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Has openreach sneakily abandoned 1.8Gb/s?

hicks12

Member
Been waiting for Openreach to finish their FTTP rollout in my area (delays and more delays!) and noticed the checker no longer says 1800mb/s plan it is up to 1600mb/s only.

Now that's not major but it's also changed to addresses I knew already had it so I presume even after their rollout they realised they will have contention issues or something due to the bandwidth available in GPON instead of the XGS-PON they are rolling out in small areas.

It's a bit odd right? No announcement and I have even seen their blog posts from 23 where it was boasting about 1800mb/s now silently updated to 1600mb/s as if it never happened (wayback machine helpful here!).

Has actually paying for this level had a drop in speeds or is just them covering their backs now in terms of ofcom marketing? Would have expected some announcement for a potential reduction in speed for those already with it.

Just a weird observation I found while desperately waiting to get off virgin media!
 
Yes Openreach site changed. The Openreach wholesale product remains 1.8Gbps but the ISP will sell 1.6Gbps which provides a contractual tolerance.

EE now offer 1.6Gbps. However some areas still only offer up to 500Mbps (sometimes less) depending on the current vintage of kit. Also ISP offerings can differ for the same postcode.
 
I think its just BT wholesale side with the issue. It hasnt been abandoned.

There is posts on EE forum e.g. about people been unable to switch packages, because the 1.8gbps is direct to OR, and lower packages are done via BTw.
 
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I think its just BT wholesale side with the issue. It hasnt been abandoned.

There is posts on EE forum e.g. about people been unable to switch packages, because the 1.8gbps is direct to OR, and lower packages are done via BTw.
Be good to see links to those. The 1.8 is not direct to Openreach it uses the same BT Wholesale kit the other products do.
 
Be good to see links to those. The 1.8 is not direct to Openreach it uses the same BT Wholesale kit the other products do.
PXC run their FTTP from BT Exchanges, it does not touch BTWholesale kit, so 1.8 should be possible from PXC as it's direct with Openreach.
 
Okay found a 'Community Star' on the EE forum claiming EE are going direct to Openreach but nothing from EE.

For clarity: they aren't. The 1.8 uses the exact same infrastructure as the other products. I'm not sure where this came from but there's no actual evidence for it for good reasons. Customers hit the exact same BT Wholesale / Enterprise owned equipment in the exchange. The wholesale division is not as tightly regulated as Openreach.

As @meritez says above anyone using PXC, Zen or another wholesale provider that goes direct to Openreach and is selling it may offer the 1.8 product. BT Wholesale / Enterprise are only selling it to the EE retail brand at the moment so anyone else using them alone is out of luck.
 
The reason you won't see any sensible ISP offering more than 1.6Gbps is because once ethernet overhead is taken into account 1.6Gbps is about the most you will get from a 1.8Gbps service. It's the same reason that everyone offers a 900Mbps service rather than 1Gbps.
 
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The reason you won't see any sensible ISP offering more than 1.6Gbps is because once ethernet overhead is taken into account 1.6Gbps is about the most you will get from a 1.8Gbps service. It's the same reason that everyone offers a 900Mbps service rather than 1Gbps.
So in other words, it was all media hype for the time just for everyone to be let down without actually being told the truth from the get go? Unsurprising.
 
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Openreach still offers the profile 1800/120 to their customers (ISPs or wholesale providers) the overheads mean it's more along the lines of 1600 so to comply with advertising standards they will show the average
 
Maybe I’m missing something, but what type of households do people have to require 1.6Gbps, let alone 1.8Gbps ?
 
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Maybe I’m missing something, but what type of households do people have to require 1.6Gbps, let alone 1.8Gbps ?
Not a huge amount was more a curiosity as they had been advertising at 1.8 and then randomly changed everywhere with no marketing to 1.6.

Personally I'd prefer 1gb symmetrical as I tend to use both ways while working and during the evenings.

