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Help picking a CityFibre ISP

Breamish

Regular Member
Hi all. I’m going round in circles picking an ISP to use with a CityFibre connection.

I can choose from Vodafone, TalkTalk, Giganet, Brawband and Brillband.

It seems like some ISPs use “CGNAT” (still learning what everything means!) which seems to be bad for online gaming and connecting to home network from outside. I’d like to prioritise latency (even over speed) for some gaming and working from home using Remote Desktop.

Does anyone have any thoughts on who to go with? I’m leaning towards Vodafone as it looks like their Pro tier gives decent equipment, and they’re a well known company, even if that means CS is bad.
 
Hi all. I’m going round in circles picking an ISP to use with a CityFibre connection.

I can choose from Vodafone, TalkTalk, Giganet, Brawband and Brillband.

It seems like some ISPs use “CGNAT” (still learning what everything means!) which seems to be bad for online gaming and connecting to home network from outside. I’d like to prioritise latency (even over speed) for some gaming and working from home using Remote Desktop.

Does anyone have any thoughts on who to go with? I’m leaning towards Vodafone as it looks like their Pro tier gives decent equipment, and they’re a well known company, even if that means CS is bad.
If you care about gaming and having lowest ping, then it would be TalkTalk, Vodafone is good but tbh both isps have bad CS.

Vodafone just is not trustworthy as they change peoples BNG which causes people to get higher ping.

However Vodafone does have a nice deal right now, £36 for 900down and up.

TalkTalk uses DCHP when Vodafone uses PPPoe. (DCHP is abit better as it can give you abit more download speed then ISPs using PPPoe).

It also really depends on if you have a budget you want to pay monthly or not. I would go with TalkTalk tho if you mainly game, stream or care about having low ping.
 
If you care about gaming and having lowest ping, then it would be TalkTalk, Vodafone is good but tbh both isps have bad CS.

Vodafone just is not trustworthy as they change peoples BNG which causes people to get higher ping.

However Vodafone does have a nice deal right now, £36 for 900down and up.

TalkTalk uses DCHP when Vodafone uses PPPoe. (DCHP is abit better as it can give you abit more download speed then ISPs using PPPoe).

It also really depends on if you have a budget you want to pay monthly or not. I would go with TalkTalk tho if you mainly game, stream or care about having low ping.
Thanks for this helpful reply.

It looks like they’re all pretty much under £40 per month, so I’m happy with any of them in that regard.

Do TalkTalk provide a static IP address, and is that something I should even be concerned with?

Is there any major reason not to go with the smaller companies (Brawband or Brillband)?
 
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Thanks for this helpful reply.

It looks like they’re all pretty much under £40 per month, so I’m happy with any of them in that regard.

Do TalkTalk provide a static IP address, and is that something I should even be concerned with?

Is there any major reason not to go with the smaller companies (Brawband or Brillband)?
Smaller isps will not have big peering routes like Talktalk or Vodafone, that is one of the biggest reasons why i would not go with any small isp. Peering is important as the more peerting routes a isp has, the lower ping you will get from your location to the game/server you join.

Some small isps can use other BIG isps peering but that is case by case depending on which small isp you are talking about.

https://www.peeringdb.com/ You can use this site to find out isps peering locations and how many gbs that can handle, etc.
 
Do TalkTalk provide a static IP address, and is that something I should even be concerned with?
For residential, no. Whether that matters to you is entirely up to how you use your connection. If you want to allow inbound RDP connections then maybe dynamic DNS is good enough, or use a meet-and-greet service like TeamViewer.

Is there any major reason not to go with the smaller companies (Brawband or Brillband)?
A recently-founded ISP is more likely to be short of public IPv4 address space, which means you're more likely to be put behind a CGNAT (sharing one public IPv4 address with other customers), or be on an IP address block which they bought in and doesn't geolocate to the UK - which in turn might mean you get intermittent access to geofenced services like BBC, or Google displaying its home page in a weird language. But these are just "mights".

A small provider might also not have good upstream network connectivity or a clueful 24x7 network operations team.

However, with a small provider you may well get better customer service than Talktalk or Vodafone - TBH it would be very hard to be worse.
 
If you are after a shorter contract:
Looks like it's unavailable here.
A recently-founded ISP is more likely to be short of public IPv4 address space, which means you're more likely to be put behind a CGNAT (sharing one public IPv4 address with other customers), or be on an IP address block which they bought in and doesn't geolocate to the UK - which in turn might mean you get intermittent access to geofenced services like BBC, or Google displaying its home page in a weird language. But these are just "mights".

A small provider might also not have good upstream network connectivity or a clueful 24x7 network operations team.
This is definitely giving me food for thought. I'll compare TalkTalk and Vodafone a bit deeper I think.
 
