Unthrottled fibre broadband

techno79

I'm in Milton Keynes area and my ADSL broadband connection has been quite dire despite trying many different ISPs over the years. Fibre (FTTC) is available in my area and I'm keen on giving this a go.

I want a service that will be unthrottled but also offer unlimited bandwidth (even if this is just during off-peak times).

The best package for a decent price I could find are those offered by ADSL24 (https://www.adsl24.co.uk). Their off-peak time starts from 8pm to 8am on Mon to Fri. This seems perfect as most of our house's usage is from 7pm on weekday evening and on weekends so we'll mostly be falling into their off-peak time period.

I believe our peak time usage could be within 15GB per month so we could go with their fibre 15 package for only £19.90 a month.

Does anyone know of any other ISPs that are worth considering?

Thanks very much

bod1467

Is Sky fibre not available to you?

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/SMBT says you have Sky LLU available, so their fibre may also be available?

techno79

bod1467 wrote: »

Is Sky fibre not available to you?

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/SMBT says you have Sky LLU available, so their fibre may also be available?

I've had quite poor experience in the past with Sky customer service so very reluctant to give them a go. My reluctance has been renewed recently when my dad signed up to them and had a world of pain when he needed to contact their customer service.

Despite this, I still had a look through their package details and noticed that they say they do not throttle the connection but this is only mentioned for their ADSL packages. Does this imply that they do throttle the fibre connections?

http://s18.postimage.org/wfk1klyuh/Sky_broadband_packages.jpg

Is this a sneaky Sky tactic to pull in more users?

Timalay

What about Plusnet? 250gb usage (unlimited between Midnight - 8am), Uk call centres (based in Yorkshire, and they seem to know what they are talking about imo) - £19.99 a month (£26.49 after 3 months if you live in a high cost area, check samknows).

techno79

Timalay wrote: »

What about Plusnet? 250gb usage (unlimited between Midnight - 8am), Uk call centres (based in Yorkshire, and they seem to know what they are talking about imo) - £19.99 a month (£26.49 after 3 months if you live in a high cost area, check samknows).

Thanks for the reply. I had already considered Plusnet but discounted them because they do some heavy traffic shaping which is a real downer. I've actually pulled the trigger on signing up with ADSL24 on their 30GB a month package. I think 30GB should be enough as we'll only have very light use during their peak times.

Thanks for everyone's reply

Timalay

techno79 wrote: »

Thanks for the reply. I had already considered Plusnet but discounted them because they do some heavy traffic shaping which is a real downer. I've actually pulled the trigger on signing up with ADSL24 on their 30GB a month package. I think 30GB should be enough as we'll only have very light use during their peak times.

Thanks for everyone's reply

Plusnet do a pro add-on for an extra £5 which cuts out traffic shaping.

VisionMan

techno79 wrote: »

I'm in Milton Keynes area and my ADSL broadband connection has been quite dire despite trying many different ISPs over the years. Fibre (FTTC) is available in my area and I'm keen on giving this a go.

I want a service that will be unthrottled but also offer unlimited bandwidth (even if this is just during off-peak times).

The best package for a decent price I could find are those offered by ADSL24 (https://www.adsl24.co.uk). Their off-peak time starts from 8pm to 8am on Mon to Fri. This seems perfect as most of our house's usage is from 7pm on weekday evening and on weekends so we'll mostly be falling into their off-peak time period.

I believe our peak time usage could be within 15GB per month so we could go with their fibre 15 package for only £19.90 a month.

Does anyone know of any other ISPs that are worth considering?

Thanks very much

Hi techno79,

I'm going to get slaughtered for saying this, but I don't care, because it's true.

Apart from P2P services, BT no longer traffic-manage their network. And I mean at all, at any time, ever. And this has been the case for quite some time.

jb66

a throttled virginmedia can still be faster than adsl

VisionMan

jb66 wrote: »

a throttled virginmedia can still be faster than adsl

Really? I didn't read it that way -

http://help.virginmedia.com/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURATION=1002&PARTITION_ID=1&TIMEZONE_OFFSET=&USERTYPE=0&VM_CUSTOMER_TYPE=Cable&CMD=VIEW_ARTICLE&ARTICLE_ID=2781

techno79

Timalay wrote: »

Plusnet do a pro add-on for an extra £5 which cuts out traffic shaping.

Not true. The pro-add on only gives you prioritised internet but it still appears to be traffic shaped. Browsing, email, streaming, downloading and peer to peer all are claimed to be "managed" which is another way to say they are still traffic shaped. Personally, I think Plusnet is really bad value for money on their fibre packages.

VisionMan wrote: »

Hi techno79,

I'm going to get slaughtered for saying this, but I don't care, because it's true.

Apart from P2P services, BT no longer traffic-manage their network. And I mean at all, at any time, ever. And this has been the case for quite some time.

BT's fibre packages (infinity) are also not as good as ADSL24 from what I can see. They are 18 month contracts vs 12 months. With regards to P2P traffic, unfortunately it seems that some ISPs who traffic shape P2P do this in such a way that it affects the traffic from other applications too. For example, Cloudberry Explorer which is used to manage files on Amazon S3 is incorrectly traffic shaped because it fits the same traffic profile as P2P (possibly using the same ports, not sure exactly how). I use this application a lot so having traffic shaping on this makes it next to useless for me.

Personally, I am totally against traffic shaping. As customers, we pay a certain amount of money for a certain bandwidth limit (sometimes this is unlimited). Why should companies decide how use that bandwidth limit? If I've paid for 30GB of data a month, then whether I blow that on downloading, emailing, P2P or streaming is somewhat irrelevant.

Anyway, the purpose of this thread was to see if there was an ISP more suited for me that ADSL24 but it seems like that isn't the case. Just as well really as I've already signed up to ADSL24 so hopefully will get some good service from them and looking forward to receiving totally unthrottled bandwidth (which is how it should be).