Secret Truth Behind the UK's Broadband Services!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 พ.ค. 2024
- Today we go on a deep dive behind the U.K.'s broadband services -comparing cable to fibre, what's best for gaming, and what you can do if you can't get fibre or faster broadband! Thanks to Squarespace for supporting the video! Head to squarespace.com/techflow to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or
domain using code TECHFLOW
The Products tested in today's video:
800mbps Business from Virgin using Cable (DOCSIS)
900mbps Residential from EE (Openreach FTTP)
80mbps Residential from TalkTalk (Openreach FTTC)
5G Unlimited Data Sim (Three)
40mbps MMWIFI (WISP)
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Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:21 - Delivery of FTTC
1:20 - Delivery of DOCSIS
1:44 - Delivery of FTTP
2:39 - Looking at PING
4:36 - Messing up PING
6:49 - Comparing SPEED
8:07 - They Don't Want You To Know
9:43 - Gaming is Strange
10:30 - Other Superfast Options - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Let us know in the comments your loaded and unloaded ping's along with the provider and make the comments section useful for people deciding who to go for
its pain in ass now internet providers slow than the tecnology i wish you got 5/10G fiber to properly test new wifi 7 routers (that this not enabled MLO)
That's always been the case. The question is, are devices and services actually ready for mutigig. Most can just about handle 1gig. Wifi 6 can theoretically do multigig
So ive just did a speed test with wifi man, my speed is 35 down and 6 up my ping is 15. i pay £50 each ,onth for 50mb , i dont get anywere near the 50mb speed,
i can download a 10gb 4k video in 30 seconds
The increase in "loaded" ping times is due to bufferbloat. You should use a router that supports FQ-CoDel or Cake. Setting the up/down speeds just below the max of your circuit will drastically improve loaded pings.
Thanks for such a plain English explanation of the basics of Broadband. You've got a follow.
Not a problem! Glad you liked the video 🙏🏻 welcome aboard! 🙌🏻
Upload speed is more important than you think. While you're downloading, acknowledgement packets need to be sent back (uploaded), and if the upload bandwidth is saturated already then it'll affect download. Several newer FTTP providers do 1000 Mbps upload with the 1000 download
In The Netherlands there are multiple ISPs (Delta/Odido(Old T-Mobile-Tele2)) that can give you 8 Gbps, which is INSANE
That is unreal!!!
@@techflow For just 85 Euro's. (Odido).
To extend this. The fiber situation in the Netherlands is a bit spotty because our biggest telco KPN kind of stopped developing their own fiber network when government stepped in and demanded they opened up their network to other ISPs (like they have to do on the POTS network). Now the old POTS network is on its last legs and they started again to roll out fiber extensively. Meanwhile other ISPs started to roll out fiber in some places. Delta and Odido have partially their own network working on ftth basis. Odido therefore is active both on their own network as well on the KPN fiber network. Delta is not. They started as a cable TV service in the province of Zeeland. They first modernized their own cable network in Zeeland and then went on to start expanding outside of Zeeland. Their biggest competitor VodafoneZiggo has had fiber up to the street cabinets for years.
True, a large amount. But you'll never find a service that will serve it back.
And in the UK too! I will be able to get 8Gbps within the next couple of months....
0:57 Currently, the fastest provider in the UK though full fibre is _not_ EE. You Fibre's plans range from 150Mbps to 8Gbps - a full _five times_ faster than EE. Who would need 8Gbps in a residential setting is beyond me, but it's there if you want it.
Very limited rollout via you fiber though... I've been on their waitlist for 2 years with no sign of any installation
I’d take a 2gig symmetric connection in a hearbeat.
I’ll have to move house to get it, they’ll never roll it out where I live. It took 3 years extra when infinity FTTC came out. I use Virgin and can get 1gig but they have no plans for FTTP here in next 5 years.
Actually the fastest residential Fibre is from 'B4RN' which they provide a whopping 10Gbps
1. B4RN 10Gb for £150 p/m
2. YouFibre 8Gb for £99.99 p/m
3. Community Fibre* 3Gb for £49 p/m (which I have at home)
4. Yayzi Broadband 2.3Gb for £50 p/m
Other providers max speeds are 2Gb ranging from £55 p/m to £129.99 p/m
Then comes EE 1.6Gb for £69.99 p/m which is a rip off imo.
