I haven’t looked into it, but I’d suspect similar to the differences between BT and Plusnet, which has its own segregated infrastructure both within BTs backhaul and where the last mile line terminates. Plusnet tends to suffer from less congestion than BT for that reason, so there’s fewer slowdowns. Plusnet also has different traffic shaping, management, and throttling policies to BT.
Based on my friends experience, I can only assume its the same sort of deal there. On the customer facing side of the question, the packages were identical in all but price. I believe EE try to restrict certain things that come as standard with BT to sell as an add on too.
The article you’ve linked to is just discussing backhaul infrastructure (what gets you from your local exchange to your ISP). EE (before they were EE) among others used to have the own. Some still do, like Sky, Zen and TalkTalk, just not everywhere. Almost all ISPs will now use either BT or TalkTalk for this component of their service, but they’ll have different arrangements in place that will impact things like throughput, congestion, and QoS. Some sharing a splice with other ISPs and some having their own dedicated use.
It’s basically the same price that I currently pay for Virgin, but with no mid contract price rise. Doesn’t come with the £100 cashback that Voda/Sky do, but feels like it could be a good choice .
And I don’t have to wait till April so won’t have to pay Virgin any extra post contract expirty.
Yes, quite. The main reasons I’m with A&A are their network, their completely unfiltered and unshaped connection to the internet with your own public IP addresses (no NAT!), their support (all of whom are well-versed in networking/Windows/Mac/Linux) and how their service caters for highly technical people and their requirements.
I also like the ability to have technical discussions with their CEO (Adrian), too. I remember in the early days of their FireBrick router, I had an issue with its DHCP server allocating IP addresses to my Sky box. I spent a morning and early afternoon in constant communication with Adrian as he produced a series of Alpha releases of the FireBrick’s OS, while I sent back Wireshark captures until we had it working properly.
Exact same reasons I’m with iDNET. I’m yet to experience any slowdowns on my Gigabit FTTP connection, and they are well peered.
As @N26throwaway quite rightly pointed out, Openreach and others only handle the last mile. They hand the connection over to the ISP once it reaches one of their facilities.
The ISPs own equipment handles everything else. If your ISP has an oversold, saturated network with poor peering, your experience will suffer.
You really do get what you pay for, in the case of iDNET, I’m paying £55 per month for 1Gbit. This includes a static IP and decent customer service provided by people that actually understand networking.
3 Likes
andrew_fishy
(Biggest horse fanatic in Leeds)
1314
It’s pretty much the same with Yayzi, £35 a month, very small team, everyone is very knowledgeable over there
I’m with Sky. I pay about £22/month (after vouchers and cashback) for 500Mb and it’s perfect. No slowdowns detected. IP has been static since I connected.
I don’t bother with the crappy router they provide at all, I’ve got my own Synology setup which does the job beautifully. Actually, it got me out of something of a pickle as Sky failed to send the equipment in time for my activation - I was able to just nip in, change a few settings and I was back online.
When my contract term is up I’ll be off somewhere else - whichever comparable Openreach based solution is competitive. I always circle back to Sky because it is the best of the bunch* in my experience, but I won’t pay more than I do for it because ultimately they’ll all do what I need them to. (VM’s networking in Nottm is horrendous, so I won’t be using them again until I see signs of improvement.)
*mainstream/mass-market ISPs, I’ll happily try one of the fancier outfits if they want to compete on price tho.
2 Likes
andrew_fishy
(Biggest horse fanatic in Leeds)
1317
Just got my usual Virgin Media end of contract email telling me what my new price is expected to be.
Going from £38 (after I started the ol’ cancellation process but was offered a decent price) all the way up to £82. I thought, I’m going to have to go through the whole 3 week period of pretending I want to leave before they offer me a good price.
I called, went through to retentions and it took a mere 5 minutes before they offered me £45 for Gig1.
Didn’t work for us last week so the Mrs has cancelled and best they would offer was £43 for M500 so taken out in my name with a Friends & Family discount and got M350 (which will get boosted to M500 due to Volt Benefits) for £24.49
Reset my phone earlier, thinking might fix Lloyds apple wallet; it didn’t.
Anyway, my internet works fine on everything such as tv etc, and iPhone works fine on mobile data, but when on my broadband (scancom EE sim) socials such as facebook, WhatsApp, insta and Reddit don’t seem to wanna work.
Everything else works fine over WiFi except on my phone with some services.
I’ve no VPN on the phone, it’s as new, speed tests come out 250/100 which is fine (5G N28).
Can’t think any reason why it’s being a
Update: Weirdly, just installed privado VPN and all back to normal. There were no pre installed VPNs otherwise.
Update update: all seems to be fine having switched VPN off
Do any adult sites load?
I dont know if the sancoms come with the mandatory filtering turned on, any sim you buy you have to disable the adult filtering as it was required a few years ago.
You could always install the Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Warp app and use it in DNS mode which may mitigate it without vpn, its good although I use NextDNS myself.
I am wondering if the phone is caching the dns results from the vpn then they expire possibly. Try the vpn fix then reboot the phone and see if its borked again.
It may be worth asking Sancom if filtering is on as well.
We had similar at work (for about £50/month) until a few months back when I managed to get Telcom to put in a dedicated fibre line for a reasonable price.
CityFibre had a manhole across the other side of the road, but they wouldn’t offer anything other than ethernet services, and that for a lot of money.
I only got Telcom by literally bothering everyone looking in a manhole in the vicinity of the shop.