Connection problems

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We had, at our old house, a giga bit capability through Virgin Media. We actually ran it at 100 Mb/s as it was cheaper and plenty fast enough.

Before moving here I checked the ADSL speed capability via Openreach and it was estimated at about 18Mb/s. We did a rough test when we visited following agreeing to buy the property. Inside it was getting 17. Grudgingly, this is one of the downsides of country living.

I seriously considered a 4G antenna based approach. One of the providers said we should get the country average of 25 Mb/s but the installation charge of £299 was considerable.

Then I discovered a rural initiative funded by the Government and EU whereby the installation costs would be covered by a grant - "I'll have some of that please!". So we got everything installed for nothing and in internal speed over wi-fi (via a mesh network) as shown below. It took a little bit of tweaking to get it this good but I'm very happy with the service now. Plus, we're not beholden to a telephone line via Openreach.

Be aware that it isn't only download speed that matters. Ping and upload speeds will kill a connection if they are bad too. Although much of the material is downloaded, your systems need to handshake with internet servers to access this data and this is where ping (in particular) is important (the lower the better). If you are working with cloud storage, upload speeds start to factor in broadband decision making too.

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We have fibre to the end of the street, 3 houses away, then ~400m of copper to the house. We pay for and get 50 mbps download and 10 mbps upload speed. 100 mbps is available but our biggest demand is 4K Netflix at ~15 mbps so 50 is adequate.
 
Just tested our speeds - 37mbs download and 10 mbs upload, ping 9ms.

We have never has issues with connection speed. Normally there are just the two of us in the house but even with the family here with several devices being used the system is not stressed.

What are the benefits of a 100mb connection for the average punter - is it like a V8 supercar - it can go faster but is constrained by risks of licence loss. Bragging rights but no real world advantages.
 
Just tested our speeds - 37mbs download and 10 mbs upload, ping 9ms.

We have never has issues with connection speed. Normally there are just the two of us in the house but even with the family here with several devices being used the system is not stressed.

What are the benefits of a 100mb connection for the average punter - is it like a V8 supercar - it can go faster but is constrained by risks of licence loss. Bragging rights but no real world advantages.

The only consideration is that broadband is shared among all users of a system and some is taken "by the pot" (the inefficiencies of the house network). Like you Terry, there's just two of us in our house and 40 odd Mb/s is more than enough. If we had a load of kids sharing the network too, it might be a different matter.

In our old place Virgin Media kept offering faster and faster speeds - total waste of time and money for us. In the end I told them to quote us for a 100 Mb/s service and I went for that (asking for anything slower wasn't worth the effort).
 
They told me it would take 8 days, it took 75, but finally installed today.
 

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Further news after complaints to the highest level with the provider and then to the ombudsman,
I have received <> 6 months free fibre + a free unlimited 4g back up.
 
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