2012-03-25

FTTC 80/20

We have pretty much decided the plan for FTTC lines moving forwards.

Basically, FTTC comes in many flavours in terms of what we can get out of BT. We are going to sell in exactly two flavours for customers as follows:-

1. Basic, which is the "not more than" 40Mbs down and the "not more than" 10Mb/s up sync speed.

2. Premium, for £10+VAT (£12) more a month which includes the "not more than" 80Mb/s down "not more than" 20Mb/s up speed and also elevated weighting within BT and priority in our network in congestion.

Note that the premium is not guaranteeing to be faster than the basic if you have a line that will not do more than 40/10 but will still cost more for the "elevated weighting" within BT and priority in our network.

The only issue here is that some people do not fit this. e.g. People on 40/2, or on 40/10 with elevated weighting. These people will pay for basic or premium based on the elevated weighting and have the option to upgrade the sync speed for £10+VAT and restarting the 12 month minimum term. Even so, upgrading to 80/20 will not always work in that a long line may not manage those speeds - in such cases the "premium" option is still provided by elevated weighting in BT and priority in our network for the extra £10+VAT per month charge.

People wanting to drop "premium", especially if they cannot get 80/20, can do so on our normal terms (charge for dropping premium).

Make sense?

15 comments:

  1. Does that mean the basic version won't be capped at 2mpbs upstream? Suddenly that becomes a seriously tempting offer..

    ReplyDelete
  2. So as an existing 40/2 customer with no need for premium weighting who, according to clueless, connects at ~38mbp/s. I presume there's little point 'upgrading' to 80/20 as I'm not even syncing at 40?

    In order to take advantage of the basic 40/10 service do I need to actually regrade? Or will the profile of my line change automatically at some point. A bit more upload bandwidth would certainly help improve my night off-site backups.

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  3. Am I understanding it correctly that to just try 80/20 to see what I can get means a new 12 month contract from 40/20? That sucks, the rest makes sense.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 12 month contracts at AAISP for ADSL? Since when?

      Delete
    2. Dan, FTTC only. We are still trying to get BT to do this on a month notice, but no joy yet.

      Delete
  4. Grrr...

    "still provided by elevated weighting in BT and PRIORITY IN OUR NETWORK for the extra £10+VAT per month charge."

    (words are yours but the caps are mine)

    You have slated 'our favourite telco' for this in the past; if there is no congestion, there can be no prioritization - and one of the selling points for A&A is that you never knowingly congest your network.

    So, I cannot see how you can sell QoS on your network when the two statements are opposites of each other.

    Other than that, I'll be interested in seeing wholesale prices for this as there still isn't an FTTC install price on the wholesale price list :-(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is a fair point - and as we have said we do have a target of not having congestion on the links to the telcos. We managed that quite a lot - right now it is 99.9% of the day which I am not happy about, but we are adding more bandwidth to get that back to 100%. However, regardless of the capacity we have, there can be events that push things to the limit - and then it matters that you have priority in our network...

      Delete
  5. Speaking as someone on 40/10 (I wanted the upload so was happy to pay for the premium option), I was hoping the 'premium' might get me the upgrade to 80/20 for the same price. Glad you agreed.

    I'm about a month-and-a-bit into a 12 month contract anyway so resetting that as part of a regrade to 80/20 isn't a major inconvenience. I'm slightly disappointed to be asked to pay a regrade fee but I suppose you have to cover the admin expense somehow. I'll live.

    My 700m line currently gives me 39mbps down, 8.5mbps up so I'm not sure how much of an improvement I'll see from the 80/20 product. But it would be foolish to be paying the premium option and not try to get the higher speed. I'll give it a whirl, and if it really gives me no speed benefit I'll take a decision in 12 months as to whether to stick with 'premium' for the enhanced priority or to drop it.

    Giles.

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  6. Are there any useful statistics that can be viewed either on the BT router or the A&A website to determine whether it's worth trying the 80/20 service either for ADSL2+ customers or 40/10/2 customers? Any rules of thumb?

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    Replies
    1. Main thing is wait for 1st April and use checker.
      Another clue is not getting 40/10 now.

      Delete
  7. Out of interest, what happens with the FTTP options - since where I live there are a number of premises served by this option... how do they fit?

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  8. Speaking as someone stuck in an "island" of 20CN, without even a projected date for 21CN, all this talk of choosing which type of FTTC you want is really depressing!
    - Howard

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  9. We have just paid our £10 to be regraded. The checker gave us 68/20 We had 38/9 so thought things looked good. We have ended up with 47/10 and because its within BT's acceptable policy they wont look into it further... Its a joke!!! Not sure how much benefit is premium is to us. BTW other users further from the FFTC cabinet seem to be getting better rates.

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  10. Ian, Email support with details and we can get it looked into.

    ReplyDelete

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