BT Infinity: RG41 5 - 1 month in

Sephiroth · 22-01-2011, 12:34

To recapitulate, I had Infinity installed alongside VM 50 meg on 20-Dec-10.

During peak hours, Infinity downstream may fall to around 25 meg; at all other times, it's 37/38 meg (against BT's forecast of 31 meg).

Upstream is around 8 meg at all times. When the boy comes home, he'll try Black Ops + Ventrilo and we'll see how that performs.

Against this, VM 50 meg is around 49/50 meg at all except peak times when it varies between 25 & 43 meg. Upstream is 3.75 meg at all times. Black Ops + Ventrilo is perfect whenever he plays.

The Infinity Homehub 2 is upstairs and feeds into a Devolo 200AV powerline; The VM modem + Airport Extreme router are downstairs and feeds into another Devolo Av powerline. The target PCs are on the end of a switch fed by a third Devolo 200AV powerline. I can switch my PC at will between VM and BT.

Jayster · 22-01-2011, 13:23

Latency?

AmAtoL · 22-01-2011, 15:35

I'm keen to see how it compares to 50 meg when gaming too, I guess your lad is on PC as he is using Vent.
I have what is left of UKOnline at the moment and it doesn't seem that brilliant tbh, I have VM 20 meg also which I can switch to, to do comparisons. The kids use VM so that is not a fair comparison when we are all online at the same time.
If Infinity is quick and stable with no noticeable packet loss or similar then I will go with that.
I really need someone who games to give a proper assessment against VM.
Everything can differ from area to area I know, but it will give me some kind of idea.

Sephiroth · 22-01-2011, 17:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jayster

Latency?

Nothing to report. The wretched Pingtest is an A and Pathping to BBC is 20 ms. Only when the boy gets gaming will we know the real score. He'll know instantly if it feels different from VM 50 meg.

---------- Post added at 17:17 ---------- Previous post was at 17:11 ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by AmAtoL

I'm keen to see how it compares to 50 meg when gaming too, I guess your lad is on PC as he is using Vent.
I have what is left of UKOnline at the moment and it doesn't seem that brilliant tbh, I have VM 20 meg also which I can switch to, to do comparisons. The kids use VM so that is not a fair comparison when we are all online at the same time.
If Infinity is quick and stable with no noticeable packet loss or similar then I will go with that.
I really need someone who games to give a proper assessment against VM.
Everything can differ from area to area I know, but it will give me some kind of idea.

It'll be a week or so as he normally lives in London and comes home to play Black Ops every so often. When he's doing so on VM 50 meg, I'm on the forums or similar and we don't interfere with each other, as you might expect.

I'm staying on Infinity for the next couple of weeks. It was only getting the third Devolo Homeplug past the wife that has held me up.

Just so you know, I'll be keeping both and intend setting up a load balancing arrangement between the two providers using a second ethernet card in my PC.

AmAtoL · 22-01-2011, 21:47

Cheers Seph
My only other option is to try and persuade a work colleague who had Infinity fitted on Thursday, to let me hook up my PC for an hour or so to see how it performs.

Sephiroth · 22-01-2011, 23:20

Then you can let me know.

BTW, the boy also plays on a Q6600 (8 GB) with a GeForce 8800 GT.

AmAtoL · 25-01-2011, 22:27

Aye was a very nice rig Seph, upgraded about 2 months ago. I did my usual trick of buying a processor just before a new one comes out (Sandy Bridge), but never mind it will do me for a while

weesteev · 27-01-2011, 09:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Just so you know, I'll be keeping both and intend setting up a load balancing arrangement between the two providers using a second ethernet card in my PC.

Using Linux i assume? I use 2 50Mb cable connections with a Dual WAN router, runs like a sweety :-)

Sephiroth · 05-02-2011, 20:09

I said I'd report on Black Ops with my Infinity connexion.

It's currently just as solid as on VM 50 meg.

Aja · 15-02-2011, 20:23

just received a letter from BT stating that Infinity was available in my area, ran the Infinity speed check which gave me the following guestimate 35.5 Mbps down / 8.6 Mbps up, out of the available Infinity packages I would most certainly go for option 2, the only thing putting me off is the 300 GB monthly download allowance, I use both p2p & usenet and with a possible 35Mbps download speed and a whopping 8Mbps upload speed I could see myself hitting 300GB within the month, at which point I will be FUPED and download speeds cut back to 1 Mbit for the remainder of the month which seems a bit draconian.

