Broadband and phoneline costs?

[longers]

I've been on 12 month contracts with BT for interweb and phoneline and they're nearly up for renewal. I'll be paying in the region of £27 per month all in with free evening and weekend calls.

Is this a reasonable deal or should I be looking elsewhere and if so, any recommendations please?

It's not been worth looking before now as there's a £7.50 per month early redemption charge for each service.

Thanks.

 

[marinyork]

12 month contracts as in plural? You shouldn't be signing 12 month contracts repeatedly, first year or whatever and that's it.

What are you getting for your broadband? If it's reasonably fast that's absolutely fine price wise.

 

[longers]

Yes, they are rolling contracts but the time for early get out is calculated from the date it was first started. One or the other seems to get cheaper each time.

The speed is 54 Mbps. No idea if that's good or bad but I don't download much, just mainly surf.

 

[graham56]

54 mbs that's brilliant, all we get is 47kbs ffs.BT spouting on about this new Infinity service, what they really should be doing is updating all of their old exchanges. But will they? Well i'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
Rant over

 

[ThePainInSpain]

Ha ha this thread is going to make me laugh, reading all you lot banging on about broadband speeds.

I live in the campo (country) about 15km inland from Malaga. The only internet connection we can get is a wireless connection, I get 1Mb (on a good day) and for that privilege pay €33 per month (approx £30). For another €9.95 per month we could have a phone that don't work.
If we want a landline then we can have one provided we pay for 400m of cableing plus how ever many post s that needs. And then there's no guarantee of line. So we use skype (when it works) or for local calls the mobile. Which is pay as you go and costs a fortune, when I tried to transfer to contract Telephonica (the monopoly gangsters) wanted a deposit of €150 (despite having had the same number with them for 10 years).
Why don't we change to another provider, easier said than done.
You think it's 'rip-off' Britain, you ain't seen nothin' till you have to deal with the utilities over here.

 

[Chutzpah]

Yes, they are rolling contracts but the time for early get out is calculated from the date it was first started. One or the other seems to get cheaper each time.

The speed is 54 Mbps. No idea if that's good or bad but I don't download much, just mainly surf.

Erm... I don't mean to be rude but are you sure that's your speed? That sounds more like what your wireless router COULD do, but BT broadband is barely anything ever near that (i.e. you're lucky to be in the double figures). And definitely not at that price point.

For avoidance of doubt, head to http://www.speedtest.net and run the test to see (for best results run it a couple of times at different times of the day).

In terms of your broadband service you can pretty much always do better than BT. There are numerous technical reasons that I can go into if you like (I work in this field) but fundamentally with providers like BT you are probably sharing your connection with quite a few other people. As you can only shove a finite amount of data down one pipe, this means there's less coming your way.

Give Be Broadband a look. Disclaimer - I know I said I work in this field, but I don't work for them (or with them in anyway). But I do use them for my home services.

 

[Chutzpah]

54 mbs that's brilliant, all we get is 47kbs ffs.BT spouting on about this new Infinity service, what they really should be doing is updating all of their old exchanges. But will they? Well i'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
Rant over

Part of your problem here is the way BT is split up. In a way it's easier to think of them as a couple of separate companies. Open Reach maintain all the wiring between your house and the exchange.

BT Retail (the people you pay for your broadband services etc.) merely send your services along that wire.

For BT Infinity to work, the dodgy copper wiring that serves your house is ripped up from the exchange to the cabinet (the green thing you see kids loitering on) and replace it with a fibre optic cable. This is great for sending data around the place, but when you consider that you can have 10,000+ homes on a local exchange, and hundreds of street cabinets, you can see that the costs are going to get pretty high pretty quickly.

BT Retail have no real direct bearing on 'making' Open Reach do this. They will need to give that division the cash to perform the work. Where's that cash coming from?

On top of this, fibre isn't the be all and end all. If it went all the way to your house it would be, but it won't. It goes to your local cabinet, and from then on you still have the dodgy old copper that was installed when your house was built/added to the phone network.

So you can still be affected by distance of the wire between the cabinet to your house, quality of the wire, outside interference etc. etc. If you look closely at the BT Infinity literature you'll see the words "up to" 40mb. That's because until they switch you on they won't know for sure what speeds you can achieve. If the line between the cabinet and your house was crap before the upgrade, it will still be a crap internet service. Just the way these things work.

Now Asia... they have it right... just went straight to fibre. Must be bliss.

 

[potsy]

Mmmm I assumed I was getting the same Longers 54mb/s as that's what the little icon at the bottom of the screen says.
Just done the above test and it comes out as 14.87mb/s is this slow?
Oh and this is with Virgin on a package with TV and Phoneline.