*If you live in London, then you may able to sign up to Community Fibre which is reliable and affodable
**Prices correct as of 27 April 2024
@@fwzmhmd Ain't that nuts?! Most people don't even have 10Gb networking in their house (I do, but that's not the point)! 😄
You Fibre originally offered 10Gbs, but they dropped it to 8Gbs for some reason.
Incidentally, I wasn't claiming YF was the fastest (I couldn't be arsed doing the research to find out); I was just refuting his claim that EE was the fastest available.
@@fwzmhmd You have forgot Hyperoptic, ASK4 both provide 1Gb.
Sadly by default both Hyperoptic and Community Fibre gives you a CGNAT type for IP addressing, Thats ok for browsing and netflix/youtube but sucks port forwarding or Gaming!
I've worked in telecommunications since the mid 2000's, and get asked by friends and family all the time about this topic. Thanks for making the video, you'll save me a lot of time with me being able to just tell them about this video haha! It's well explained and is correct!
Really informative and accurate video thanks Alex!
One thing to watch out for with those 1GB for 30 quid fibre plans is that many of them run CGNAT. This means that you share the same IP address as the other houses on your street. This can prevent some VOIP software and home security cameras from working. It can also prevent you from self hosting a gaming server. Most of them will let you turn off CGNAT and have your own IP, but for an additional monthly cost.
It does happen but not all I'm with county broadband and I had issue with online gaming so asked that question specifically and was told I have my own IP.
FTTP has just been installed to my house a month ago and I got the BT 900 Package, zero complaints and its insanely more stable compared to my previous FTTC! However since I'm a new customer they installed a 2.5gb ONT, Openreach are soon to offer 1.8gbps download, BT, EE etc... are dropping them at any moment.
EE already offer the 1.8 atm.
@@benjaminfphillips I know, but already in a contract with BT... hoping they offer 1.8 soon
Great video Alex! 👌
Excellent guide. Subscribed.
I'm on EE 300 FTTP in the East Midlands, and it's fantastic. More than fast enough for me.
Is it better than virgin? My contracts up and im thinking to renew the current virgin 500mb thanks
Nice video, Alex. Other thing for people to remember is speed is measured differently to size - so a 1Gbps connection will download (in a perfect world) a 1GB file in 8 seconds - speed is measured in bits and storage is measured in bytes...8 bits in a byte etc. etc. I think you've covered this before.
Also - there are some default settings in Windows that throttle downloads. Worth doing an overview on them. Makes a huge difference.
Why there is differences in speed depending on the website is because of how these providers or the CDN's interconnect into the ISP's network. They could already have the connection saturated or even be a slower interconnect than the other.
You should have done a trace route to dropbox/google drive to see the differences in how/where it connects into the CDN.
I have been using Three 5G for a couple of years now. Used to have to reboot but it’s been fine recently. Get around 400 down and 60 up but for £20 a month that’s just fine with me
I get 1gb up and one down for £29.
YouFiber
Great and informative video! You might as well talk about “bufferbloat” in another video. Cheers
Yea codel limiters / qos can make a big difference. My isp router supports this but was disabled by default. My loaded ping is now much better.
In the US a lot of companies will give you a nice download speed but a very minimal upload speed. I wish symmetrical was the standard. this has the effect of sure you might have 25 down but you have 1 up and that gets saturated which causes information not to get out to bring you a download like videos, streaming or gaming. Next the whole thing feel even slower than it is. Or in some cases unusable depending on time of day and user load on the network and on your network. I've had a few sites where there's just too many buses trying to go down a one-way street.
yep, robing Peter to pay Paul!, there selling, something that not really there, the faster on paper down load,, nocked down by the lack, full up stream link,
IIRC this is to due available ports on a connection line. If the ports were split 50/50 the download speed would suffer significantly and the ISPs assume customers would prefer higher download speeds so the split is closer to 95/5.
Hi. Did you have standard EE router or some better one? Can you tell me specification of your PC, LAN card, ssd drive? How much RAM? LAN cables that you use to get those test resoults ? Thanks
CPU speed is going to play a much bigger role in download speed in most cases. For example, Steam downloads are compressed and get decompressed as you download the file. If your CPU cant decompress the file fast enough then your download is going to slow down also. I have seen computers on 1gig connections with a HDD and not an SSD still download a file at the full 110Mb/s. amount of RAM is also not going to affect much. As long as your ethernet adapter is a 1Gbps capable one, just about all are these days and have been for well over a decade, you will be just fine. And as for cables, again, Most cables sold today are Cat 5e or 6/6e and can handle 10Gpbs over short runs and 2.5Gbps over longer runs just fine.
