A housekeeping note and a request for suggestions, folks.
We’ve now moved house from beautiful Marlow to equally lovely Ascot. Home of the world famous race course (300 years old this year I think).
I have a greenfield house to play with so I would welcome your connectivity suggestions.
There’s nothing installed at the moment and I’ve got a bit of time before I need to actually get something active.
There’s probably a BT connection in the house.
The area supports BT Infinity. (There’s no Virgin Media fibre broadband in the area.)
So my question to you is:
What would you do for connectivity?
I’ve had excellent experience with Be Unlimited. I was thinking about using them again.
I’m drawn to BT Infinity — the BT.com site reckons I’ll get 34mb down and 8mb up. But I don’t really fancy being lumped in with the consumers so I was considering buying the BT Infinity Business option that includes some kind of prioritisation.
Orrrr there’s always a leased line. Perhaps that’s stupid. How much do these things cost nowadays?
What do you suggest?
Ewan,
I’ve used Zen Internet for broadband for years (delivered via BT line). The customer service is excellent, in my experience. They can deliver FTTC (via BT). I’m about to take them up on their offer. The only snag is that you get to pay the £70 installation charge levied by BT and you have to have an appropriate router.to connect to the BT Openreach vdsl Modem. The other reason that I want to stick with Zen is that I can keep my current fixed IP (I have servers here).
Cheers,
Derek
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Gazing back through the mists to my time with BT Business, contention rates in the exchange were around 50:1 for consumer, and 20:1 for business. Critically it’s down to how full the cabinet you get hooked up to is. Infinity looks like a good option as the fibre between the cabinet and the exchange bypasses the usual bottleneck there. It’s then a matter of how many people take it up in the 500m or so radius from the cabinet. If the whole area is greenfield, then you can cross your fingers that the neighbours go for standard DSL and you pretty much get the cabinet’s DSL switch to yourself. Have a couple of colleagues who’ve taken it up here in Brighton and are very happy with it. Then again, the contention problems on both Virgin and BT round here are atrocious.
Given that you’ll get the 8Mb up, that’s healthy enough for throwing content at the video server without making a cup of tea every time you send. A 20Mb symmetrical leased line would fly, but the costs on those are still obscene in this country…
I’ll look into that Derek, thank you!
I’d be happy with £100/month ‘professional’ internet but I suspect that’d only get me, what, 64k? 😉
I think it might be Infinity (business) then…
€99 per month will get you a business grade 50Mb fibre connection to your house in France…
I would second Zen – a friend has just had their fixed line solution put into a school in our area and can not praise them enough. Their first line support were able to help him with his Cisco router issues on his line in a matter of minutes. If i was using BT i would be with them in a hearbeat.
Hey,
BT Infinity on the consumer side isn’t too bad (they do traffic shaping, but then being able to continuously download at 40Mb/s can cost BT a LOT of cash in terms of peering costs), running normal web stuff works well. The Business service will be lower contended and they’ll not slow the connection down even in peak hours, however I’d definitely pay the extra £5 pm for the ‘unlimited’ service (standard business is limited to 100GB per month).
You could go through a BT reseller, like Zen or Andrews and Arnold (though they pre-charge for fixed usage and a higher rate if you go above that), but then they do minimal stuff to your packets and also can offer things like static IP (or IP ranges) so you can run VoIP/web servers etc.
An Ethernet connection (probably 25Mb/s synchronous) I’d imagine will cost around £2500 to install and around £6K per year (over a 3 year contract) – you may get higher or lower speeds, depends if the supplier has fibre near you – if they don’t they’ll generally buy from BT anyway … though they’ll need to install a ‘tail’ into your premises which means digging from the nearest fibre node to you (might be a BT exchange or other building). Also assume a minimum of 3 months from order to install …
Steve
Hugely comprehensive Steve, thank you!