Your internet connection?

[adam thompson]

I have Optus NBN, so happy compared to what I used to have which was ADSL horrible haha, used to get around UP TO, key word up to 5 mb/s was more like 3 mb/s for ages and i had 3-5 months where it was so bad i could not use it , but now I have NBN which is up to 51 mb/s and its so much better, it is hard wired into back of both of my consoles and it works and is much much much faster and downloads are like an hour or two not 4-6 days haha ready for next generation too

 

[VBR]

Is superfast broadband, "not available in your area"? Well, it might be, read on...

I recently upgraded to superfast broadband & it went live today. For years, I was told that it wasn't available in my area. Then one day my neighbor told me that he had it. So, I typed his address into my ISP's broadband checker & he did indeed have it. I then contacted Open Reach & they said that there were two slots available for Fiber To The Cabinet, & out of my 12 neighbors only two of us were unconnected. For some reason our two slots were not connected, no idea as to why. However, it was an absolute nightmare to get Talk Talk to set it all up, as they had to send an engineer out to connect the FTTC. I had to go through 3 contract renewals over the phone, the first two didn't go through because their automated systems tell them that superfast broadband is 'not available in my area', the first time they didn't even let me know & left me hanging for days. The last one went through, although they were three days late on the live date. This has taken me a whole month to sort out. So, if your ISP is telling you that it's "not available in your area", maybe, just maybe, they're wrong & it actually is...





EDIT: speeds before were about 12Mbps download, 0.8mbps upload, & 22ms latency.

 

[Jump_Ace]

I upgraded to gig speed last month as I was up for renewal at Ziply (formerly Frontier, formerly Verizon) Fiber. With the wife and kids on their ipads I'm getting this:

Jerome

 

[VBR]

@Jump_Ace - That's some impressive speed. The only way to get speeds like that in the UK is with Virgin's Fiber To The Premises & that's definitely not connected to my property, although I did put myself on their waiting list...

 

[Barry R]

Had Virgin Media for years, 200MB download and roughly 20Mb Up. I cant knock it tbh... super reliable

 

[Sprite]

Advise needed.

As some may know I don't actually have a hardline connection to my home. We have the physical phone line ADSL/VDSL(FTTC) and my cousin who works for an Openreach contractor came and fitted me a master socket, but we still don't have an ISP or Modem/Router. Any advise from the UK peeps on good ISP (I'm looking at IDNet as they have been pretty good for my parents home) also any recommendations from anyone on here regarding Modem Router.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

I don't have much in the way of positive guidance, unfortunately. My parents are on BT, and haven't complained about it, so I'm assuming it's working well. Certainly, they were getting around 70Mb when I was last there. That's in a village, 1.3km from the exchange.

I've been hearing negative things about Vodafone, from a few people. There's a level of monkeying around to be done as they have backhaul issues from what I've been told. Customers connect to an access point, and sometimes have to manually change the access point they're connecting to. I have two colleagues who are a couple, and they have difficulty running simultaneous video calls.

 

[Dave A]

Advise needed.

As some may know I don't actually have a hardline connection to my home. We have the physical phone line ADSL/VDSL(FTTC) and my cousin who works for an Openreach contractor came and fitted me a master socket, but we still don't have an ISP or Modem/Router. Any advise from the UK peeps on good ISP (I'm looking at IDNet as they have been pretty good for my parents home) also any recommendations from anyone on here regarding Modem Router.

It depends what use and speeds you're looking for. Hyperoptic are a very competetive ISP twards the faster end, but thier coverage isn't great yet. Virgin Media can provide great consistent speeds generally, but the routers they provide aren't great in terms of range, so consider buying your own.

BT's routers can struggle with packet loss, so if you do a lot of video calling the quality might not be as consistently good as some other provers routers but the range is better than Virgin Medias routers.

If it's gaming you should be ok with the faster speeds, but if you can afford it, a decent 3rd party router is often much better that the one you get sent for free. The best one really depends on your budget though.

 

[Sprite]

@GilesGuthrie & @Dave A thanks for the info.

I’ve just looked at Hyperoptic and they seem reasonably priced for what they offer speed wise. However my area isn’t covered. We only just got Virgin to lay their lines last year.

I’m about 1.2 miles from my main exchange and the cabinet is just round the corner for BT & Virgin.