But if your downloading a Linux ISO for example the CPU speed is less of a limit as the file is compresses yes but its not decompressed as it is downloaded. Same goes for any other file really.
Great video, thanks!
Very well explained. I get FTTP in my UK Newbuild but through the OFNL infrastructure that seems to come with most newbuilds these days. Great solid fibre speeds but much more expensive than the big brands. Currently paying £43p/m for 200/200.
Just a sidenote: the latency under load is also dependent from the QoS management of both the CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) and the backhaul of the provider.
For example, here in Portugal we have 2 major ISPs, NOS and MEO, which both use FTTH, although NOS still uses DOCSIS (it is migrating to FTTH tho). With some tests, where NOS uses DOCSIS (HFC) and MEO uses FTTH, under no load, the MEO FTTH connection wins, because it can provide much faster latencies than NOS HFC. However, when you insert some load in the network, for example, a speedtest, the NOS HFC performs better than MEO FTTH, although NOS uses DOCSIS.
Why? Because NOS made a good job to apply a good QoS for it's network than MEO. The NOS routers and the network itself (on the last mile, and inside the backbone) were configured to prioritize traffic for UDP, VOIP and other real-time traffic in case of a pretty loaded network. MEO, on the other side, does not has those configs for that, causing a worse experience under loaded networks.
Im not saying that DOCSIS is better than FTHH, none of that; what Im saying is that the technology itself helps to deliver a good speed and latency to a customer, and also the equipment and the config that is being used by the ISP enters the equation.
Thanks for this video
4 x 4K streams with 60mbit - dream on
Incoming - possible but under really perfect conditions. Outgoing, you won’t even push 1 despite the speed test.
In Netflix maybe, but do *anything* else and it'd start buffering. Netflix does drop the bitrate as much as possible to save on their bandwidth (high compression using HEVC)
extremely highly compressed and horrendous frame rate maybe.
@@jamesrbrindle your outgoing issue has nothing to do with the bandwidth its other issues.
Stating the resolution means nothing, you have to know the Bitrate of the source. Bluray 4K has a much higher Bitrate than TH-cam or Netflix (and this Blurry has much higher quality)
so Alex, so how can i get my internet speed to be faster/better ping for gaming while i have adsl?
Thanks Alex and Jed.
You should explain peering and why different ISPs perform differently for different services.
2Gig symmetric fiber just north of Seattle for around $80 a month, super reliable now that they moved my ONT into the house. My external ONT would get overheated and drop frequently in the summer under direct sunlight!
Great video Alex and Jed! 😁
Thank you! Appreciate that
Great video, there is also now another way other than docsis or fttp. There is now fibre to the hub through virgin and 2 gig symmetrical is already in some areas 🤩
That is the same thing as FTTP.
@@incandescentwithrage no it isn’t, fttp is to the property and then Ethernet with open reach, xgs is fibre to the equipment
@@Callum-R By definition it is FTTP.
XGS-PON can terminate at an ONT, or the ISP provided router.
My ISP provides a Nokia ONT on an XGS network.
The ONT has a 10Gb RJ45 interface.
What the fiber plugs in to is irrelevant
@@incandescentwithrage I get what you’re saying, and understand. Interesting how an ont can run 10gig
City fibre does symmetrical FTTP. Starting to roll out 2.5gig. Also, other smaller fibre operators are doing multi gig (3+) symmetrical. Although with city fibre, it depends on the ISP on how good the ping is!
Please we want you to be release more videos for us to consume that’s the only thing we are requesting to from now. Thank you for agreeing to do it for your subscribers. 😊
Great video!
Low Ping / latency is foremost. Don't be fooled by faster is better. Run a couple of services via Virgin DOCSIS and watch the ping times soar. The Virgin 'business' service is simply a lie. Run the exact same services via BT FTTP and the ping times are night and day. Swapping out the BT router can further improve latency. Avoid Virgin at ALL cost if you can. Their customer service is a joke, bordering on pathetic.
Yeah avoid Virgin unless you have no other choice. The service is decent (when it works) if you use your own equipment but they're currently charging us £95 a month for 500 meg (boosted with Volt so we're actually paying for 350 meg) and an international landline which barely ever gets used. Absolute joke of a company and just take advantage of people who value their sanity enough to avoid speaking to their woeful customer service.
