Broadband provider Aquiss sells services across the Full Fibre Ltd (Fibre Heroes) network, along with services from Openreach, CityFibre, Freedom Fibre and Gigaclear. It has today refreshed its line-up with Full Fibre Ltd with a new 2.5Gbps product as well as new ‘burstable’ product.
- FullFibre 2500 — 2.5Gbps symmetric product expecting to deliver average speeds for 2.3Gbps up and downstream. Priced at £65/month with free install with the first three months at half price (£32.50)
- Full Fibre 1000 Flex — A new product which offers ‘burstable’ speeds up to 1Gbps but stated to expect symmetric speeds averaging at 750Mbps. The original Full Fibre 1000 (with expected speeds of 900Mbps is £44/month (after three months), making the £36/month flex offer a rather significant saving. A Full Fibre 700 product (650Mbps average) is also available for £40/month.
We queried how the Flex product works and were advised it is expected to be more contended, in other words you’re expecting to share the capacity with more users, so your speeds may slow down at peak times. As with everything on the Internet, all services are contended to some degree, but this suggests going a a bit further. It brings back the memories of BT’s 50:1 residential vs 20:1 business services where say 500 users on a 1Mbps service would share 10Mbps uplink (as an example). These ratios may sound incredible but average use wasn’t that high. It would be interesting to discuss with networks how they contend these days, as we know off-the-record from some networks that a user on a 1Gbps package doesn’t necessarily use much more than a 300Mbps one, they just get their downloads that bit faster.
Any tech geeks will be happy to note that a free static IPv4 afdress is standard as is a /56 IPv6 assignment.
Aquiss packages (live from our database)
| Provider | Package | Download speed (average) | Monthly (inc. VAT) | First year cost(inc. VAT) | ||
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It’d be good to try and ask all altnets and OR about contention ratios imo. I believe Openreach are 1:32.
Congestion ratio or PON split? A PON split without knowing the mixture of customers on the PON is largely useless, and how different ISP run the interconnect between Openreach and wider internet has a bigger impact most likely.
Both with all the talk of 8.5gbps, the max of XGS-PON, contention on PON as well as cable link and back haul will again become an issue. Plus many of us like to aggregate lines to mitigate reliability for a fraction of the price of EAD so I believe there’s good reason to know all the line specs.
Irrelevant really. Regulations require 50% of customers to hit the speed advertised at peak. The providers’ problem how it’s achieved.
Just the term contention ratio id meaningless to most people and even fewer know what one actually is.
As evidenced by you using a split ratio as a contention ratio.
Appreciate as a consumer your reporting highlights the full price not the discounted price, and that you looked into the mechanics behind the higher contended product. I am not sure of the merits of a 2nd physical network being ran though, so I wonder if its just some kind of VLAN separation.
I’m not sure of the back-end technicality but it could be done in various ways. I am almost certain it’s not a physically separate network as that would be unnecessarily complicated and expensive. To be honest, I don’t see why 750Mbps on 1Gbps would in any way be a bad speed at peak times. In that way it’s good value.