Not sure if many other UK guys have had a chance / desire to move to one of the FTTC providers - thought I'd put in a few thoughts here. I'm in London, was previously with Be (had 26ms to foppa!) and am now with BT Infinity.

Sync

I sync at the full 80/20 - modem reports max attainable of around 85meg and it's been steadily decreasing from 93meg about 12 months ago - presumably cross talk as more people sign up. Hopefully it doesn't drop too much further. Not sure how far I am from the cabinet - guessing about 150m.

# xdslcmd info --stats
xdslcmd: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: Showtime
Retrain Reason: 0
Max: Upstream rate = 33119 Kbps, Downstream rate = 88236 Kbps
Path: 0, Upstream rate = 20000 Kbps, Downstream rate = 79999 Kbps

First hop latency is roughly the same as Be ADSL was - about 5-6ms. There's no control over interleaving though and BT love mystery DLM, so that's not necessarily guaranteed. Earlier in the year, I think someone had some fancy lights for NYE which introduced some noise on the line - showed as packet loss on my f8lure graph. The PL stopped about 1am, but about 4am DLM kicked in and added interleaving, increasing first hop latency to around 16ms. It took 3 weeks for DLM to decide to take interleaving off again.

Routing

Routing with BT is less than satisfactory though. Despite the 5ms first hop, I get around 20ms to BBC, as my traffic is sent to what looks like Sheffield and back. This graph from a London based server to my IP demonstrates base latency:



A traceroute from a little while ago to bbc:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms a.router [10.1.1.254]
2 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms slowhop2 [217.32.147.97] <--- Yay it's only 6ms first hop!
3 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms randhop3 [217.32.147.142]
4 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms randhop4 [213.120.181.142]
5 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms slowhop5 [217.41.169.197]
6 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms slowhop6 [217.41.169.109]
7 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 109.159.251.235
8 22 ms 27 ms 24 ms core2-te0-13-0-2.ealing.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.251.139]
9 16 ms 22 ms 83 ms peer2-xe10-1-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [109.159.254.116]
10 19 ms 18 ms 17 ms 194.74.65.42
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 22 ms 28 ms 22 ms ae1.er01.rbsov.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.46]
13 18 ms 19 ms 21 ms 132.185.255.134
14 18 ms 20 ms 19 ms 212.58.241.131

Foppa ends up being about 34ms, which is alright, but a bit frustrating when there's so much pointless latency in there, especially when Be ADSL was actually better for QW. Think UK is the only place I get 26 now, except for maybe some french servers in Roubaix.

This routing isn't universal, as I've seen people in east/south-east London get around 7ms to BBC - it seems to affect those in the west more commonly. Not sure about up north.

Other performance

Aside from the routing issue, it's very good. Jitter is effectively 0, even while someone else in the house is watching Netflix and I've got a SC2 stream and Spotify running in the background. The extra bandwidth is very very nice. Torrents are throttled in the evening, but I don't think this applies to anyone who signs up now - it's because I'm on the 'legacy' product and wasn't prepared to re-contract. This isn't related to QW though so no more!

I'm moving to Sky FTTC in about a week, who from investigation appear to have a less stupid network - will update after that happens.

you seem to change providers alot!

Hmm, I don't think I do? I just talk about it a lot.

Initial signs are pretty good:



Can almost get 25/26ms to foppa with a proxy, it hovers around 27ms. Might change over time - I think the tdc route is much faster. Get 13 in UK and 38 it seems to Pangela!

If you have a *perfect* line (and from your sync speeds you're pretty close), vdsl2 in the UK is very good for gaming.. with some caveats.

The ISPs, including BT, have no control over interleaving on vdsl. DLM is completely autonomous.
If you have CRC errors (which hopefully you won't on your decent line), the DLM will apply interleaving and the first hop will increase by 8ms, then 16ms, then 24ms etc. as more interleaving is applied to control the errors.
On a marginal line, like mine, the interleaving level will yo-yo up and down and there's not a lot you can do about it.. unless you use a third party router like a Fritz!Box 7390 to increase the SNR and reduce the line speed.

ISPs actually have a choice of three customer DLM profiles in the UK with vdsl - stability, balanced and speed. The 'stability' profile applies high levels of interleaving and will probably be shit for gaming, 'speed' applies as little interleaving as possible (great), and 'balanced' is err.. balanced. They can switch individual customers between these profiles.
Unfortunately, most ISPs don't offer this information to customers, and will actively refuse to switch DLM profiles. Zen adopt the 'speed' profile as standard, and allow you to change, but they are the only ISP I know of who do.

I've been on VDSL2 for 8 months now, and when it works, it's great. Unfortunately "Openreach", the company who actually maintain the infrastructure nationwide, are SHIT. In the past 8 months I've had 6 engineer visits, including a complete re-wire from the master socket to the underground cables. On some occasions the line has been down for days on end. I have a ADSL connection in the same house (Xilo / Uno) which has had no downtime over the same period with the same pings, just not the same speed :>

tl;dr : VDSL in the UK is good on a good phone line, otherwise avoid


edit: I'll so some traceroutes from zen / xilo later if cba