@@itIsI988I've just gone on the virgin Website right now without Volt it's £35 a month for 18m with 500mbps..why are you lying?
If you're an existing o2 contract customer you take the £35 and once setup you get the speed boost so 1gig for the same £35..
Again why lie?!?
Last time I had Virgin was being charged for phone calls I didn't make, no phone connected, never again
What you haven’t mentioned is the recent Starlink update for European customers - the dishy’s are now pointing West (previously most pointed North). They’re now taking advantage of unused satellites across the Atlantic before they reach the continent. This had massively reduced ping times. I went from receiving around 40-50ms to an average of 20ms, with download around 200mbps, and upload of 25mbps.
Hello, we switched to BT full fibre but I complained that we weren't getting the speeds advertised, until I removed the supplied BT Router and plugged my ASUS router in and discarded the BT Router.
Have you seen this before, and doyou know if BT purposely throttle back their routers.
Any thoughts?
Had the same issue but on FTTC, They admitted and said the capacity is full at peak times and because of that, they offered half the price of £15 but decided to leave and went to ghost gamer broadband for there FTTC who use TalkTalk business wholesale for there stuff and never had any issues, also comes with a static IP so bonus! - Also they supply you with a tp link archer vr400 router and also not locked to any ISP.
Also, get quality routers, APs or Switches. If you use a cheap route the quality of your link is degraded when you start to push the limit of line. If you have a route that supports QoS that helps to smooth out new connections as it will prioritise protocols that need more bandwidth ( streaming, gaming, online meetings) and those that need less bandwidth ( downloads, web browsing). There will be a little on the side for a new connection to start up. This means that the new connection will not impact any other user experience (buffering on a stream, lag in a game or meeting).
This was the best discussion on the topic. my IPS pushed me to 100MB on my FTTH connection (was on a 75MB) as they dropped the speed I was on so I have requested to be on a low package 50MB as this will do perfectly for my needs. As I have quality routers, APs, and switches. And fewer issues with them.
My area only has a OFNL broadband. Which OFNL supplier do you suggest me?
Completley agree.
I see people asking about/wanting to get Starlink when they already have a 80Mbps FTTC connection.
Speed isn't everything!!
I'm lucky as I have 1.6Gbps and I live in the middle of the Scottish Borders, so I'm not sure how I managed to pull that one off as it doesn't seem to be available in the majority of places yet.
Meg and Gig in this context is Bits - lots of folk talk about storage and file sizes in Bytes - there is of course a difference of 8. You need to be a tad clearer in your videos mate.
Hey Alex, any advice on USG and busy Fiber line with 4G backup., How i combine both for uninterupded internet. Failover is lazy and it drops internet for too long, load balancing at 50%50% introduces higher ping on 4G but never drops internet, but 90% 10% is slow to failover it drops in between but ping is like fiber. How i set it to never notice fiber droping out as they service the gear so often.😅 I get 340/100 @15-50ms fiber and 4G+ 100/30 @50-100ms, loaded ping is high number. I have seperate ssid on all APs from vlan of 4G but it is last resort😅
I have 1Gbs symmetric and it makes using AWS / cloud services from home a practical proposition to use high virtual CPU count servers for a few seconds to perform tasks and download the file file to my home server. That would take many hours to days to process locally and at high energy usage.
We live on a tenfoot, so cannot get fibre. I'm currently with talktalk and get around 80 meg. I would like to go higher, but we're very limited.
Hi Alex, can you do a video going deeper into 4g and 5g broadband. I am going down this route with an external 5g antenna.
Avoid 4G/5G as speeds can very depending on the load in the area. Expect pings around 20-80ms.
if you need to go down this route then get a pay and go sim card with a 4 or 5g router and give this ago before getting into a 24m contract with say 3 or EE etc.
@@francisuk1989 Yeah I already got the equipment and router. I will be getting a 5g sim from Smarty for £20/mo (uses 3 network). Reason I am going this route is because I'll get max 36mbps from BT for nearly double the price. Ping is not an issue for me as I don't do gaming much. Solid 4g in the rural area and there is a 5g mast 3 miles away, so I will be attempting to pick up on the 5g mast with an external antenna mounted on the roof. I have picked a very weak 5g signal from the roof with my phone so hopefully antenna will amplify it. Otherwise I should be able to get a comfortable 60mbps+ on 4g.
