BT Broadband tells fibs. And bad lies at that.

[Dawg]

Just had a cold call from BT about broadband. BT chum claimed that the BT 8Mb connection was faster than my Zen 8Mb connection because it came by satellite. In my normal 'umble way I queried this and it turned out that the BT satellite is in fact a wifi router.
Which is nearly a satellite if you throw it hard enough I suppose.
BT Broadband. British Teller of downright bloody lies.
(When I gently and nervously enquired about contention they rang off. Strange.)

[luke696]

They are jokers..if u have seen my thread ive had a lot trouble with them today & also the last!

[cjd]

Oh, tell me about it. The problem is that even those that sell the bloody stuff don't understand it.

And that includes me.

It's mostly black magic.

If you want a good, fast, reliable broadband service it needs to be one of the business class MAX products - either the standard MAX (8mbs x 448kbs) or the MAX Premium (8 x 832). Choose the first if you don't do much uploading or don't use VoIP with more than 2 phones.

ADSL2 and ADSL2 Anex M is not as reliable yet and although the headline figures look high, the actual throughput is often less. But it varies so much by location and distance from exchange that meaningful comparisons are difficult.

The mythical contention ratios are no longer used by ISPs as they have become meaningless with traffic management of lines but generally a consumer line would be about 50:1 while a business line would be 5 to 10:1, sometimes 20:1.

These days the statistic that matters - and which tells you an awful lot about the state of the industry - is the guaranteed throughput. This is what the ISP guarantees you will get as a minimum. Even on a business quality line it can be as little as 10%, but obviously they hope to do much better than that.