FTTC 40/2 - talk talk now offer 40/10

[#1]

Do you know how much BT Wholesale charge ISPs per customer for the various speed products?

I guess that's what affects Plusnet more than OR pricing. Maybe they (BTW) will drag their feet or hide the OR reductions somewhat. Pure speculations of course 🙂

Seems you need to register to access BTW price lists - I didn't try.

[#2]

The BTWholesale WBC price spreadsheet is still publicly available (publishing the prices is/was an Ofcom requirement), the prices for the FTTC speed variants have always been £13, £14, £15 and £16 per month ex. VAT for 40/2, 40/10, 55/10 and 80/20 respectively. We'll have to assume that the WBMC prices are the same as WBC for that type of per-user cost.

I thought the Ofcom proposal for 40/10 was to give it a similar monthly rental cost as ADSL, so it wouldn't only be 40/2 that it would make obsolete, apart from the back-haul costs of course (bandwidth at £40+ per 1Mbit/s per month).

[#3]

Ahh, thanks for the info.

So only a pound per month as it is, 40/2 really should disappear already.

20:1 asymmetry is horrible to inflict on people.

As for the the BTW interconnect costs - I thought they were symmetrical, though maybe things have changed, but if they are then 2 to 10 up isn't really going to hurt that part of the network.

[#4]

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@legume wrote:

20:1 asymmetry is horrible to inflict on people.

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Do not see how you come to that conclusion - for the majority of users the predominant requirement is download.  If DS/US were symmetric then the DS would be much lower than what we see presently.

[#5]

upstream has become far more important in the last couple of years, with the boom in cloud services.

[#6]

Indeed it has, but not so far as requiring symmetric line rates.  Even with the growth of cloud storage, the predominate usage for the majority of users is still downstream.

If individual users really do need such massive upstream capability, then maybe domestic internet services are not the right solution for them and instead they should turn to higher specification commercial solutions which do provide symmetry ... and pay the appropriate price for that.

[#7]

10 or 20 Mbps upstream is plenty for upstream cloud services
2Mps most definitely isn't (which is what the 20:1 ratio was referring to).

[#8]

Backing up a 4TB drive to the cloud over a 2Mbs connection would take over 6 months according to this site.

Not exactly an overnight backup but as a full backup in preparation for incremental ones it's quite an upload.

[#9]

...which is a good illustration of why dependence of the cloud for backup strategies is not a sound solution.

@chenks76,

Agree that depending on individual needs that might not be ideal, but that is quite different from the implication that asymmetry as a principle is terrible.

[#10]

where did anyone say that asymetry as a principle was terrible?
the quote above was "20:1 asymmetry is horrible to inflict on people." which is in reference to 40/2.

[#11]

i do belive the UK is so far behind with internet speeds , i have friends in holland who i Game with see speed test below

First one is their base speed , he pays similar price to what i pay for 80/20 top speed is a extra £8 per month or equal in Euros and its FTTH

[#12]

I was not really saying everyone should have symmetrical - even with fttp the consumer grade technology doesn't allow for it.

The 20:1 on the 40/2 product is IMHO too extreme. If you work out things after reducing sync by 64/65 and accounting for PTM/PPP/VLAN/ETH fixed overheads (IP + 34) there would be brief times, when TCP is in recovery, that there isn't even enough upstream for one (s)ack per packet.

Though as Plusnet turned off QOS this example doesn't really stand now - when it was on, gaming when someone was downloading should have been OK - but on 40/2 upstream couldn't even, in theory at least, always handle that.

Normally TCP will only ack every 2 (or more) incoming packets - so it wouldn't be always bad, but still not a nice connection to have to share just for the extreme asymmetry.

[#13]

Back to the original post - it appears that their existing customers have been moved to 40/10 in June https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7798-minor-skirmish-sees-talktalk-reducing-fibre-prices

Update (*) 10:45am: After reviewing the last months speed test results its evident that TalkTalk has upgraded its up to 38 Mbps customers from the 1.9 Mbps (40/2 variant) to the up to 9.5 Mbps (40/10) variant. The upgrades were part way done in June but it was not possible to be sure, but based on the change during July it looks like the regrades are complete, the upload speed profile for FTTC users with TalkTalk during July and Q2 2017 are included below for people to judge the change for themselves.

[#14]

Time will tell if PN decides to regrade up to the 40/10 , which obviously is the better option

[#15]

the second they do i'll be signing up for 40/10 FTTC.
at the moment i don't need 20Mbps upstream, but i certainly wouldn't upgrade to just get 2Mbps.

case in point why upstream speed is becoming more important.
took a few photos on my phone, and they auto upload to the cloud.
on my current ADSL i sync at 1.2Mbps upstream, and it caused downstream to stall whilst the upload was taking place. 2Mbps wouldn't improve that problem by much.