Switch Broadband ensure speed maintained 10 May at 1:31PM in Phones & TV 6 replies 82 views

BathMoney

Have pretty good broadband speeds at present with Sky:
Download Speed: 53.6Mbps
Upload Speed: 18.4Mbps
I live in a small village and use my home broadband for business use so essential to maintain speed and efficiency if I switch.
What's the best way to ensure this, don't want to switch and get locked into a contract with a slow provider.

zx81

Make sure you buy a comparable service and check the minimum guaranteed speed.

JJ_Egan

You need a business service for  service level agreements .

Speed likely to be the same with Sky , BT , Zen or A&A .

iniltous

As already suggested , if you simply replace Sky with someone else’s using the same Openreach FTTC product , then the speed will be similar, if not identical, the  only  real ‘ change’ from the customer’s perspective being the router the new ISP provides ( which could be better, or worse or the same than the Sky one ) some will say they get much better or much worse , but if that’s the case there is a fault rather than anything else, this applies to the ‘sync’ speed, the throughput speed may vary between providers , so at peak times you may slow down a little if that particular ISP has skimped on backhaul bandwidth, chances are the more of a budget supplier the more they may need to cut costs to keep the price low and that’s an obvious place to do it.
If you are getting 53Mb that’s Sky upper FTTC tier ( they sell upto 40Mb and upto 80Mb ) whereas BT Fibre 1  tier is 55Mb and Fibre 2 , 80 Mb...if the best your line will do is 53Mb, you may well get the same speed with another providers lower tier ( 55Mb ) which may be cheaper than Skys upper tier 80Mb product that you are currently on, but if you go for a lower tier from an ISP that only offers 40 or 80, obviously you would only get 40 Mb...if upload speed is important you may want to consider that as well as download speed , only the 80Mb has 20Mb upload, the others ( 40 and 55 ) are upto 10 Mb upload

brewerdave

Also bear in mind that some FTTC cabinets are limited in size/no. of connections, so if you try to switch you MAY find that someone else who has been waiting, pinches your connection such that a new supplier cannot get you back on FTTC straight away. Certainly happening round my area and as BT Openreach are now pushing full FTTP, little chance of FTTC expansion.

BathMoney

brewerdave said:

Also bear in mind that some FTTC cabinets are limited in size/no. of connections, so if you try to switch you MAY find that someone else who has been waiting, pinches your connection such that a new supplier cannot get you back on FTTC straight away. Certainly happening round my area and as BT Openreach are now pushing full FTTP, little chance of FTTC expansion.

Sounds nasty, I think I will just stick where I am in that case. 

matelodave

TBH if you are getting good speeds at the moment then I'd probably stay where I am.

As said above there is always the possbility that you may end up with problems during or after the transition and there would be no easy way to get back to where your were. Although most other providers will be using the Openreach infrastructure as do SKY there is the hiccup between the new provider and Sky because it''s Openreach that does the transfer. I's not unheard of  for a problem to happen especially as Brewdave suggests that a third ISP/subscriber get's in the way during the transfer process. See my experience below

A couple of years ago we were trasnferring from SKY to BT and they managed to get it wrong. We were diconnected from SKY on the appointed day, but not reconnected to BT and lost broadband for four weeks and phone service for six (we almost lost our phone numer as well  - we managed with a 4G mifi solution - initally using the mobile phone as a hotspot until it was sorted out (BT credited me with the cost of a mifi unit) but it was extremely annoying and took a lot of too-ing and fro-ing to get it soretd out.

And just to add insult to injury the water company dug up the cable two weeks later and it took another four weeks to get it repaired (good job we had the mifi unit)