The UK is the most frustrating place to live sometimes. The English speaking world has a shining example of how to not fuck this up in NZ, yet they keep doing the opposite. Against all sorts of lobbying, the NZ govt. forcibly separated our telecom monopoly provider into a retail and a wholesale company, then they put a whole bunch of money up for competitive tender to build a national fibre network. And it works, it honestly fucking works.
I've got Virgin in London and it's a piece of shit compared to what I had in NZ. In theory, I have 200mb down, but the uplink is bullshit because they convert to cable for some unknown reason. I also rarely see the performance that a 200mb connection should have. In NZ I had, in the first days of fibre, 30 down 10 up. It was always this speed, the fibre terminated at my house and was more responsive and reliable than what I have now in the UK.
Here, the govt keeps kicking around, getting conned by the industry as they promsie to upgade things, to be better. It's such a joke.
For reference these are real plans, with reliable speeds, with FTTH: https://imgur.com/a/8JeV7 (divide amount by 2 for £, take off 30%ish for USD)
I don't agree. BT have got to 95% 'superfast' (24mbit+ sec) coverage, with minimal govt funding. It will probably get to 98% coverage.
Try switching from Virgin to BT/openreach FTTx and you'll probably see much more reliable speeds.
FWIW I have hyperoptic in London which is ~£45/month for 1gigabit up and down.
edit: keep in mind the NZ project cost NZ$1.5bn subsidy to get to 87% penetration for ~1million premises. The UK has got to 95%+ penetration (>20million premises) for £600m ish subsidy. It's literally 20x the cost.
my own experiences of BT have made me leery of using them. their customer service is utterly appalling. just consistently, every single time i've had to deal with them, help a friend or family member sort out their bs, it's a horror. we even had to move our business away from their service because we just couldn't have meetings and do screenshares consistently.
even if i wanted bt fibre, i live in the center of a large city in the uk, and i cant get fttc because im on the wrong street. one street over they can get fibre, mine, not a chance - and no plans to according to openreach either. similar issue with where our office is located. wrong street. no fibre. a few streets over, fibre.
virgin on the other hand, i have their 200/20 package. consistently max out the connection no problem. had them for years and they've consistently performed above expectations - i even remember when they were called blue yonder.
I agree, switching to BT makes a big difference. With virgin, I rarely got the advertised speed (certainly not on the weekend or evenings), with BT it's stable 24/7 (~60mbit). In addition to that, peering appears much better. Downloading files from US west coast works generally at very good speed, any connections to servers in the US from Virgin Media was often <10mbit.
Apart from downloading backups, I never find myself constrained by 70mbit download speed.
I tried BT's "fibre" for a year, and I probably never will again. When it was connected, the speed was as advertised. But it disconnected several times a day, sometimes for half an hour at a time, and they didn't seem able to fix it. Relying on decades old copper wire seems like it will never work.
You should try AAISP. They are very technically savvy and will bully openreach relentlessly to get it fixed. They offer to refund all costs if they can't. They almost certainly can, with time.
> I don't agree. BT have got to 95% 'superfast' (24mbit+ sec) coverage, with minimal govt funding. It will probably get to 98% coverage.
Is BT still have awful bandwidth limits? Because like 3-4 years ago they capped you at like 300GB and then cut your speed next month or something like that.
I just got letters from them telling they'll decrease my level of service since I got over 300GB this month, but that was 4 years ago and on xSDL (many areas fairly close to London city still had only xDSL then).
Keep in mind there are many other providers for Openreach FTTx (though BT retail don't cap anymore). I'm refering to BT fibre as really openreach fibre. Sky, Vodafone, etc etc all provide the service also.
You're one of the lucky ones. I don't consider the 'fibre' crap they offer, FTTN then vdsl, to be 'fibre', so the comparison you make is misleading. If the UK gov had got 95% FTTH they might have something to be proud of.
I honestly can't tell the difference between 80/20 FTTN and 1gig FTTH for 99% of use cases. Both support HD conferencing and 4K video with ease. WiFi tends to struggle to deliver above 100meg reliably regardless (especially in dense urban environments, or conversely old rural homes with very thick walls).
