Fibre broadband - EE or BT

ancient_mariner

ancient_mariner

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We have fibre broadband available, yabba dabba doo and all that. ;)

The choices I have are BT or EE - we've has an EE account for conventional internet for >10 years, and it's been OK. EE's fibre service is a bit cheaper than BTs while offering the same speeds, at least in theory (and should be practice since they're using the same cabling etc). BT have a small advantage with their open wireless access system, but that's not such a big deal with mobile 4G now.

Here's the rub - if I get a BT account, they are responsible for everything from outside the house to their exchange, while if I get EE any connection issues can become 'somebody else's problem'. The present system works OK, but we've had to get BT out several times to fix telephone cable faults in the past, and I'm a little nervous that any faults will get passed on, rather than sorted.

So - anyone got any experience in this scenario?
 
The thing to watch with BT is that their offers change almost weekly.. we managed to sign up to Infinity 2 (the faster 76Mb service) for £15/month fixed for 2 yrs which was cheaper than they were offering the slower fibre service for at the same time. I see the current price is £25/month.
 
BT are just another service provider like EE, its Openreach that are responsible from exchange to premises.

It's a common and easy mistake to make, but in theory all sp's are treated equally.

Great store is set on equivalence by Openreach, no favouritism is to be shown to its paymasters (BT)
 
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I think the OP is correct. BT are generally poor however all providers will blame someone else if they can.
In theory Open reach should not show favouritism to BT, in practice the CEOs of all other providers will tell you they do.
 
That's a pretty dire pair of providers...is that really all the choice you've got? Even as an ex BT employee, the fact that I've used PlusNet and Virgin since I left should give you an idea what I think of their broadband service.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Here's the rub - if I get a BT account, they are responsible for everything from outside the house to their exchange, while if I get EE any connection issues can become 'somebody else's problem'.
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This is wrong. They both (BT Internet and EE) buy wholesale connectivity from BT wholesale, who have Openreach maintain the network and actually connect stuff up. Situations arise where BT wholesale and BT Openreach can't sort out between them what's going on and this can happen whatever the ISP. BT internet have no priority when dealing with BTW or OR, they are treated the same as every other ISP.

The question is how far will each ISP go in maintaining pressure on BT wholesale to sort out line faults if one persists?
 
I doubt there is much difference, depends what deal is best on the day.

Do you need faster speeds?
 
cambsno said:
Been with BT a year now and hard to fault them.
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Same here over a two year period.

Service quality from all ISP's can be very much geographically specific. An ISP that is excellent in one place can be dire in another. A good idea is to ask as many of your neighbours as you can about who they use.
 
boogie man said:
That's a pretty dire pair of providers...is that really all the choice you've got? Even as an ex BT employee, the fact that I've used PlusNet and Virgin since I left should give you an idea what I think of their broadband service.
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I am also an ex-employee and still use BT, never bothered with Infinity, for my purposes the 15mb/s on copper is good enough.

Just out of interest, do you know that BT wholly own Plusnet?
 
tijuana taxi said:
I am also an ex-employee and still use BT, never bothered with Infinity, for my purposes the 15mb/s on copper is good enough.

Just out of interest, do you know that BT wholly own Plusnet?
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My broadband has been playing up today and been about 15mb I couldn't live with these speed all the time!
 
I am on BT, new router is good. last one was s***.

I only went with BT as I get rugby free.
 
rjbell said:
My broadband has been playing up today and been about 15mb I couldn't live with these speed all the time!
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Yes you could, for goodness sake it's just the Internet, not water or food.

There are whole exchanges in Scotland capped at 0.5 mb/s, they seem to manage, glorious countryside and quality of life are probably compensation
 
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Alastair said:
The thing to watch with BT is that their offers change almost weekly.. we managed to sign up to Infinity 2 (the faster 76Mb service) for £15/month fixed for 2 yrs which was cheaper than they were offering the slower fibre service for at the same time. I see the current price is £25/month.
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Thanks for that - I'll maybe try to 'swoop' a deal.

tijuana taxi said:
BT are just another service provider like EE, its Openreach that are responsible from exchange to premises.

It's a common and easy mistake to make, but in theory all sp's are treated equally.

Great store is set on equivalence by Openreach, no favouritism is to be shown to its paymasters (BT)
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Good point, and one that makes a difference.

boogie man said:
That's a pretty dire pair of providers...is that really all the choice you've got? Even as an ex BT employee, the fact that I've used PlusNet and Virgin since I left should give you an idea what I think of their broadband service.
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Those are the only choices for fibre. I've had an Orange broadband connection from when it was Tiscali on dialup - nothing wrong with them in any way thus far.

Archie747 said:
I doubt there is much difference, depends what deal is best on the day.

