Going from 3Mb to Optic Fibre performance information

[Ryu]

Hello BT forum users,

Sorry to make a post but this is for a personal interest. We decided to upgrade our internet package after having had 5 new routers, 3 technicians over due to the still ongoing problems we have with the internet. Frankly my partner gave up calling as all that would be done is sent a new router or we had to try a third party one.

So we decided to take a nose dive and see if it would get better with the BT Infinity. I am not going to lie, the internet gets used for gaming most of the time, primarily World of Warcraft and the reason it is business as they wanted to charge us a hefty fine for trying to get Business2resedential.

So my question to you BT is;

I read the consumer forums and read a unbelievable amount of complaints down to throttling. As a business customer I presume this would not be the case? See here Consumer Forum
Also the current issue we have which is when the line is under stress (downloading a file at 700Kb) we don't have a DNS and pages will not load, I presume with the BT Infinity this would not be the case.
What are the rules on, if we are not happy after the 10 day throttle period are their possibilities for a refund etc.

Sorry for the many questions, however the person I send my emails to has still not responded, also I do not want to come across blunt whatsoever but I hope you understand I am slightly worried as we have to pay 19 pound more compared to the residential package.

Kind Regards,

Rick

[MHC]

I have a business service - we run two consultancies from offices attached to the house.  Then during the non-working time the connection is used for residential purposes.

I see no throttling on anything I do, but there may be some if you run large peer to peer file sharing.    I presume that the gaming does not involve GBs of downloads everyday but just lots of small messages travelling to the server and back andd required low "ping times".

I often need to download files of 500MB as well as plenty of 50-100MB downloads and during those times, I get the full speed my line is capable of ... 

If you are willing to pay the extra and can persuade the sales agent it is a "legitimate business requirement" then there is no reason why Business VDSL cannot be delivered over a residential PSTN line.

[OldWolf]

Hi,

Another thing you should consider doing, assuming you haven't already, is install some form of network usage monitor.

I play WoW myself and I know it doesn't use much bandwidth, but as soon as you hit anything with video (especially HD) then your usage, both in bandwidth and total data, will shoot through the roof.

My advice for this would be to install something like Networx (which I use, and it's fairly simple to work with).  This would give you an idea of how much data you are using at any given time.  Remember that you would need to install it on every machine that you use (and i think it can compile figures over a network if you set it up to do so), and that it won't track usage on any non-computer device that connects directly to the router (e.g. games consoles, mobiles, iWhatevers, etc.) by wireless.

At present on business packages you need to be using at least 90 GB per month on average to hit any form of Fair Use restriction on normal (non fibre) ADSL, but I have no idea if there is any similar FUP on fibre or how much it might be if there was.

Another thing you should be aware of is if any of your activities use peer-to-peer.  Now you may assume that this is file sharing in the 'bad' sense, but some companies use it in their standard set up.

For example if you have ever played Lord of the Rings Online you would have had to install Pando Media Booster so that you could download the installation files.  This is a peer-to-peer app that is perfectly legitimate, but is possibly going to be restricted by any P2P throttling in place, no matter what ISP it is.  Now once you have the files installed you can uninstall it, but if you don't then it will happily go chewing up your bandwidth and data if you let it.

(And also bear in mind that almost all ISPs have some form of P2P throttling in place, and not just BT.)

Hope that helps.

Cheers.

Dave A

[Ryu]

Thank you both for the response,

And it has definitely shown some insight on the matter. The thing that worries me the most is just that we have had problems for 2 years where pages just don't load when either of the PCs are receiving quite a bit of bandwidth. No matter what internet connection I have had in the past you would not get a DNS not found or Page has taken to long to load in under a minute.

Got the technician coming over next week, so we shall see how it runs when he is done. And me and my partner both play OldWolf and you know as well as I do that during raid times (25 man) and that with the 2 of us will increase the usage quite a bit. And you could expect a new patch every month at least to download.
How is your Home/World ping with BT infinity? Has there been a improvement at all over normal ADSL?

Regards,

Ryu

[OldWolf]

Hi,

Ah no I'm not in fibre... yet (maybe this century).  I'm recently on to ADSL2+.  My bad for not pointing that out.

To be honest if you're getting 404s and DNS errors when you aren't doing anything else then there's something up.  While web pages are getting bigger and bigger, normal Internet use shouldn't struggle once you have 500 Kbps or more, unless you are looking at script and graphics heavy sites.

Looking back at your original post, however, you mention that you get this when you're downloading files and such.  When you refer to 700 Kb, could you clarify if this is kilobits or kilobytes, and if it is the speed of the download or the size of the file?

To be honest it would probably all be moot if you moved to fibre, as they are currently only supplying connections that get at least 15 Mb, so unless you are somehow managing to hammer it constantly then any downloads you do won't take long enough to bother you, although if they were big enough you could in theory still bottleneck the connection for a bit.

There are a couple of other things that I've just thought of.  Do you use wireless, and if so do you stream anything across your local network?  Also have you checked your wireless security, as other devices connecting to it and using the Internet would have an effect on your connection that you wouldn't see was happening.

As far as raids are concerned you're probably right in that the amount of data will increase, but I don't think that it will be huge, as WoW in Org runs at just a few Kb per second.  I am, however, now curious to see what the difference might be, so I might set Networx running it's check for an hour to see what happens, since we have a 10 man in Firelands tonight (assuming we get enough people).

Cheers.

Dave A

[Ryu]

Hey OldWolf,

Sorry it has taken awhile for me to respond, but I can honestly say I am impressed with the speeds at the moment, from what they estimated 29Mb, I am now at 37Mb so that is always nice. No issues of course when doing some internet based multitasking, gaming and streaming youtube as example. So all in all good, now I just need to complaint o BT as they have still got me on the wrong tarif and I still do not have a BT Email or any other information.

Just want to thank you for your input though  🙂

Regards,

Ryu

[OldWolf · Accepted solution]

Oh very nice.

One day my exchange shall be all shiny and give superfast stuff. One day... 

Glad to be of some assistance tho.

Cheers.

Dave A