We move in 5 week to new build house. It's got fibre into building, I can see it physically there. Developer and neighbours tell us that Hyperoptic are the broadband suppliers. Online check tells me it's Hyperoptic as only choice.
Hyperoptic say that they can't supply.
Plusnet our current (and preferred) supplier tell us they think it's locked to a different supplier - but can't see who.
The address was only registered with post office two weeks ago.
Any suggestions of a way forward?
I’d be tempted to say wait 2-3 weeks for everything to catch up… but do appreciate that increases the risk
I've just gone hunting and BT Wholesale site is showing our address as 'in development' but says an order is needed to trigger connection.
I should say that there are 68 of 80 houses built and occupied with broadband, and we are last 3 houses being built...
Knock on some doors and ask who other people are using / how it got activated? (Edit - beaten to it whilst typing)
We were lucky in our new build having a mega local rural fibre provider - so a lady in the village pops in to connect you up after work 🙂.
Still had an additional openreach cable coming in and a massive empty openreach box on the lounge wall (which I've now removed).
Knock on a (new) neighbour’s door?
Ask if you can share their broadband in exchange for some upholstery work? 😉 🙃
Is there a Facebook page for the estate?
Ask on there.
Our local page is hilarious but sometimes informative.
I think some of the newer houses by us are still locked in to some kind of deal but everyone else is now free to choose who they want.
I'd also highlight the physical address may not be on the systems of the various utility providers, it'll be the plot number.
We ran into hassles with that in our new build when it came to changing energy providers. Couldn't change gas supplier as the plot number was on the register rather than the house number and name of the street. Took about 2 years to sort😭
Mobile Broadband?
We’ve been on 3 Mobile for 3 years now. No trouble at all with it, and cheap at £20/month iirc.
Watching with interest. Doing exactly the same though move date not yet confirmed. I don’t think there’s fibre to the building (but not really checked) so may have a bit more flexibility (and want to stay with Plusnet too ideally).
When we moved into our new building (10 years ago now), we were stuck with virgin. Its buried in the contract somewhere. The developer wins as they get the install cost reduced, increasing their margin.
We had a terrible supply as the developer argued to planning and building control that they didn't have to provide fibre due to the cost of building out the site due to technical challenges!
So developer answered it today - they haven't filled in the form yet to tell Open reach it's good to go...amazing speaking to the site manager not sales people for the last week!
So he's promised to do that this week, told me to check in a fortnight.
And we are registered with Open reach, but funnily enough the only company who "can" supply it is BT. Apparently every other supplier will find out they can supply is in a couple more weeks. And of course our current supplier Plusnet now needs 4 weeks notice....
What we are discovering is that it takes 4 weeks notice, but no one will be able to confirm supply more than two weeks in advance. So two weeks without broadband. Which can I remind you has Hyperoptic and Openreach direct fibre into the building....
Seems amazing in this modern world....
Starlink?
Seems amazing in this modern world....
The joys of buying a new house will never cease eh! I found the whole process so overwhelming last year, I very nearly gave up on the whole thing...
With regards to your specific issue though, we spoke with Sky (as we wanted a TV package too), and they were able to get us setup for the day of move in (my GF works from home and broadband is job critical for her, so it wasn't an option for there to be a period with no internet)... Yes, we had to pay for 2-3 weeks of internet with our previous provider at our old house that we never used, but that £20 or so was the least of our worries all told...
A phone call from Hyperoptic today - they sent someone out to 'switch on' at the property so apparently I can now have broadband... Yay...
Question: 1gb or 500mbps. I am thinking that at this kind of speed every part of the 'chain' needs to be fast for us to benefit fully? There's 4 of us, two game, maybe browse netflix, or a couple of Teams meets at same time. We currently do OK on 50mbps, so 500mbps with 'average' hardware and use seems more than fast enough?
The only time you will get anywhere near stretching 500mbps is when downloading a game. I just went from 300 to 500 and can't tell any difference.
Question: 1gb or 500mbps
Ans: 1gb or as much as you are willing to pay. There is no such thing as enough bandwidth, we want more, more, more ... (hardwares upgrade as well to take advantage of the bandwidth)
I've just upgraded from 80mbps to 150.
Downloading something big from a fast server definitely benefits, like from steam or Epic etc.
Day to day there's no practical difference for me, I'd have stayed on 80 for a cheaper monthly contract personally, but the way the prices are currently it made sense to get 150 at £24 per month with no mid contract price hikes guaranteed.
The biggest difference I found with various speed increases over the years isn't one of raw individual performance but of concurrent performance. Like, if I've got several machines updating, the Xbox downloading tens of GB of data because it's not been switched on for weeks, a .torrent coming down somewhere... the rest of the network doesn't grind to a screaming halt for everyone else.
I recently renewed and upped it from 500Mbps to 1Gbps for no real reason than I could. The difference between the two was like £2/month and both were still cheaper than I was paying prior. The only real gain I've seen is on the (hardwired) Xbox, everywhere else there isn't a perceptible difference. At the desktop where I spend most of my days🎵 I get maybe 250Mbps after it's been bounced around the building.
On wifi the wifi card in the pc might not be capable of 1gbps.
Although both my desktops are on wifi and can max out my 150mbps connection individually, im not sure what it tops out at, wifi in the pc I'm using now is wifi 6 (802.11ax)
On wifi the wifi card in the pc might not be capable of 1gbps.Although both my desktops are on wifi and can max out my 150mbps connection individually, im not sure what it tops out at, wifi in the pc I'm using now is wifi 6 (802.11ax)
I think anyone old enough to remember physical media (CD's and DVD's, let alone 3.5" floppies) is conditioned to assume that the slow step is reading the data from the media and that a 52x CD drive (or gigabit internet) will speed things up. But remember that the baseline for a CD was 150kBs
150kBs = 0.0012Gbs (2 channel 16-bit audio @ 44kHz)
52x = 0.064Gbs
1Gbs = 833x faster than a standard CD drive.
The steps after the network card are no longer always trivial when it comes to how fast your connection seems. It's entirely possible for a laptop CPU (or the motherboard) to be the bottleneck when it comes to downloading and installing large updates.
It's entirely possible for a laptop CPU (or the motherboard) to be the bottleneck when it comes to downloading and installing large updates.
I think this is kind of where I'm at. We've one decent gaming pc. Everything else is work laptops and couple of year old phones, or older gaming pc. None of them are going to reach the lofty speeds of 1gbps.... I've gone 500mbps, just for a year and we can see.
Well, two weeks into our new house and a chap from Openreach knocks on the door today. Seems that Openreach messed up the installation/router numbers relative to the house numbers on our estate. So he was sent round to take photo of everyone's pre-installed Openreach kit/modem/box/doofer and correct the mistake. He seemed somewhat glum to find out that due to this absolutely no-one on the estate is using Openreach network.... but also seemed very defensive of the fact that you can move in and order broadband the day you move in for activation in a week, and did not understand that that for us Hyperoptic being able to 'sign up' new customers in advance and activate the day you move in was really rather useful and the reason we went with them.
Piss up.
Brewery.