 

[Chutzpah]

14mb isn't slow - compared to most people you're flying!

Cable can be a bit of a mixed bag though. You might find at popular times of the day your speed slows considerably (as others use the service), and if you use a lot of data in a small period Virgin are likely to actively slow your connection down.

The icon in the bottom right is just pretty much saying what data transfer you could achieve between your network card and your router. But on most home broadband services you'll never get anywhere near to touching this.

(Incidentally I'm trying not to use complicated words here, it's one of my bug bears when people are trying to explain things to others. But even I have to admit to writing 'PCP' in an earlier post rather than the bog standard 'street cabinet' before I noticed and changed it. So if anything I'm saying needs more explanation, just ask)

 

[Chutzpah]

Ha ha this thread is going to make me laugh, reading all you lot banging on about broadband speeds.

I live in the campo (country) about 15km inland from Malaga. The only internet connection we can get is a wireless connection, I get 1Mb (on a good day) and for that privilege pay €33 per month (approx £30). For another €9.95 per month we could have a phone that don't work.
If we want a landline then we can have one provided we pay for 400m of cableing plus how ever many post s that needs. And then there's no guarantee of line. So we use skype (when it works) or for local calls the mobile. Which is pay as you go and costs a fortune, when I tried to transfer to contract Telephonica (the monopoly gangsters) wanted a deposit of €150 (despite having had the same number with them for 10 years).
Why don't we change to another provider, easier said than done.
You think it's 'rip-off' Britain, you ain't seen nothin' till you have to deal with the utilities over here.

My mother-in-law and her partner are moving to Portugal soon, once they have finished renovating their property out there. They are finding pretty much the same thing as you.

 

[Fnaar]

For avoidance of doubt, head to http://www.speedtest.net and run the test to see (for best results run it a couple of times at different times of the day).

Ha h ! Just did the test (and another one I googled) ... both came out as 0.8ish for download and 0.6ish for upload

Which is obviously pants compared to other speeds here!
BUT... at the time, in another tab, I was watching live BBC Chilean miner coverage, my daughter had spotify going on a laptop, and I had an open connection to my work email... all working fine too! Would having all this going affect your speed?

I notice sometimes if I'm watching Beeb iPlayer it lags a bit, and very occasionally with youtube...

 

[Keith Oates]

Part of your problem here is the way BT is split up. In a way it's easier to think of them as a couple of separate companies. Open Reach maintain all the wiring between your house and the exchange.

BT Retail (the people you pay for your broadband services etc.) merely send your services along that wire.

For BT Infinity to work, the dodgy copper wiring that serves your house is ripped up from the exchange to the cabinet (the green thing you see kids loitering on) and replace it with a fibre optic cable. This is great for sending data around the place, but when you consider that you can have 10,000+ homes on a local exchange, and hundreds of street cabinets, you can see that the costs are going to get pretty high pretty quickly.

BT Retail have no real direct bearing on 'making' Open Reach do this. They will need to give that division the cash to perform the work. Where's that cash coming from?

On top of this, fibre isn't the be all and end all. If it went all the way to your house it would be, but it won't. It goes to your local cabinet, and from then on you still have the dodgy old copper that was installed when your house was built/added to the phone network.

So you can still be affected by distance of the wire between the cabinet to your house, quality of the wire, outside interference etc. etc. If you look closely at the BT Infinity literature you'll see the words "up to" 40mb. That's because until they switch you on they won't know for sure what speeds you can achieve. If the line between the cabinet and your house was crap before the upgrade, it will still be a crap internet service. Just the way these things work.

Now Asia... they have it right... just went straight to fibre. Must be bliss.

I can't speak for all of Asia but China, Vietnam and The Philippines is far from being bliss. Hong Kong is usually better than the other places out here.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[ColinJ]

Just done the above test and it comes out as 14.87mb/s is this slow?

I'm currently getting 6.14 Mb/s download, 0.34 Mb/s upload but it is 00:15 when few people are going to be online in these 'ere parts so I won't be sharing the bandwidth with so many others. I'm sure it is slower than that during the day. I'll check it again at lunchtime tomorrow.

 

[potsy]

I'm currently getting 6.14 Mb/s download, 0.34 Mb/s upload but it is 00:15 when few people are going to be online in these 'ere parts so I won't be sharing the bandwidth with so many others. I'm sure it is slower than that during the day. I'll check it again at lunchtime tomorrow.

17.32 now with 0.45 upload woo hoo

I could do this all night

 

[ColinJ]

17.32 now with 0.45 upload woo hoo

I could do this all night

I couldn't - I'm going to watch TV for half an hour then I'm going to bed!