[Phpwm] Broadband recomendations

[Andy Cowan]

On 28/07/2011 12:01, Tim Cumming wrote:
> provider!!
> But they are providing your BB ... you are just paying someone else who
> makes a cut by not providing the full bandwidth ... as I have now proven
> with my Sky connection. Is you modem saying 8Mb service or 2Mb?
> http://www.speedtester.bt.com/ will tell you what your 'configured
> download throughput' is, and your Max Achievable Speed. If your provider
> is only paying BT for a 2Mb service, the BT speed test will tell you.
>
> UNTIL another provided actually puts kit into an exchange the only
> provider carrying the traffic is BT? TOTALLY agree that their support is
> crap, but you only need it when the line goes down - and then openreach
> will be going out anyway?
>
>
This is not how it works. Traffic is carried to the exchange on BT. 
Traffic gets from the exchange  to the providers network via BT, but now 
the provider has control over contention etc. over his central pipes. 
 From there, the traffic flows out via the other provider onto the 
internet proper, as quality of service is dependent on the usual - 
interconnects, network design, overall bandwidth on particular routes, 
peering etc.

Even ISPs who use BT for Wholesale vary wildly in quality - it simply is 
not true to say that unless they have their own kit in the exchange then 
effectlively you are buying a BT resale, you're buying an OpenReach 
resale which only covers geting your traffic to and from the exchange.

The benefit of many smaller ISPs is that they will have access to all 
the various wholesale providers who have kit in your exchaneg and will 
offer/choose services accordingly, with their experience of dealing with 
the various wholesale providers, support teams etc. We for example don't 
use BT for a customer if there is any alternative becuase OpenReach are 
impossible to deal with, don't communicate with anyone and in our 
experience, just outright lie when it suits them.

There is genuine choice. But make sure your choosing with the right 
criteria. Are you after cheap? In which case go with TalkTalk, Sky, BT 
etc. Mass market commodity broadband. They all do it reasonably well, 
and they're all cheap becuase they make money out of your phone calls. 
If you rely on your service for business, you need to think properly 
about how much it's worth to you. And if a morning's outage is going to 
cost you money, you need more than one line, with more than wholesaler 
behind them. Otherwise you're somewhere in the middle. We have a filover 
setup with BE and Webtap. More expensive than buying cheap as chips from 
BT, but we can't afford to be without broadband for over a week because 
Openreach can't find an address (I've seen that more than once), so it's 
worth it.

It's not possible to be 100% reliable. If you want 100%, you need to pay 
for it and realise it's *your* problem because ISPs don't offer it.

A.