I’ve been looking at the TP Link Archer VR2800 with a small PoE 5 port switch. This way I can rout the TV/PS4/ATV/Amp/BD player via RJ45 and keep the WiFi clear for phones and MacBook.

The internet doesn’t need to be amazingly fast. Just a bit light internet, patch downloads for the PlayStation etc. Maybe some catch up TV for the missus and some YT and streaming (mainly single streams).

I personally do a lot of heavy streaming on my phone and I’m hitting about 200gig of data per month over my own phone. The missus is a lot less maybe 30gig.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

I would agree with the separate router, and also with using CAT5 where possible. I installed structured cabling into the house when we moved in, and it's been one of the best investments I made. The Sky boxes, NAS devices, and the primary PCs are all on wired connections. Ideally I'd like to build a second WiFi network to separate the non-Apple traffic, as the myriad Echos etc seem to reduce browsing performance on the iPhones. You can also install Pi Hole for secure DNS and traffic filtering, which I've done, and which the family loves.

So, I'm using a Draytek Vigor 2960 as a hardware firewall/router. I have a Raspberry Pi running as a DNS/DHCP server with Pi Hole for DNS filterning. And I have 3 Apple Airport Express access points. Local switching is all NetGear ProSafe Gigabit switches, which I generally sourced refurbished off the 'Bay. Next on my list is to replace the Airports with a WiFi 6 mesh setup, but that can wait a little bit I think

 

[Dave A]

@Sprite The TP Link Archer VR2800 should be more than enough for what you need it for, it's best to have as much as you can wired.

 

[Sprite]

@GilesGuthrie I was looking at the Mesh stuff to help cover the upstairs, however our house is pretty small so I suspect the Routers own reach will be enough.

Pi Hole sounds a nice solution, I know that the new Sony TVs run Android and have tons of adverts etc within the UI. Hopefully that might limit those. Thanks for the suggestion.

We actually don’t have a load of things connected at any one time so I’m hoping the WiFi can cope with our limited traffic and the wired stuff will help keep some form of stability where it’s needed.

Effectively it’s a NAS, MacBook, two iPhones, PS4 and occasional Nintendo Switch use. Currently they’re not connected to the net as we only use the Tethering function when we need to.

 

[Scaff]

While I currently get 350mbps over fibre, I just found out they will be laying gigabit canoeing in our street over the next few weeks.

Looks like a gigabit connection is in the cards before the years out.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Electrician's been here all morning and had pulled a gigabit cable to my shed. Oooooft. Beats the arse out of my dangly wireless aerial over a rafter.

 

[Scaff]

Electrician's been here all morning and had pulled a gigabit cable to my shed. Oooooft. Beats the arse out of my dangly wireless aerial over a rafter.

View attachment 997065

They are literally laying gigabit connections in my area as I post, just waiting to see who I need to sign up with to take advantage once it's here.

 

[TenEightyOne]

They are literally laying gigabit connections in my area as I post, just waiting to see who I need to sign up with to take advantage once it's here.

For us it was the first time in a BT area for a long time, so we went with the vanilla BT 900Mbps. Another fiver a month for all the call minutes we can use, fancy internet phone, we're quite happy. And my shed is bursting with data. Burstin', I tells ya.

 

[PzR Slim]

They are literally laying gigabit connections in my area as I post, just waiting to see who I need to sign up with to take advantage once it's here.

Is that City Fibre, Scaff? I had it installed about a month ago. Was around 10 weeks from them running the cables in along the street before it went live and then a two week wait for an install. Install done in about an hour, fibre cable from the telephone pole in the back lane to the eaves of the house down the wall and into the same location as the existing router was, and this is the result.

If it is City Fibre you can sign up on their website to be notified as soon as it goes live. The provider is Zen and it's £40 a month.

 

[Scaff]

Is that City Fibre, Scaff? I had it installed about a month ago. Was around 10 weeks from them running the cables in along the street before it went live and then a two week wait for an install. Install done in about an hour, fibre cable from the telephone pole in the back lane to the eaves of the house down the wall and into the same location as the existing router was, and this is the result.

If it is City Fibre you can sign up on their website to be notified as soon as it goes live. The provider is Zen and it's £40 a month.

Will have to check the letter we got, but I’m fairly sure that’s the one.

 

[BloodRaven]

 

[FPV MIC]

Australian internet, pffft what a joke!