Do you need faster speeds?
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'Need' is an interesting concept in the case of an internet connection. Current copper gives about 2meg (about 230Mbytes/sec typical best speed) and that's as good as it can possibly get this far from the exchange in a rural location. It's just enough that one person can stream a movie, but renders the connection unusable for any other user in the house. Our son is home shortly after several months away, and that means there will be contention for data. We don't 'need' a connection faster than dial up for email, but for any other use 2meg isn't really enough. I cannot upload images for printing at or above about 12X16 from home because the upload link times out before loading is completed.
 
Cable is much better than dialup. Sounds like you need the faster speed. Read the reviews for your area and then decide what is best for the you.
.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Those are the only choices for fibre. I've had an Orange broadband connection from when it was Tiscali on dialup - nothing wrong with them in any way thus far.
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If you can get BT Internet, you can get Zen and you can get A&A (who I use) and some others. They all use the same wholesale backhaul, which is not to say they are all the same, because they really aren't. You don't get "deals" with the smaller ISPs though.
 
tijuana taxi said:
I am also an ex-employee and still use BT, never bothered with Infinity, for my purposes the 15mb/s on copper is good enough.

Just out of interest, do you know that BT wholly own Plusnet?
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Yeah I did know about Plusnet. BT own them but have let them run as a separate entity.

I don't like slagging off the people who pay my pension but myself and other family members have had awful experiences with BT phone and broadband in the past. I put up with the dismal service while I was getting it free as a work perk but always said I wouldn't touch them again when I had to actually pay. Been with Virgin cable for the past four years and haven't regretted it. It's gone down once in all that time and was fixed relatively quickly (a van had ploughed into the local cab!) Was with Plusnet broadband before that and it was faultless over two years.

As a matter of curiosity I looked at Infinity recently. The BT website says it's not available in our area. The Openreach website says it's coming soon but can't give an actual date when our local exchange will be enabled. BUT, there's a street cab round the corner that's been there for at least two years with "Infinity is here" stickers on it. So is it available or isn't it? Doesn't inspire much confidence frankly.
 
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I am very happy with BT infinity 1 after leaving plusnet who i was with for 5 years.:)
 
Archie747 said:
Cable is much better than dialup. Sounds like you need the faster speed. Read the reviews for your area and then decide what is best for the you.
.
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Does anyone still use dialup ? That was back in the days when download speeds were just a few hundred kb/ssec with a following wind and files to eons to download.
 
I wasn't suggesting anyone *should* use dialup, but it was adequate for text-only email and surfing in the days when web sites were built to be compact.
 
onomatopoeia said:
If you can get BT Internet, you can get Zen and you can get A&A (who I use) and some others. They all use the same wholesale backhaul, which is not to say they are all the same, because they really aren't. You don't get "deals" with the smaller ISPs though.
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But how can they be better if they don't have full control end to end?
 
ancient_mariner said:
But how can they be better if they don't have full control end to end?
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The ISP has control of a lot of things in the wholesale connection, including the capacity of their connections from the wholesale service and consequent contention therein, and their connections to the internet as a whole and contention on those. Also, addressing, filtering, traffic shaping (etc).

It's quite possible for the ISP to specify it in a way that is less contended than (say) BT Internet. BT Internet have as much but no more end to end control as any other ISP using BT Wholesale services, that is the purpose of the "chinese wall" between the different bits of the BT group, to provide a level playing field and to stop OFCOM wanting to break BT up.
 
tijuana taxi said:
BT are just another service provider like EE, its Openreach that are responsible from exchange to premises.

It's a common and easy mistake to make, but in theory all sp's are treated equally.

Great store is set on equivalence by Openreach, no favouritism is to be shown to its paymasters (BT)
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True that OpenReach are meant to be 'separate' from BT Broadband but they are still owned by BT Global.

We tried to go with Sky initially and had nothing but dramas getting the line installed, months down the line with nothing we cancelled and tried BT.......had a line installed in 8 days.
Openreach prioritise BT customers, I am sure of it.

We have fibre available but the cabinet is 'oversubscribed'.
I have to check daily, then place an upgrade order when available and wait for Openreach to reject it as somebody else has nicked the spare port.
Its a great system!

I would go with whichever company has the best support, probably not BT based in my experience.

I like Plusnet but their basic fibre package only has a 1.9Mb upload!
Barely more than ADSL so I will be going elsewhere.
 
At present lowest cost BB is through SSE - £21/month including line rental - but I'm not sure I'd trust an energy company to tie their own shoe laces. BigBroadbandWarehouse also seem competitive on price. Plusnet's basic broadband package is OK, except that after 18 months I've got to go through the same rigmarole again when they bump prices up by £10. I don't want to shop around, hence why I'm still on EE after so long, and would much rather have a decent deal that I could use for another 10+ years with the supplier gradually boosting performance to match current technology.
 
ancient_mariner said:
At present lowest cost BB is through SSE - £21/month including line rental - but I'm not sure I'd trust an energy company to tie their own shoe laces. BigBroadbandWarehouse also seem competitive on price. Plusnet's basic broadband package is OK, except that after 18 months I've got to go through the same rigmarole again when they bump prices up by £10. I don't want to shop around, hence why I'm still on EE after so long, and would much rather have a decent deal that I could use for another 10+ years with the supplier gradually boosting performance to match current technology.
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SSE will be packaging it up, white labelling an existing product, and they have been voted highly for customer service.
Doesn't sound like a bad combination to me, especially if it better on the pocket as well...
 
