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On Thu, 29 Apr 2010, Eion MacDonald wrote:
On 29/04/2010 12:19, Neil Winchurst wrote: wifi and also has a printer port.Anyone have any recommendations please, or any warnings about what to avoid? Thanks NeilRe HomeHub reply The BTHomeHub2 has been OK these past two years for both wired and wireless and a downstream switch via ETH (when wanted). It has a reset wireles button, which is occasionally used when I want to tie in visitors. It has a USB conection some use for printer or USB external storage (never used by me) and a second VoIP telephone connection with local phone number, useful to segragate business from home calls.
I'd not call these 'local' exactly - and I'm fairly sure that calls to these numbers don't come out of any allowances in call packages. I'd be cautions of calling them from a mobile too... I don't think they're particularly cheap to call out on either...
Home Hubs are the bane of my life and I refuse to work with customers who have them. They block all 3rd party VoIP (as do most other routers with built-in VoIP - but most of them make it easy to turn it off!)
Only point is do NOT use or remove power when BT do a (- usually at about 2am (shows my work habits !) 'system upgrade' of the control program in hub; this is warned by a yellow flashing light. I use BT as ISP (only one in my village).
That's simply not true, and it really really bothers me when people say this.
You (and everyone else) has a choice of over 100 ISPs from *every* Telephone exchange in the country (Hull excepted). All these ISPs use the BT Wholesale network, but only one of them is BT Retail - and BT retail is one of the worst ISPs in my books (another reason to stop me working with a customer - even if they choose the business package from BT retail, it's still worse than basic packages from other ISPs)
In addition to 100+ ISPs who use the BT Wholesale network, there are a dozen or so who run their own networks to BT exchanges - these are the LLU ISPs (Local Loop Unbundling). This is where you get the wool pulled over your eyes... Oh, no LLU, so you have to use BT... But they don't say which BT - one of the 100+ ISPs who use BT Wholesale, or BT retail - who are just one of those 100+ ISPs using the BT Wholesale network...
Here's how it works: (approximately)BT Wholesale maintain a network through the UK. It connects all their exchanges together and provides places throughout the country for resellers to plug into. It's fairly good and in most cases relatively un-contended. BT Wholesale do not deal with end-users - their customers are big ISPs - e.g. BT Retail, Entanet, AAISP, Zen, Plusnet, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and so on.
They offer their customers 2 levels of service over it - standard and elevated. Elevated service levels come with a guarantee of 3Mb/sec or faster over the BT Wholesale network for 90% of the time. Standard is (I think) 2Mb/sec for 80% of the time). If you connect into an ADSL2+ exchange then you get the max speeds possible regardless of being on elevated or standard service, (ie. up to 24Mb in, and up to 1.2Mb out) but if you connect in on an ADSL2 exchange, then elevated comes with an upstream speed of up to 830Kb/sec. (and downstream of up to 8Mb) rather than the standard upstream of up to 440Kb/sec.
These new metrics have been in-place for some years now - they're akin to the old 20:1 for businesses and 50:1 for residential.
BT OpenReach are the guys who get their hands dirty maintaining the physical cables. (and I think do the actual plumbing inside the exchange to do any line shifts, etc.) We as consumers don't deal with BT openreach either - they deal with the ISPs and BT Wholesale.
ISPs connect into the BT Wholesale network to transport data to/from their customers - me and you into their network and beyond. There are a couple of ways for them to plumb in, but essentially they run high-speed cables from their network into BT's network - hopefully at more than one location for redundancy.
We (as consumers) buy a service via a retail ISP. And remember that BT retail is just one of over 100 retail ISPs who connect into the BT wholesale network.
So where does the slow-downs happen - mostly at the interface between BT Wholesale and the ISPs own network - either they do not buy enough capacity off BT Wholesale, or through their own networks which may not be good enough - usually a combination of both. Finally, there's the hand-offs where the ISPs talk to other ISPs and buy backhaul to the global Internet. The bigger ISPs also have dedicated lines to the major content providers and in some case host servers for the content providers - e.g. the BBC, etc. as well as global content producers - e.g. caching data like Microsoft patches, anti-virus updates and so on.
If the ISP themselves don't have enough capacity internally then there will be slow-downs at peak times. IT boils down to the amount of money the ISP wants to throw at their internal network vs. the aggro they want to take from their customers vs. the profit they see themselves making.
Then the ISPs themselves offer various packages - e.g. the basic BT (retail) Business package offers more "stuff", but it still uses the standard service level over the BT Wholesale network (440Kb/sec upload) You have to pay BT retail more to get that 830Kb/sec upload and a bigger bite out of the BT Wholesale network.
ISPs pay more for the elevated services from BT Wholesale, they're also billed per byte - which is why unlimited Internet is a fallacy in the UK. It's simply not fesable to provide unlimited data at a sensible price.
So where does that leave us - it basically boils down to how much you're willing to pay to get a good quality Internet connection. Pick 2 of these three: Speed, Low-Cost, Reliability. You'll never get all three. Personally, I go with Speed and Reliability, and I insist my customers do the same. I pay £25.75 + VAT a month for my Internet (plus a BT phone bill of about £12 a month for the copper to carry the ADSL on). I know that's out of the reach of most consumers and the big companies know that too, so they squeeze you and dangle tempting packages in-front of you - phone, line rental, broadband, etc. all bundled into one - and I have to say, for the average consumer, it's very attractive, however ... You get what you pay for...
As for the LLU companies - bit of an unknown really. They won't say what speed lines they run from the exchanges, they won't give you much clue about their internal networks... My personal thoughts is that they are probably a good consumer product, but won't touch them for business.
Aargh. Too long, but that's what happens when someone whinges that they can only get BT from their exchange. It's not true and more importantly, never has been - ever since day 1 in the ADSL world in the UK, there has been a reseller program in-place for other ISPs to compete (and provide a much better service IMO) than BT retail.
Gordon
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