My old 50mbps cable with speed boost set-up

And now with our new NBN 100mbps fibre to the curb connection.... at an additional $20 a month.😠

 

[PzR Slim]

Five months after having fibre installed and getting closer to 1 Gig.

 

[CodeRedR51]

 

[TonyJZX]

Unfortunately in this country most of us only have the copper at something like 25/5 or 50/20... pay a bit more and you get 100/40.

I have two premises, one is on 25 the other 50. And there's really not that much in it for most things. Both are unlimited.

About 15% have fibre. We will need to redo the other 85% down the line which begs the question why we replaced copper, admittedly 4 line rj11 phone line with more copper?

 

[TB]

Not a speed thing but...

I'm surprised the IT guys haven't asked me what's going on with my data usage.

 

[Smurfybug]

Got rid of Concast, absolutely love FiOs. Upload will easily hit 300 when wired.

 

[EVIL_GOD]

Bro i have a cable modem it gives a speed of 75 mbps but sometimes it feels like only 10 mbps.. i just get angry and feel that i could just throw it away..

 

[GBO Possum]

I'm on Verizon's FIOS, paying for 100/100. Ookla Speedtest tells me I'm getting 109.8 download, 118.1 upload.

(Measured using a ten year old MacBook Pro connected to the Verizon router via wifi, not ethernet cable)

Results at the link below...

https://www.speedtest.net/result/12800047005.png

 

[Jordan]

If you guys have been around for a while, you know I take my internet connections seriously. I started GTPlanet as a young teenager on a 56k dial-up connection and I'm still scarred by the experience today. I was so impressed by broadband when it finally became available to my family's home, I included "my cable modem" alongside "Jesus" and "cute girls" in a list of things I was thankful for in GTP's 2002 Thanksgiving thread... Oh, to be 15 again...

Anyway, in the 7,467 days (really) since I created this thread, I have waited patiently for the "holy grail" of a symmetrical gigabit fiber connection.

In a cruel twist of fate, despite the area where I live being serviced by two different telecom companies offering fiber services for years, thanks to obscure contract disputes and installation challenges my particular address could not be serviced... until now.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

How are you managing your internal infrastructure @Jordan?

I have a 200/20 connection right now, which regularly delivers well over the advertised bandwidth to wired devices. I have a Draytek router/firewall, which feeds into a 1Gb CAT5 wired network. WiFi is provided by three Apple AirPort Extremes, each of which is connected to the wired network. Handoff between the AirPorts is fantastic.

I'm regularly seeing 220-230Mb on the wired devices, and 60Mb on the wireless devices.

My Draytek router is limited to 300Mb bandwidth, so that would have to be replaced, as would the AirPorts. Makes it quite a costly endeavour!

 

[Jordan]

I just upgraded to an Asus AX5700 router with WiFi 6.

RT-AX86 Series(RT-AX86U/RT-AX86S)

ASUS gaming routers provide the very best gaming experience, with an arsenal of features and tools designed to improve online gaming performance and give you the competitive edge you need to win.

www.asus.com

I like its dual-WAN ports with automatic failover (I do still have a cable modem for now — long story!), a 2.5Gbps WAN port, traffic monitoring capabilities, VPN features, and overall performance.

My previous router was no slouch (Linksys WRT3200ACM), but upgrading to WiFi 6 improved wireless speeds on my devices by around 200Mbps from ~450Mbps to ~650Mbps, up and down. Even though my latest devices (14'' MacBook Pro M1 Max and an iPhone 13 Pro) report solid 1,200Mbps wireless connections to the router itself, I'm only getting about half those speeds in terms of actual throughput. It seems low (and yes, I realize the irony of complaining about symmetrical 650Mbps), but I think that's about as good as can be expected. The wireless spectrum in my area is also extremely congested.

Of course, I want full speed to my primary devices, so I have run ethernet from the router to a switch which serves my aforementioned MacBook Pro, PC, and gaming consoles.

My space is not large enough to require mesh coverage, but my parents' house is. They are heavy users, and of course they have happily let me wire their house to the teeth as well. They have a 400/20 cable connection and the home network is powered by two Asus AC2900s, one of which serves as an AiMesh access point. I like Asus' AiMesh because it supports ethernet backhaul. It can be finicky, and sometimes the unit serving as an access point does need to be restarted, but overall I have been satisfied with it.