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It looks pretty expensive for my needs to be honest, and am I reading correctly that it has data caps? In 2023?
ye i wouldnt get a&a if ur a gamer lol the only isp to have data caps.
 
ye i wouldnt get a&a if ur a gamer lol the only isp to have data caps.
Still struggling to decide between Vodafone and TalkTalk now.

It looks like TalkTalk might edge it out on latency and they provide two Eero Pro 6E routers which sounds ideal knowing that our place isn’t great for WiFi, but then Vodafone provide a booster with their Pro tier too.
 
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Still struggling to decide between Vodafone and TalkTalk now.

It looks like TalkTalk might edge it out on latency and they provide two Eero Pro 6E routers which sounds ideal knowing that our place isn’t great for WiFi, but then Vodafone provide a booster with their Pro tier too.
yea im switching back to TT after trying out BT & Zen. TT had the best ping for me :)
 
yea im switching back to TT after trying out BT & Zen. TT had the best ping for me :)
Do you know if TT’s upload speed is actually the 100Mb it says on the website, or is actually 900 like every other CF provider? Assuming they just say 100 because they also offer 900 over Openreach.
 
Do you know if TT’s upload speed is actually the 100Mb it says on the website, or is actually 900 like every other CF provider? Assuming they just say 100 because they also offer 900 over Openreach.
all isps on CF do same download and same upload even if the site says 100 upload due to most people ordering is with openreach.
 
all isps on CF do same download and same upload even if the site says 100 upload due to most people ordering is with openreach.
I've just realised that with TalkTalk, they only provide ONE Eero 6 Pro for CityFibre, but TWO for OpenReach. Absolutely bizarre.
 
I've just realised that with TalkTalk, they only provide ONE Eero 6 Pro for CityFibre, but TWO for OpenReach. Absolutely bizarre.
thats odd
 
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Their online chat agent says "CityFibre won't let us provide two" which smells a lot like ******** given that you can buy additional ones from TalkTalk...
yea thats seems stupid as CF doesnt give TT the routers, TT buys from amazon lol
 
Still struggling to decide between Vodafone and TalkTalk now.
I'm with Vodafone on 900Mbps package currently they were fine for 3-4yrs I was with them. But since late August I've had issues with latency and download speed.

They switched my BNG from Surrey Quays (London) to Swindon. So my latency now to London is always 6-8ms, rather than the usual 2-3ms I had before.. And it's not limited to an increase in latency, the download speed also dropped to as low as 10Mbps, and tends to usually be anywhere between 200-400Mbps but can range at any given time, only Vodafone's own Speedtest server provides the consistent full speed, so must be some routing/capacity issue, no idea why I was switched over to begin with to somewhere far from me.

I've tried to speak to them about it but they refuse to acknowledge it's something on their end which is very frustrating. Probably due to the fact that anyone you tend to speak to doesn't know what a BNG is on the phone... They just recommend I switch to the ISP provided router, bla bla bla.

If you check the Vodafone thread you can see many other people having this issue over the last few yrs. They locked the thread awhile back but you can see some people have made some similar threads about the issue over time. I've been lucky to not have it till recently, and until they put me on the wrong BNG it was fine...

https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Bro...-Latency-way-higher-Gigafast-900/td-p/2710240

So looking forward to switching over to TalkTalk now, so I don't have to deal with this issue anymore.
 
I'm with Vodafone on 900Mbps package currently they were fine for 3-4yrs I was with them. But since late August I've had issues with latency and download speed.

They switched my BNG from Surrey Quays (London) to Swindon. So my latency now to London is always 6-8ms, rather than the usual 2-3ms I had before.. And it's not limited to an increase in latency, the download speed also dropped to as low as 10Mbps, and tends to usually be anywhere between 200-400Mbps but can range at any given time, only Vodafone's own Speedtest server provides the consistent full speed, so must be some routing/capacity issue, no idea why I was switched over to begin with to somewhere far from me.

I've tried to speak to them about it but they refuse to acknowledge it's something on their end which is very frustrating. Probably due to the fact that anyone you tend to speak to doesn't know what a BNG is on the phone... They just recommend I switch to the ISP provided router, bla bla bla.

If you check the Vodafone thread you can see many other people having this issue over the last few yrs. They locked the thread awhile back but you can see some people have made some similar threads about the issue over time. I've been lucky to not have it till recently, and until they put me on the wrong BNG it was fine...

https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Bro...-Latency-way-higher-Gigafast-900/td-p/2710240

So looking forward to switching over to TalkTalk now, so I don't have to deal with this issue anymore.
Thanks for this perspective. It seems both Vodafone and TalkTalk aren't very well regarded for their customer service, but it does seem like TalkTalk's product is better, so I think I will go with them. I just hope the one Eero 6 Pro is enough to get through my thick internal walls!
 
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