Reply to: Infinity 2 installed yesterday, cant get my head around download \ wireless speed

[Mr.Whippy]

Had BT Infinity 2 installed yesterday, on the speed test I did this morning with nothing else connected to the network, download speed to home was 53mbps and upload 12mbps. Impressive compared to the 6mbps on adsl I used to get.

How are you finding Infinity 2 now you've had it a while? I'm moving house to a fibre area in the next few weeks and just deciding which ISP to use, either Sky or BT....

I'll mostly be using it for VOD (NetFlix, LoveFilm, iPlayer & Sky Go).

[quackhandle]

Cheers for replies.

qh

[BolshieBastard]

Okay so the 100Mbps was plucked from the air, as I'm slowly learning at these things.

Could it be that I can have FTTC and fibre to my house or does it not work like that?

qh

Why would you have FTTC and Fibre To The Home (FTTH) if you can get them?

FTTH is fibre cable all the way from the exchange to your home and to the BT modem. Its generally only certain cities that are getting this with new builds in those cities likely being the priority. FTTH can deliver 160mb (so BT claim).

FTTC is fibre cable from the exchange to the local green roadside cabinet that provides your telephone connection to the network. The original twin copper wire from the cabinet to your home is still used and this limits the max download speed.

FTTC can currently only provide a maximum 76mb download and, the further the cabinet is away from your home, the slower your max download speed will be.

Im now on FTTC so a max of 76mb is 'available.' My local cabinet is about 600 metres away (following the roads). Im getting 56mb download to my home and 53+mb from the Home Hub3 to my lappy via a LAN cable (according to the BT Infinity speed test although Im still in the '10 day training period' ho, ho!).

If you could get both FTTC and FTTH installed to your home, you'd take one or the other depending on how much you want to pay, whether you want more speed etc.

HTH.

[VectraMan]

Could it be that I can have FTTC and fibre to my house or does it not work like that?

If it is to your house, then that's FTTP. BT have done that for some reason in Deddington (which is a village between Banbury and Oxford), and they're talking about 330Mb/s - though I guess you'd pay extra for that speed.

But obviously it's a lot more expensive to install a fibre to every house, and it has to be said, that 50Mb is probably enough for 99% of users.

[quackhandle]

A cable that's going past your house makes no difference at all. It's the cable going to your house that counts - i.e. the bit between you and the cabinet, wherever it is.

Where do you get 100Mb? The fibre is essentially as fast as BT want to make it. The bottleneck will be the copper cable between you and the cabinet, and your ISP. You don't lose speed because of the cable, the cable has a maximum speed it can work at, and as always the actual speed you get is dictated by the weakest link in the chain.

Okay so the 100Mbps was plucked from the air, as I'm slowly learning at these things.

Could it be that I can have FTTC and fibre to my house or does it not work like that?

qh

[BolshieBastard]

Can be a minefield working all this out, but getting the free app inSSIDer helps to understand it.

Stand to be corrected but with fibre (or FTTC) the speed would be 100Mbps? to the cabinet then you would get some loss due to the copper cable to your house. Now the other day I found out some workmen were replacing the copper cable (that goes past my house)with fibre, so would this mean that I shouldn't get any loss of speed?

Thinking of plusnet fibre when the next gig is sorted.

qh

Plusnet had a very good offer on that expired about 4 weeks ago. I nearly went with them but, they dont have any free access to wifi hotspots in any of their plans unlike BT and a lesser extent sky. I asked if this may be something they'd look at and they said 'No!'

[VectraMan]

Can be a minefield working all this out, but getting the free app inSSIDer helps to understand it.

Stand to be corrected but with fibre (or FTTC) the speed would be 100Mbps? to the cabinet then you would get some loss due to the copper cable to your house. Now the other day I found out some workmen were replacing the copper cable (that goes past my house)with fibre, so would this mean that I shouldn't get any loss of speed?

Thinking of plusnet fibre when the next gig is sorted.

qh

A cable that's going past your house makes no difference at all. It's the cable going to your house that counts - i.e. the bit between you and the cabinet, wherever it is.

Where do you get 100Mb? The fibre is essentially as fast as BT want to make it. The bottleneck will be the copper cable between you and the cabinet, and your ISP. You don't lose speed because of the cable, the cable has a maximum speed it can work at, and as always the actual speed you get is dictated by the weakest link in the chain.

[quackhandle]

Can be a minefield working all this out, but getting the free app inSSIDer helps to understand it.

Stand to be corrected but with fibre (or FTTC) the speed would be 100Mbps? to the cabinet then you would get some loss due to the copper cable to your house. Now the other day I found out some workmen were replacing the copper cable (that goes past my house)with fibre, so would this mean that I shouldn't get any loss of speed?