I'm also comparing Infinity to VM XXL 50 Mbit which looks like the better option, some good deals going on with VM, 1/2 price for 6 months, no install charges, £65 cashback offers etc, plus my area gets the faster 5Mbit upload speeds. I was with Virgin a long while back (Blueyonder) and the speeds advertised were pretty much the speeds I got I also like the fact that VM don't have STM on the 50 Mbit package, but even if they did I would just schedule my downloading for after midnight.

Sephiroth · 15-02-2011, 20:41

VM have finaly admitted on their forum that 350GB/month download is a sort of threshold where they send out Acceptable Use Policy letters. In areas of heavy aggregate use, that could be much lower because their basis is what happens to the non-heavvy download users squeezed out by the downloaders.

VM also have a published upload management policy because of P2P traffic. And they traffic shape newsgroups and P2P sites. So I'd go into it very carefully and also check with someone (like here) that yours is not a chronically poor performance area.

VM claim that 66% of their customers hit the "typical" speed published by OFCOM. That leaves an awful lot (34%) who don't. Would you be one of those? VM won't tell you before you buy although would know.

That said, I'm a satisfied VM customer - but it hangs on a knife's edge. VM could resegment everybody to smooth the load out and the downloaders breviously on RDN-22 could suddenly find themselves on RDNG-20, say, spoiling it for previously content customers.

In summary, if you can schedule your downloading AND you don't live in an oversubscribed area (particularly studentland) you may get a decent 50 meg service like I do.

HTH.

pabscars · 15-02-2011, 21:01

So what's the latency like on your BT line compared to VM, is the Jitter better or worse Seph

Given you've got a decent 50 Meg connection it should be a fair comparison

Aja · 15-02-2011, 21:18

@Sephiroth

Well my area is Enfield in London, it wasn't oversubscribed when I was with Blueyonder, and there were no contention issues when Blueyonder was re-badged as Virgin Media I pretty much got the full download speeds on my 10 Mbit connection 24/7 (unless I got stm'd which did seem to happen a lot and was the reason I moved to O2 unlimited who have just jacked up their prices.)

I didn't know about the VM 350GB download threshold warning letters and I hate it that ISP's try to hide these details from their subscribers, there's no mention of these thresholds on either BT or VM's websites but out of these two ISP's I still see VM as favourite, the idea of BT auto capping my download speeds from say 35 Mbit down to 1 Mbit for the remainder of the month if I exceed 300GB fills me with dread.

At least VM are not that punitive, I'm assuming these VM warning letters go out if 350GB is reached for uploads/downloads combined, either way thanks for the info!

Sephiroth · 15-02-2011, 21:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by pabscars

So what's the latency like on your BT line compared to VM, is the Jitter better or worse Seph

Given you've got a decent 50 Meg connection it should be a fair comparison

Hi pabs -

I wanted to measure latency with Thinkbroadband/ping. But it won't do it - something about Dynamic IP address. It just reports 100% lost packets.

But in other respects, the Boy is best latency tester. He plays Black Ops non-stop when he's here and uses Ventrilo at the same time. Not a lost word, not a teleport, nothing going red. And that's with me messing around on my laptop on the same switch. BT Infinity checks out fine in my area. Just like VM on my UBR.

If you know of another remote ping test like Thinkbroadband have, do let me know.

Cheers

Turkey Machine · 15-02-2011, 21:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Hi pabs -

I wanted to measure latency with Thinkbroadband/ping. But it won't do it - something about Dynamic IP address. It just reports 100% lost packets.

But in other respects, the Boy is best latency tester. He plays Black Ops non-stop when he's here and uses Ventrilo at the same time. Not a lost word, not a teleport, nothing going red. And that's with me messing around on my laptop on the same switch. BT Infinity checks out fine in my area. Just like VM on my UBR.

If you know of another remote ping test like Thinkbroadband have, do let me know.

Cheers

There's www.pingtest.net for an immediate ping-test but that's java-based and subjective, so needs to be done thrice to get a good reading. Also give this a go: http://www.123myip.co.uk/ping/result.php

Dynamic IP address would only matter if the router was switched off or rebooted, as it then means it can't track the IP change, so your results get skewed. More than likely the router's not responding to ICMP echoes.