Keep in mind BT is starting an aggressive Gfast rollout and has a slow and steady FTTH program also running. Personally I don't think it's worth the UK govt spending £30bn+ on FTTH as I believe the commercial sector will get there, especially when FTTC is so widespread.
Wifi struggles hard in British buildings but the difference between 80/20 and 1gbps is huge: worry free multiple streaming or uploads or anything involving more than one person or even 4k streaming for one person
The upload does matter with everyone uploading videos and high resolution pics plus game streaming. It also helps a ton if you have the odd 200GB genome you need to archive somewhere :)
Ok, I don't know if this use case justifies many billions spend on it from government funds. Netflix's top 4K stream uses 25mbit/sec. How many households have multiple 4K TVs in use at once?
...How many families with kids streaming 2 different shows to their ipads/phones/laptops do you know? + Parents streaming video? Maybe one of them streaming a game on twitch?
It adds up. Copper is far less reliable at distance than fiber (the amount of people able to get 80mbps is < 10%).
And government is totally incentivized to spend money on a natural monopoly with an immense RoI. Rural areas are basically disconnected from high end internet activities. If you build a fast national network, it will pay off.
And for the record, the cost to full fiber the UK is less than the government plans to spend on HS2, a single rail link between birmingham and london.
I know coworking spaces that operate with around 100 people on 100/100 internet with little problem.
My grandmas old village in probably the most rural area of NW england can get 80/20mbit broadband (very close to cabinet). If you genuinely think that uncapped 80mbit/sec cuts you off, I don't really understand what you're saying.
HS2 is a very important project and I would much rather that be funded than spending billions on slightly faster internet.
That was in my first post: The govt. should pay, or at least subsidise, as it's a national infrastructure investment. The UK is one of the world's leading tech nations, mostly due to London and the research universities, but the broadband is rubbish. If the govt. is prepared to write what looks like a blank cheque for HS2, why not throw a few billion pounds at FTTH?
There are better uses of tax money than upgrading grans line to FTTH when all she uses it for is to call her daughter and family on the phone.
and why does consumer bb speeds effect th UK's status as a leading tech nation - not treating engineers and scientists as second class citizens would do far more.
I live in Zone 1 (less than 1/2 mile from an exchange) and still don't have fibre, and get less than 300kbps in the evenings with BT some days (max quoted, 16Mb). Fibre isn't even planned for our cabinet yet, so it strikes me as surprising we're at 95% coverage.
I guess the problem is that so few people live in the city that it compares for BT to a small village. Businesses usually will have dedicated lines so it's not really worth going after the few people living there (esp as many use it as a second home which shortens average contract duration).
I'm aware of that, but most parts of Zone 1 are still not very densely populated. And where they do, more apartments tend to be empty or only used for a few days per week. Residential areas in WC and EC postcodes can appear like a ghost town on some days.
That is true. And I can see the argument that the population density doesn't really make up for the awkwardness of the territory, especially in older streets with peculiar exchange configurations.
Yes, also keep in mind that central london boroughs/tfl hate allowing roadworks as they want to keep congestion down, which makes it even more a pain in the ass, AFIAK they charge pretty ridiculous rates per day per m^2 you block the road Especially if you have complex duct blockages that can take many days to fix.
There is a plan, Openreach are either building new cabinets or doing full FTTP. The problem in Central London is that there is often very few residential connections to justify it (though I agree that a lot of people could switch from expensive leased lines if it was available).
I'm also in London on the edge of Zone 1, so far unable to get FTTC, living in a building not served by Hyperoptic, on a street not served by Virgin Media, in a flat with a poor mobile signal.
This sort of conversation can get a bit depressing.
In contrast, I have Virgin in London and it's pretty astonishingly good. Solid 200Mbps+ down even at peak times, uplink is limited but that's not much of a concern for a residential plan, and it costs £40 a month.
> the NZ govt. forcibly separated our telecom monopoly provider into a retail and a wholesale company, then they put a whole bunch of money up for competitive tender to build a national fibre network
Isn’t that effectively what happened with BT and Openreach? In a large town or city you are usually ok, but any further out you have a lack of choice and pretty poor (for 2018) speeds.