Helps more for house shares I'm sure as a few friends I know would benefit from more bandwidth as they share with 5 people who all use a lot of bandwidth (not just watching the occasional stream).

openreach are the only alternative that is coming in the near future (was meant to be done last month or so) as only virgin does 1gb here else everyone else is just pathetic 30mb lines, sadly cityfibre is not yet planned my area it was vaguely added as "phase 2" with no date still.
 
Maybe I’m missing something, but what type of households do people have to require 1.6Gbps, let alone 1.8Gbps ?
Yes I'd say you're missing something.
Large households with multiple kids/teenagers all wanting to update their favourite game at the same time. It's nice to have the ability to burst when required.
 
Maybe I’m missing something, but what type of households do people have to require 1.6Gbps, let alone 1.8Gbps ?

My partner spends a lot of time up and downloading very large media files. The extra bit of bandwidth means that we don’t suffer as much slow-down.

That said when our contract is up with EE we’ll probably move to an altnet as they offer 1Gbps synchronous which is more useful to us (it’s also less than half the price).
 
Yes I'd say you're missing something.
Large households with multiple kids/teenagers all wanting to update their favourite game at the same time. It's nice to have the ability to burst when required.
That is a niche case, in normal operation i doubt there would be many households who require that much bandwith.
 
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I personally dont get it, I think its a hint of "I want the best" combined with a high level of impatience.

Gigabit speeds are fast, even if you had 2-3 people using it at same time, I guess if you now find that slow then impatience has crept up with the speeds, even media files only take a few minutes at the most (more typically seconds), unless they in the size of TB's, I cant think what media files would be that big. Unless you dealing with raw uncompressed for a odd reason or perhaps are building up a digital bluray connection. :p

I havent even bothered to upgrade my LAN past gigabit as I dont see the cost benefit.

Someone on another forum is doing really inefficient backups, backing up 10s of TBs of entire virtual disks (not differential) regularly.

Hopefully someone like this doesnt jump on my GPON.

With all that said if XGSPON ever is enabled here, I will likely upgrade to 2.5G myself providing the cost isnt prohibitive, to get myself on the better PON tech, and also just to have that extra spare capacity. But I probably dont need it.

Incidentally I shared a WAP with a new neighbour, supposedly temporary, and they streaming pretty much around the clock, its going to probably easily double my monthly consumption, although no real threat to a PON capacity as its constant low bandwidth rather than bursty fast.
 
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That is a niche case, in normal operation i doubt there would be many households who require that much bandwith.

Careful, there's a guy on here (can't remember his name) who takes great offence at people suggesting there's no need for ridiculous speeds on home broadband. Fwiw I agree with you, I'm on 900/900 which I think is overkill but I can't complain as it's cheaper than the 80/20 FTTC I had before.
 
That is a niche case, in normal operation i doubt there would be many households who require that much bandwith.
Sure not everyone needs it but it's their money and they can spend it on whatever, But the option is there for those who do want/need it.

Let's look at it like this, You come home from work or whatever and want to jump on a video game for an hour, but hang on there is a 25GB+ update that's going to take over half an hour on your 100Mb connection, well some people value the time so would rather have faster to can be done in a couple of minutes on a 900Mb connection so they can get more time on the game

TL:DR it's Time vs Money for most cases
 
Sure not everyone needs it but it's their money and they can spend it on whatever, But the option is there for those who do want/need it.

Let's look at it like this, You come home from work or whatever and want to jump on a video game for an hour, but hang on there is a 25GB+ update that's going to take over half an hour on your 100Mb connection, well some people value the time so would rather have faster to can be done in a couple of minutes on a 900Mb connection so they can get more time on the game

TL:DR it's Time vs Money for most cases
You just explained the bump from VDSL to gigabit very well, but of course after that it is significantly diminished returns.

I will for sure notice a 30+ minute download go to 3 minutes, but I will I care as much for the 3 minute download becoming 1 and half minutes?

I wonder how many are going straight from super fast to multi gig, having not experienced how good gigabit is.

Of course I agree people can spend their money on whatever they want and there will be niche cases where people are transferring extremely large files. We have one member on here who is on 8 gigabit, its there to buy, if you want it, buy it.
 
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