Thinking of plusnet fibre when the next gig is sorted.

qh

[jmo21]

It just seems logical to me that if the waterboard is delivering water at say, 5 litre per second to your home that when you connect a hosepipe to that supply, your hose pipe cant deliver the water at a speed > 5 litre per second.

If the exchange to HH3 link is only 53mbps and if the HH3 to lappie is greater than this, surely there's going to be a lot of lag in the system until the HH3 delivers all the data?

Are you Suity?

[v8gaz]

Had BT Infinity 2 installed yesterday, on the speed test I did this morning with nothing else connected to the network, download speed to home was 53mbps and upload 12mbps. Impressive compared to the 6mbps on adsl I used to get.

However, when I view my wireless connection speed via my lappie's wireless network gui, it says my speed varies between 300 - 72mbps. Well, how can my 'wireless' speed be more than my exchange to home download speed?

Im using 2 wireless channels (2.5ghz and 5ghz).

If I connect to the HomeHub 3 via the LAN, the connection to the lappie is limited to 100mbps as that's all the ethernet card in the lappie supports and dont have a prob with this.

Sooo... you can understand why the physical lan port says 100Mb cos you can see it. But you cant understand why the magic radio waves say 72mb? FOr the very same reason maybe? Its the physical limt of the technology?

Or do you really think that it always delivers at max link speed, even when there's a slow link in the chain?

Are you sure you're cut out to be a contractor? /nluk

[LatteLiberal]

Wonder if I can justify fibre when we move... would love it but can't really see the point. I get something like 20Mbps which equates to about 2MB/s but I've never ever seen it download anything faster than 1MB/s whether from a website, via FTP, etc, so I'm not sure if my connection is the limiting factor.

The upload would be awesome though.

Then your broadband is maxing out at 1MB, I have inifinty 2 and almost everything downloads at 80 Mbps or 8MBs. So a 720p HD movie will take @ 10 mins.
'

[VectraMan]

Wonder if I can justify fibre when we move... would love it but can't really see the point. I get something like 20Mbps which equates to about 2MB/s but I've never ever seen it download anything faster than 1MB/s whether from a website, via FTP, etc, so I'm not sure if my connection is the limiting factor.

The upload would be awesome though.

Same here, but upload is why I'd get it. I uploaded a 200MB file to dropbox yesterday, and it took an hour and a half. That's almost like living in the dark ages.

[VectraMan]

It just seems logical to me that if the waterboard is delivering water at say, 5 litre per second to your home that when you connect a hosepipe to that supply, your hose pipe cant deliver the water at a speed > 5 litre per second.

But if you had a water tank, that could also deliver water at 5 litres per second, and you had a 10 litre per second hosepipe, your hose pipe could now be delivering water at 10 litres per second - 5 from the tank, and 5 from the waterboard.

The wireless GUI is reporting the speed of the wireless part of the link - the hose pipe. It doesn't know about the rest of the network; it doesn't know what the real limit is, just that the hosepipe works at 10 litres/s.

[d000hg]

Wonder if I can justify fibre when we move... would love it but can't really see the point. I get something like 20Mbps which equates to about 2MB/s but I've never ever seen it download anything faster than 1MB/s whether from a website, via FTP, etc, so I'm not sure if my connection is the limiting factor.

The upload would be awesome though.

[tranceporter]

Had BT Infinity 2 installed yesterday, on the speed test I did this morning with nothing else connected to the network, download speed to home was 53mbps and upload 12mbps. Impressive compared to the 6mbps on adsl I used to get.

However, when I view my wireless connection speed via my lappie's wireless network gui, it says my speed varies between 300 - 72mbps. Well, how can my 'wireless' speed be more than my exchange to home download speed?

Im using 2 wireless channels (2.5ghz and 5ghz).

If I connect to the HomeHub 3 via the LAN, the connection to the lappie is limited to 100mbps as that's all the ethernet card in the lappie supports and dont have a prob with this.

I had a similar issue with my Virgin Media fibre optic. I am on 100 mbps connection, and when I connect straight to ethernet cable, I get about 100 mpbs. Connect to wireless, and boom, no more than 60 mbps. SO I dug around, and like you said, it's mostly the difference between 2.4Ghz channel and 5Ghz channel. If I go to router admin page, and change the channel to 5Ghz, I get about 100 mpbs via wireless. As soon as I switch to 2.4Ghz, the speed drops. The problem is 2 fold:

1] 5Ghz is not able to penetrate walls/barriers as well as 2.4 Ghz.
2] If you have latest tech with supports wi-fi on 5Ghz (iphone 5 does for example), then you can set the frequency to 5Ghz. Problem is, my wife has iphone 4, and an old laptop. These devices cannot connect to a wifi on 5Ghz frequency.

So stuck on 2.4Ghz, and rocking it up to 60.