Id suggest running multiple tests and just taking the mean of those tests, as i have ran a test on my pc an hour apart and got 2 different speeds. Also my playstation utilises the max speed i get, which is 900mb download but i actually get 980, but sometimes i can do 2 tests close together and get wildly different speeds. You cant stop the playstation from doing internal processes when it wants to do them, so again id say do a few tests on each console and take the mean for a more accurate data set, and even out variables between both consoles. You can game on a 5mb dl connection, its the upload speed (information that's sent to game servers), ping and quality of connection that matters (packet loss)
I have 2Gbit Down /1Gbit up with a ping on 7ms on Yayzi with the CityFibre Network in Coventry. With an upgrade to XGS-PON in my area soon it will go to 2.3Gbit symetrical. Not bad for £50 a month!
Yeah that's a sweet connection, Can't help but be a liitle green eyed :P I'm gagging to get an upload higher than 100Mbit.
There's more potential for XGS-PON and CityFibre is already looking at 50G-PON.
While watching your from around at 10min, couldn't help but notice that your consumer unit (fuse box) seems to have some regulation issues being different branded mcb(Volex in a Hager enclosure) and a white flex entering the closure possible without a gland or flame retardant entry method. would recommend to get your CU upgraded to a metal flame proof box with surge protection and RCBOs for peace of mind
I've come to the exact conclusion that 50/60 mbs is the sweetspot speed. As Virgin upgraded my service - and charged me more per month - once above 60 mbs the downloads didn't seen to improve that much, but it was costme more without any obvious benefits. What would be better is a symmetrical download/upload speed for sending large images or files.After that you are at the mercy of the server to which you are trying to connect and download.
Virgin now offers 2 Gbps in some areas but at £85 a month for a household, I won't be taking that.
And £140 a month once you are out of the initial contract.
@@gorebrush Still a bargain lol they're currently billing us £95 a month for 500 Mbps with a landline.
VM are bonkers. I can get 2.3 Gig down and 1 Gig up here in Peterborough for £50 I am leaving VM as soon as my contract is up at the start of August.
you can "fix" loaded ping by having a qos capable router
I do exactly that. Sure my ping goes up a little, from 20ms to about 30 ish. but not as bad as shown in this vid
Nah qos is so 10 years ago. It's SQM what you want
i’ve got threes 5g broadband, and i get 20ms ping and around 500-800mbps download. it’s really good, i was stuck with a 30mbps fttc connection for ages.
Would be great to see a video about how to make the most out of the speeds. Something like mesh wifi, how to get ethernet into other rooms, all whilst keeping the best ping and speed. I see a lot of people using crusty old wifi routers that throttle the speeds they could be achieving with some small hardware upgrades.
have you ever heard of delay in fifa when online but plays fine when offline same thing happens in all other online games its as iff packets of data arent being sent properly or something but its been bothering me for years my isp always says everything is fine on their end but ther is an input delay that ruins competeive gaming completely if anyone can help PLEASE!!
You can actually get 100-300mbps via GFAST DSL Line (copper) if you're within a certain radius of the cabinets.
You have to be hugging the G-Fast pod to get even close to the 300mbps speeds via DSL. You also got to account for the line, you might not even have copper but aluminium or worse still a mix of the two.
Certain distance, not radius.
It's the cable length that matters, not the radius from the cabinet.
Gfast is crap tbh
7:21 that's always the case with virgin, the hugely cap your upload speed no matter which package you get
what about virgin xgs pon being able to provide 2Gb symetrical to customers?
This is available in my area but I pay £20 for 2 diverse 1Gb connections. Soooo I think I’m good enough as is.
Docsis ADSL, and fttc will all have a contended connection. During COVID lockdown it was crazy on a docsis connection, at 4pm all the kids in the street would start watching Netflix and my connection performance plummeted
Thanks, excellent info here. It is quite shocking how latency affects the quality of your internet experience.
There is a provider here in Romania that can do 10 gig for €10/month. The catch is that it’s not available almost anywhere so far. I think they use fibre, and with my 1 Gbps plan gets 1ms ping!
When i stayed in a Airbnb in Romania for a couple of days, They used RCS & RDS for internet and was getting close to 1Gbit. :P
Of course it’s fibre if it’s 10 gig
I'm on a 60mb connection ( talk talk ) and my days use is under 10GB which not so long ago 300GB each month would classed as over T&Cs .
I can't see a point of going ant higher .
