Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nux | Hacker News Reader

A massive variety of crap, mostly. The only thing that gets close to well connected countries in Europe is BT's Infinity. The rest are just pathetic ADSL offers or throttled-to-hell cable offers (Virgin, now UPC).

View on HN

Other ISPs have access to BTs FTTC (and, in the few areas it's deployed, FTTP) systems. Not every ISP offers this, but there are plenty of alternatives to BT Infinity.

to repeat what Dasmoth calls out - BT Infinity is just fibre laid by Openreach it is available to any operator (Sky etc), BT have just a great job of branding it like you can't get fibre on other providers - except you can.

http://www.sky.com/shop/broadband-talk/fibre-optic/ https://sales.talktalk.co.uk/product/fibre http://www.plus.net/home-broadband/package-guides/fibre-opti...

Mea culpa for not reading properly and thanks for explaining it. It's a shame more ISPs aren't doing it, I for one have not heard of anyone else but BT.

The relevant press release from Ofcom (the telecoms regulator, for those outside the UK): http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/2010/10/supporting-the-uk%E2%8...

BT Retail has just been really good at advertising it, the rest of the ISPs don't seem to have branding budgets to compete.

I have a non-bt fiber package and my speeds beat most of my European friends top speeds. In fact it sometimes beats my Hetzner (German) based servers.

Which isp?

KC Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCOM_Group)

Thanks for the info.

The speed can be amazing but sometimes it goes very very slow. We do have 5 people using it at peak times and the router they gave us is a bit shit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com