In practice they operate separately, and IME BT's ISP side takes this seriously.
Really, OpenReach is the old Postmaster General's department, after a privatisation and a couple of renames. Except they now take three weeks instead of six months. The engineers are great, too - people who see their job as keeping things working.
well that is because Virgin's plant is mostly based around buying up cable tv companies on the cheap. so their infrastructure is really a cable tv companies and no an isp/telco
I've used Virgin broadband for 15+ years and (minus a couple of very short outages) it has been rock solid. Contrast this with BT, who apparently can't offer anything better than basic adsl in my street, despite my living about 100m from a large BT exchange.
I have to be honest, I think the experience that BT were clear and communicative would not be a typical experience, and EE themselves admitted their customer service just completely fell apart last year.
The split between Openreach and ISPs in the UK has been very helpful for increasing competition in the UK and avoiding the malaise of regional monopolies the US found itself in, but the one time it presents clear issues is when something goes wrong with the line. The ISP has very limited diagnostic options, and a customer cannot speak to Openreach directly despite the fact it's their cabling that's usually at fault. So you're stuck playing Chinese Whispers with the engineers looking at the problem and offshore support, normally with the consequences you'd expect. And the perverse situation where ISPs have to tell customers they will be charged several hundred quid for a visit if the Openreach engineer decides that the ISP supplied router is at fault rather than the line (O2 quoted that line at me once when I was looking out of the window while a bunch of roadworkers looked on at the steamshovel they had just wrecked putting it through a main power line and all our fibre. I was fairly confident the router was fine...).
I had a terrible experience with Sky recently, when my line started to fail and drop intermittently, something that has happened multiple times before to me in this property, likely due to weather damage to the poll. Sky tried to charge me £50 for an Openreach engineer visit despite them not being charged by Openreach for this. Meanwhile they're trying to charge me for an ISP service they're not providing. I told them to sod off in no uncertain terms.
Installs that involve new constuction are always tricky to be honest - there are a lot of moving parts and getting access can be tricky.
The real problem with VM is their massive overselling problem. It is on a UBR by UBR basis, some UBRs are totally fine and have enough capacity but some are chronically overloaded. I am luckily enough to be on Hyperoptic now but before it was a complete cointoss whether at peak times the 150meg or whatever would go to 1-2mbit/sec with massive ping and jitter making anything interactive (even SSH) impossible.
At one point they had 300mbit/sec of downstream capacity and 50mbit/sec of upstream capacity for 100s if not 1000s of users (who could be provisioned at 150mbit/sec). So two users could knock out the entire UBR.
I believe DOCSIS 3.1 will resolve this somewhat as it will allow far more capacity, but really VM needs to look at much more aggressive UBR segmentation which is expensive. Or switch entirely to FTTx (which they are doing for some new builds using GPON), but again, very expensive and many users won't notice/pay more for the additional quality.
OTOH BT FTTx is super reliable in my experience, with no contention issues at all (they have at most 288 users on 10gigE backhaul). I would much prefer a 80/20 BT line vs 300/10 on VM simply for the reliability of speeds.
I've been with VM for a few years as well. In many areas they have far and away the best speeds [0], but the service seems to randomly drop every now and then, and the support is hit and miss at best.
In fact, you can tell whether a customer support call is going to be "hit" or "miss" almost instantly. Half the time you get a helpful, competent agent who will confirm that you can take your contract with you as you move home and even looks up whether they can give you a better deal; the other half you get an outsourced agent who tells you that moving house requires signing up to a completely new year-long contract.
The billing also leaves a lot to be desired. At one point I got so angry with them billing me way above the agreed amount that I guessed the CEO's work email and sent him a personal message outlining my frustrations. The issue got solved within a week of doing that!
> In many areas they have far and away the best speeds [0]
As always with cable, that depends on the time of day. I was never able to get anywhere close the maximum speed between 5-10pm Mon-Fri and all-day on weekends. Download speed was great in the early morning but that doesn't help because it's not the time I usually use the internet a lot. I switched back to BT, speed is lower (60-70mbit, although 56mbit were promised) but fairly constant.
I've got sympathy – there's nothing worse than this sort of terrible customer service and lack of communication. It's a shame, because the network itself is pretty good.