Maybe I should just try them. In fairness they already supply our electricity (as they always have) but I'm suspicious after the energy company switching debacle that happened when they first opened up the energy provider market, and we ended up getting 2 identical energy bills (one from them, one from the new provider) for months.
 
Went SSE in the end. £21 for the higher speed BB including line rental, router & some calls. Hard to argue with that unless they give terrible service. Looked at A&A, but I'm not wealthy enough to afford their services (and they have the most bizarre website).
 
ancient_mariner said:
Went SSE in the end. £21 for the higher speed BB including line rental, router & some calls. Hard to argue with that unless they give terrible service. Looked at A&A, but I'm not wealthy enough to afford their services (and they have the most bizarre website).
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I have always fund a&a's website quite easy to navigate - they tend to have a "no nonsense" approach to most things although they are aimed at the tech market rather than the mass market.
 
boliston said:
I have always fund a&a's website quite easy to navigate - they tend to have a "no nonsense" approach to most things although they are aimed at the tech market rather than the mass market.
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Maybe it was because everything was called 'broadband' and differentiated by download volume rather than speed - appropriate to those in IT, rather than domestic users. Obviously I managed to navigate in the end, but only because began clickig with 'best guesses' instead of easily finding a product. They also offered the choice of filtered & unfiltered, with a snarky comment if you clicked filtered (I clicked unfiltered first, then filtered just out of interest).
 
ancient_mariner said:
Maybe it was because everything was called 'broadband' and differentiated by download volume rather than speed - appropriate to those in IT, rather than domestic users. Obviously I managed to navigate in the end, but only because began clickig with 'best guesses' instead of easily finding a product. They also offered the choice of filtered & unfiltered, with a snarky comment if you clicked filtered (I clicked unfiltered first, then filtered just out of interest).
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I think there is now a legal obligation for an isp to offer a "filtered" service and their "filtered" service is in fact the "ultimate" filtered service which basically means "no service".

Pretty much any router now offers comprehensive filtering options so it is beyond me why someone would want the isp to take over this role.
 
ancient_mariner said:
They also offered the choice of filtered & unfiltered, with a snarky comment if you clicked filtered (I clicked unfiltered first, then filtered just out of interest).
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One of the reasons I use A&A is the attitude of the owner to censorship, thought there are a lot of technical reasons as well.
 
ancient_mariner said:
At present lowest cost BB is through SSE - £21/month including line rental - but I'm not sure I'd trust an energy company to tie their own shoe laces. BigBroadbandWarehouse also seem competitive on price. Plusnet's basic broadband package is OK, except that after 18 months I've got to go through the same rigmarole again when they bump prices up by £10. I don't want to shop around, hence why I'm still on EE after so long, and would much rather have a decent deal that I could use for another 10+ years with the supplier gradually boosting performance to match current technology.
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If you push PlusNet after your contract has ended they give you the same offer as new customers £5 for broadband + line rental costs.... just renewed mine. Customer service wise I've found them excellent, they're actually part of BT which they don't advertise openly, their service is far better perhaps that's why!

Simon
 
Some people do seem to have issues with BT, we haven't so I've stuck with them. Currently on a loyalty deal for £29 a month, line rental, infinity 1 and BT TV. I don't have any grumbles at that price.

As many others have said, always seems to be a deal. Check through moneysupermarket or compare etc.
 
Stu Meech said:
Some people do seem to have issues with BT, we haven't so I've stuck with them. Currently on a loyalty deal for £29 a month, line rental, infinity 1 and BT TV. I don't have any grumbles at that price.

As many others have said, always seems to be a deal. Check through moneysupermarket or compare etc.
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What speed does it provide? Not fibre I assume?
 
Stu Meech said:
On the deal I'm on?

Infinity 1 fibre, we live in a creaky old village at the end of the copper (literally) so we only get 25mpbs but better than the 1.5 we got on dialup!
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Just checking, thought you have may found a really good deal!

Is it fast enough for catch-up tv, streaming movies etc?
 
25Mb is loads fast enough to catch up. I can stream Amazon movies on 2Mb.
 
For streaming 4K, big down/uploads etc. For my sins, I've just had to re-install W7 on my work computer requiring a couple of 700Mb downloads of updates, and they took about an hour each over a shared 1M connection. Imagine if I could have had them done in a couple of min instead - not in any way essential, but very nice.
 
Archie747 said:
What speed does it provide? Not fibre I assume?
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Infinity one here.
Just shy of 50 MBS speed since the recent upgrade of speeds across the board.
 
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