Yayzi's offering at 2.5gbps is the current fastest. Runs on cityfibre, been around for 3-4 months. Also, to compare cityfibre to openreach, i.e. the way it works is a bit oversimplified. They have cabling infrastructre in common. They work a little differently from each other, which is why the service offering between cityfibre and openreach is completely different.
My neighbor has gigabit across the road and the max I can get is 30mbps, can u help me get faster broadband that doesn't effect ping so satellite and 5G isn't an option
Virgin may seem good at first but they are a nightmare company to deal with, their customer support will have you pulling out your hair..IT'S THAT BAD!! They have so many dropouts and do not deliver the speeds they promise, especially after the cooling off period. The worst experience I've ever had with any broadband provider, avoid like the plague!!
i have fiber to the house but am still only getting 30mbps?
2:31 dont you mean fttp vs docsis, cause fttc is what virgin use for docsis
Depends on the area. Here in Peterborough the network is old as shit and VM's network here is RF for a lot of the runs. My line for example, I know its route. It goes upto a cab at the top of the street where all the lines from this street combine into a few bigger coax links that go off for a about 1.4 miles back to the VM office. Sure from there its a fibre link. RFoG is a thing in places as well but I'm fairly sure Peterborough has not got any of that new fangled tech here yet.
How far are you from your local exchange? I can't help feel you've missed so many variables....
Interesting comparison of Google and Dropbox…. The transfer speed would depend on where and how the isp peers with the two. Look up the asn numbers for the two isp’s and then you can lookup the peering info. For instance one of the isp’s here in Canada peer 811 kms away and the other one 1300 kms away.
You fibre do 10gb up and down if you ask them. 8gb to the consumer. I'm on 950mb up and down. EE not the fastest the limitation is it's mainly North East but they are growing and moving further south. My ping is 2
That's why you get a router with SQM (Smart Queue Management)/FQ-CODEL/etc...
it should be mandatory at this point!
If you live outside London your pretty much done over with faster speeds way more competition in London so better deals 6G almost ready would be a better option in countryside.
Here in INDIA we really have a very good network of fibers....that's FTTH(Fiber To The Home)....that's similar as you have shown....a fiber cable coming to your property and using a converter to convert it into ethernet/RJ45.....and with rise in coverage of 5G network..... Air Fiber is becoming a trending/popular alternative to FTTH for places like rural areas and for the places where laying fiber cable connection is hard/impossible....!!
FTTH and FTTP are the same thing
@@incandescentwithrage YES
Using an ethernet LAN connection to your router makes a huge difference. I've networked each room in my house and my ping to EU gaming servers never gets above 15-20ms and that is using a copper BT line. Rarely see any one else get better than that. We also keep game updates capped so they don't munch all of our 50mb connection speed and slow the other devices down.
We live in the UK countryside & can’t get any kind of fibre optic etc so our only option is a 4G Router which gives us about 50-80mb download speed. As an avid gamer it’s just about the minimum speeds I can handle for gaming before things become unplayable.
New virgin media installs get a fibre line compared to a coax cable and those properties can get upto 2 gigabit upload and download
I found this with Virgin maybe about 8 or 9 years ago, it was 100mb, great for downloads at the time, but it seemed slightly 'chuggy', then went to vodafone fttc and it was a lot more responsive. Since then we gained fttp and its the responsiveness of vodafone, with similar speeds to what I was getting with virgin.
So nexifibre installed cables via the pole for virgin to a box on the side of my house then a box on the wall outside with a fibre cable into the house. This is where I am confused as this will be a full fibre part of the network that has just been installed that must connect to Virgin's old network.
Nope it is all fibre. The fibre to pole will from XGS PON OLT somewhere in your area which is all fibre. Will be capable of 10Gig in the future.
To be clear that's a 3.3% difference for the 10 Gb file download test from Dropbox, and you might consider that those slow download speeds are more something to do with Dropbox (specifically your account type and how you are using it)... for a thorough test you'd probably need to have a statistically significant sample of download speed/time measurements. That 3.3% is in the range of expected error and I'd guess that these results are effectively the same.
PS the Google Drive download difference was ~6% which could be considered more significant, but I'll bet many wouldn't even have noticed that difference in a side by side comparison unless they were paying close attention ;)
Lucky person. I only have 40mb download and the real killer 5mb upload. With no other options. This makes remote working painful. Took me 6 hrs to upload 5GB the other day to work.
FYI Virgin offer a 2gig service in there FTTP areas.