Why do large companies have such trouble scaling customer support? It's exactly the same whenever I have to interact with any organisation like this – no callbacks that they promised, missed appointments, work not done on schedule, that kind of thing. It's got to the point where I will actively avoid interacting with any service provider unless it's totally unavoidable.
(There are some exceptions – like my energy company Ecotricity have a phone line with a person on it when you call. It's pretty boss.)
I wrote a blog post[0] about the situation in the UK a while ago.
The British broadband system is quite crappy in general, especially so if you're on ADSL, but at least it's not the same as America or Canada which is significantly worse.
Although if you have the money for it I'd recommend springing for Andrews and Arnold (aaisp.net.uk).. or if you're near Stratford I'd recommend Hyperoptic, they were able to sell a very, very, stable symmetric 1G connection using the fibers left behind after the Olympics.
EDIT: Reading my blog post with fresh eyes has shown me that I did not provide my raw data, and I did not elude to the fact that I had been in constant contact with BT trying to get the line fixed. I should have mentioned this as it mirrors TFA's experience with virgin insofar as they were non-responsive and when on-site looked around and did very little with small excuses about access to equipment/cabs.
So I'm not the only poor sod who got shafted by Virgin Media... my example is probably even worse...
VM send their surveyor to assess my flat. "It's quite high, but if you manage to drill the holes yourself and get an RG59 coax cable down to the ground level then our team will be able to connect you". (The cabinet is 20 yards from the said touchdown point). I spend money getting contractors to do the walls/roof and buying a long cable.
Long story short, they simply cancel my request. Despite telling me what to do, and what to buy. And their drone just kept repeating on the phone "it was canceled. You can't complain to anyone, there is no other department".
Suffice to say, I'm getting angry even as I write this. Absolutely appalling company. Never buying anything from them, although that 200MBit service had its appeal... they could offer me 2Gbit for free now, I would refuse.
Internet situation in the UK is a very, very sad story... I am thinking of getting a microwave internet for my neighbourhood, but all the info so far points to it being a Sisyphean task
The absolutely worst thing about Virgin, in my opinion is that the passwords on their e-mail accounts are limited to no more than 8 characters. No special characters, no spaces etc.
Form many people control of e-mail represents the final key to their digital kingdom. I'm awaiting the inevitable news story.
Other than that, the service has had about 2 sub-30 minute outages in the last 10 years.
I have Zen Internet. It is a little bit more expensive than competitors such as BT and TalkTalk, but the customer service is so much better! It’s all in-house, run from their office in the U.K.
The Fritzbox! router is fast, reliable, has great WiFi and looks like a spaceship!
I recently left Virgin Media because their pricing was going up and up and just not competitive. I later found out they were charging me for a set top box that I never asked for but installed anyway and I didn't know it was de-bundled when I downgraded to freeview only services. They deliberately obfuscate the bill so you don't notice and had the cheek to put it up even more when the phone number was taken over by the new provider without telling or informing me.
And the Tivo box they give you is the most infuriating piece of rubbish I've ever used. Such a depressing state of TV experience.
For me, it's VM or nothing. The maximum speed I can get for broadband in my area (South Birmingham) is about 4mbps. But I get 200mbps with Virgin for not much more than the ADSL equivilent.
I _always_ get the advertised speed, and sometimes more.
I've not had any issues with them in 10 years, but it'd be nice to have a bit of competition!
This sounds like an immensely better experience than anything in the U.S.A. that doesn't just work. I'm still jealous that you can just switch to another ISP.
I've got Virgin in London and it's a piece of shit compared to what I had in NZ. In theory, I have 200mb down, but the uplink is bullshit because they convert to cable for some unknown reason. I also rarely see the performance that a 200mb connection should have. In NZ I had, in the first days of fibre, 30 down 10 up. It was always this speed, the fibre terminated at my house and was more responsive and reliable than what I have now in the UK.
Here, the govt keeps kicking around, getting conned by the industry as they promsie to upgade things, to be better. It's such a joke.
For reference these are real plans, with reliable speeds, with FTTH: https://imgur.com/a/8JeV7 (divide amount by 2 for £, take off 30%ish for USD)