FTTP comes in a variety of speeds ranging from 40Mbps right up to 1000Mbps (1Gbps). Whilst you will often see these speeds, it is worth remembering that FTTP is a shared service and the speed you achieve on a download is often dependant on the server you're downloading from.
Shared Service
In contrast to leased lines where you pay for a specific speed dedicated to you, FTTP is delivered over cables and equipment that is shared with your neighbours. This means that the speed you achieve when downloading can be affected by how your neighbours are using their service at that point in time. BT Wholesale have stated the following minimum speeds that can be achieved on each of the speed variants during the busiest 3 hour period on any given day (usually the evenings).
| Product (Downstream/Upstream) | Standard Minimum Best Efforts Downstream Throughput (Mbps) |
| 40/10 | 20 |
| 80/20 | 40 |
| 160/30 | 95 |
| 220/20 | 40 |
| 330/30 | 40 |
| 330/50 | 165 |
| 500/165 | 225 |
| 550/75 | 195 |
| 1000/115 | 195 |
| 1000/220 | 225 |
Please note, that even with the above being specified, your achievable download speeds might still be affected by the server you're downloading from.
Other factors affecting your download speed
Servers
It's important to consider, especially with the 1000/115Mbps variant, that not all servers or speedtest sites are able to deliver downloads to you at full gigabit speeds. This is because many servers still themselves only have gigabit ports to the internet and deliver downloads to multiple users at once over these ports. Likewise, the same can and does apply for some speedtest sites/servers.
WiFi
We always recommend that customers hard wire into their routers where possible using ethernet. Most WiFi routers (at the time of writing) and WiFi clients are not capable of utilising full gigabit connectivity.
Routers
Your router may indeed be the bottleneck in some cases. This can be down to the routers PPPoE implementation or maybe the CPU inside the router is just not powerful enough to route traffic at gigabit speeds.
There are also cases where sometimes you'll only see full throughput realised when multiple TCP threads are in use as some routers are not able to utilise multiple CPU cores to service a single TCP thread. In these cases, you could see much less throughput with a single TCP thread and full throughput when using multiple TCP threads.
We can recommend routers to achieve the full throughput of your line, so please get in touch with us for further information.
Our approach
We always aim to have sufficient bandwidth available to service our customer base whether that be at quiet times or busy times. This being said, we run an uncongested network and intend to keep it that way.