They are moving away from docsis and all new areas are FTTP
Virgin does not offer FTTP
Yes they do, it’s FTTP in my area
Virgin are not the fastest far from it, I am now on 2Gbits (2000 Mbits) and can go up to 8Gbits this is both ways "Synchronous" unlike Virgin and others where uplink is far less than downlink.
Enjoyed the Video. 👍
So, does full fibre (FTTP) suffer from contention issues like FTTC does?
no, it is a direct line from Fibre Node to you, so you use no one else's connection
Downside of Fibre, some people have found they get a high smoking Fibre optic cable so it's being stolen in the country I live in. I have Fibre less 5g it comes to my modern straight from the tower. Was getting 180 mps
The whole thing about your loaded ping being higher than your unloaded ping is due to bufferbloat. This is down to your router and has nothing to do with your provider or connection speed. If your connection is fully saturated then any packets are sent and received on a first come, first served basis. In other words, any time sensitive UDP packets in your conference call or online game are stuck at the back of the queue - the buffer - and have to wait until all the other packets in front of it have been dealt with first. High end routers have a function called smart queue management which can be enabled for a small bandwidth hit, but the tradeoff is you get no bufferbloat and your ping does not increase no matter how loaded down the network becomes. This is because your router is smart enough to know which packets are time sensitive, and sends them out straight away regardless of where they are in the queue.
Here in Chile I pay £25 for unlimited symmetrical 1Gbps fibre, its stable and I have never had any problems... when I had a company that uses DOCSIS, because of how that system works it had issues with congestion, random ping spikes and a the slow uploads were an issue to work from home.
There are so many issues buried under this analysis. The video exposed the impact of how ISPs interconnect and peer their services that is shown by differences in speed to specific services. Indeed, you may not be connecting to those services at the same point either. Time of day has a big impact on responsiveness of internet services and networks. What you don't see is the backhaul to an ISPs presence in addition to their peering arrangements. That will be dimensioned (and hence costed) to meet a forecast load. Virgin will all be on it's own infrastructure so under their direct control. With the exception of the other ISPs mentioned (and possibly even those) the other ISPs backhaul will likely be over BT MPLS.
Then of course there is the impact of the hardware serving a particular connection or connection path. Older routers in street cabs will likely be less capable than newer ones. But, if you are on fibre you have good reason to expect that all the local loop is also fibre and the shared links are faster than your own access connection.
The internet is an incredibly complex machine. It is difficult to make direct comparisons because there are so many variables. Others may likely get completely different responses.
Finally, you really have to be going some to load fast connections. You will really struggle to get 4 stable 4k downloads over an 80M service. Typically you will be seeing 17-18Mbit/s for each stream (depending on encoding). Then you have the link overhead and router performance considerations. It is a walk in the park for 200Mbit/s and greater though.
Ping is important for gaming which is why that metric is shown (not a gamer myself and two heavy gamers have now left home). I dare say though that the games insert some equalisation on that measure to make things fairer but am sure they won't acknowledge that.
Outright speed is an overrated metric. It only tells you so much. It is only really important to certain businesses such as banking/trading where they use dedicated fibres with minimal repeaters in order to reduce latency. And, they will only use their own networking equipment. That is a different ballgame altogether.
I just want a good provider that gives me a static IP, rDNS, symmetric speeds (with upload over 100mbps), and good customer service. I plan on switching to zen when my virgin contract ends near the end of August.
The real issue about speed is that Virgin throttle the system at peak times and my broadband goes from over 400Mb to below 20Mb and sometime the circle of death goes on and on, where as BT never throttle there speed at any time. I would like you to do a vid on this topic please, throttling.
That's not throttling, it's contention.
It can happen with any residential ISP.
Virgin are particularly bad for it though as they oversell available bandwidth at a higher ratio than others..think a ratio of over 20 times the bandwidth available in your local cabinet has been sold.
Works fine until everyone tries to use it at once.
@@incandescentwithrage Hiya thanks for that info matey, I actually got that information from a Virgin engineer who came out to look at my connection due to it being so bad he said it was called throttling or slowing the speed down at peak times so everyone could get on, but I think your explanation is probably right over selling and system can't cope . I actually threatened to leave as I'm now not in contract, also Open Reach as nearly finished installing FTTP in my area and it will be available soon so I will definitely be swapping over to them soon.
