Is it simple to move back from fibre optic to ordinary broadband?

archieboy

I currently have BT fibre optic but am very tempted to move and take up the Sky offer of free broadband plus line rental for 12 months or at least try to get a better deal with BT because of their recent price increases.

I realise that BT wouldn't offer anything like the Sky deal on the fibre optic that I'm on at present but are they likely to give me a fairly comparable offer if I went back to 'ordinary' broadband?

Would it be easy to go back to ordinary broadband or would I need work done on my telephone socket as I think something was done there when their engineer came to put me on fibre optic.

Cornucopia

You need to check your contract first. Is your lock-in period expired?

Yes - there are changes that need to be made. Definitely in the street cabinet, and probably in your home, too.

Best deal on Fibre is probably TalkTalk, like I've got. (13.50pm)

kwikbreaks

There is no need for the phone socket in your home to be changed as Openreach just fit a filtered faceplate which will also work with ADSL.

There is a chance that they may want the FTTC modem back assuming you had one.

LazyTyper

kwikbreaks wrote: »

There is a chance that they may want the FTTC modem back assuming you had one.

Quite unlikely. I have not heard of anyone being asked to return the modem.

Openreach will stop providing this sometime next year and FTTC will become complete self-install anyway (just like how standard broadband was rolled out 10 years ago...).

nickcc

I changed from BT infinity to sky non fibre last year. Nothing needed in the house except plugging the new sky modem in, I plugged into the landline socket first but found using the socket that supplied fibre was considerably faster. Original infinity gave me 38mbps and Sky non fibre gives me 16mbps, both download speeds. The big loss in speed was uploading where infinity gave me 6mbps but Sky non fibre only gives me 1.2mbps. I live about half mile from the exchange. Still have the BT modem which is now outdated anyway.

archieboy

Cornucopia wrote: »

You need to check your contract first. Is your lock-in period expired?

Yes - there are changes that need to be made. Definitely in the street cabinet, and probably in your home, too.

Best deal on Fibre is probably TalkTalk, like I've got. (13.50pm)

My contract period isn't up yet but with the recently announced BT increases I understand that I can cancel contract with no penalty.

archieboy

nickcc wrote: »

I changed from BT infinity to sky non fibre last year. Nothing needed in the house except plugging the new sky modem in, I plugged into the landline socket first but found using the socket that supplied fibre was considerably faster. Original infinity gave me 38mbps and Sky non fibre gives me 16mbps, both download speeds. The big loss in speed was uploading where infinity gave me 6mbps but Sky non fibre only gives me 1.2mbps. I live about half mile from the exchange. Still have the BT modem which is now outdated anyway.

That's useful to know. The one thing that does worry me is that all our neighbours seem to have BT and say it is because the 'signal' is better, so I'm not sure if Sky wouldn't be as good and we'd have probems. I know you won't be able to advise on this with living near to your exchange. We are about 2 miles away.

SeduLOUs

nickcc wrote: »

The big loss in speed was uploading where infinity gave me 6mbps but Sky non fibre only gives me 1.2mbps.

After months of complaining to Sky about the same upload speeds causing problems with gaming we finally discovered from a tech support agent that Sky Broadband upload speeds are capped at this level, and won't go higher even if your line is capable.

nickcc

SeduLOUs wrote: »

After months of complaining to Sky about the same upload speeds causing problems with gaming we finally discovered from a tech support agent that Sky Broadband upload speeds are capped at this level, and won't go higher even if your line is capable.

I thought that was the case as speed checks over the last twelve months show slightly different download speeds whilst upload speeds are always the same.

kwikbreaks

archieboy wrote: »

all our neighbours seem to have BT and say it is because the 'signal' is better

If they are talking about the ADSL signal that's pretty much nonsense as the copper part of the circuit which governs the ADSL performance is identical. Sky may impose a higher noise margin to reduce the chance of dropouts (and so calls to support) - I note someone has said that they do cap the upload - and that would marginally reduce the top speed.

It may be that there is more congestion on the Sky network than BT's although historically that wasn't so.

It may be that the BT HomeHub provides a better WiFi signal as many seem unable to treat two very different technologies individually and just lump the ADSL performance and WiFi performance together.

The one thing that is certain is that you'll pay more for BT broadband than Sky (certainly if you have their TV product) regardless of whether they deliver a better experience.