fault.

[cml24]

We attempted to get FTTC in our current place but they eventually got back to us (three weeks wait) and said it couldn't be done as the equipment was at capacity in the exchange.

Considered an ADSL connection but they thought it would be about 3Mbits a second.

Ordered a 4g router and unlimited data SIM, even though we couldn't get a phone signal in most of the house. A day later both arrived, setup instantly and now have a reasonable connection.


It would struggle to stream 4k half the time, and I'm sure inline gaming wouldn't be great but for normal iPlayer, 4od etc and web browsing it's a great alternative to patched traditional broadband in a semi-rural location. Directional 4g aerial would see speeds improve I'm sure!

Sorry, drifted off topic.