Great video, unfortunately I am one of the unfortunate lots that relies on copper…..managing a lightening 10-12 mbs and 0.5 unload. I live in a town ironically and have city fibre 20m away in the footpath……however my address is apparently on a private road so they won’t connect us up…..frustrating much lol. I love gaming CoD which is interesting with my internet and I would like to stream a bit……..but with my speeds it’s impossible. I have looked at some many options and I think 4g might be my best option……Thoughts please…?
I pay SKY a fortune for their “superfast internet” is to be fair to them it’s the infrastructure that my issue not the provider…..confirmed by Open Reach.
look into wayleave agreement - a wayleave officer can help get a private road connected
Which one is the 22£ provider?
I have 3Gb symmetric with Community Fibre London... nice you don't have to wait for them big file transfers... but sometimes it feels slower than BT's FTTC 80/20 - happened a few times I get a weird lag and can see it clearly with watching 1 twitch stream (I do a speed test and shows no noticeable problem with at least 2.8/2.8), but all mostly it's okay, and I have at least 8 Twitch streams (min 1080p each) running flawlessly... but one time the ONT would not power up... they can't send a new one, and I had to wait for days for their engineer... which made me think... maybe I should have opted for 2x 1Gb = if 1 ONT fails, the other should be fine (?)... that issue made me explore routers with 5G sim... even in London, the speeds are up and down and not reliable.
it also depends on what server you pinging in first place
Hyperoptic doesn't use the Openreach network and has upload and download speed at 1gb. so they would have been a good compare lol
Brilliant video Alex.....Finally a decent video explaining the different types of Broadband.
Interesting channel,i like your chat😎👍🏾💯scribed.
988 down and 787 up, 5ms ping FTTP (not Openreach or VM) on 1Gb package. They do also offer 2.5Gb but at a cost of £70 per month compared to the £35 I pay now. 2.5Gb is nice but totally overkill for my needs.
Openreach are planning to build in my street by Dec 2026 also and VM is available to me but they are using Fibre cables (not the same cables as what I get my internet from) and not coaxial cable.
the path is also importent
on VM your traffic must go to manchester and VM cable does not support any sort of QOS your also unable to change router with VM only via adding if you wanna look up Puma chipset issue that still creeps issue today with most VM
as for Openreach/CF/HO, they are London base soo your traffic is being done in london, resulting in Lower latancy, keep in mind that Games will often use Processing Latancy not just RTT ping
I also tell people stay away from VM for competive gaming unless you live in Manchester.
As for your Speedtest
Sony Thottle network speed as they dont have the network to handle everyone at 1Gbps
Microsoft uses server I think in dublin if you live in the UK.
they both bad speedtester,
do speedtest where your ISP is based
if you want RTT then pick a server near you.
Good thing about virgin is they use an isolator. So when your line is hit with lightning your router doesnt get fried
looks like he needs a better router to handle the buffer bloat on my FTTP connection my loaded pings on an under powered router get to 30ms tops. 6ms on a clean connection. I'm sure that could be better as I'm only using fq codel and cake on upstream 1 way at the moment.
Some of the other factors are Load balancing on servers etc. Along with location, physicasl network infrastructure in countries etc. and so forth. I have City Fibre, we c an get 1Gbps download AND Upload, yes, 1Gbps UPLOAD. Why? because when I have time I will be uploading all sorts, programing, accessing my own servers etc for projects, data analysis may be and so on.
So yeah, MANY factors can show lower speeds and doesn'tr mean it's YOUR connection, just the way equipment may be set up. may be load blanacing needs to be set up so one person doesn't hog all the bandwidth so to speak. What about who you are connecting to? what's their setup? how many connections do they take in or can take in, and so on.
As mentioned, many households do NOT need 1Gbps and 8 0 is fast enough even for gaming where gaming doesn't actually send that much data at all. If you upload lots of media fopr instance to stream to others? may be or yes. Comp science person running projects at home? may be or yes. General viewing of online content and gaming? reconsider those top speeds for lower ones as you do NOT need them. M
Virgin Media currently do the fastest residential connection. You mentioned EE do 1.6gbps but Virgin's fastest is 2.2gbps although only across about 1/4 their network which they plan to have across their whole network by 2028 I think it was and that is migrating all DOCSIS to FTTO with fibre into the back of their modem not to a ONU/ONT
All the info you need except the only one that matters, price.
I swear i got virgin 370 down and 40 up its supposed to be fiber but it doesn't feel like it is even playing apex the delay in shots is very very noticeable