British Expats - Ya.com or is it Nah.com?

Quote:

Originally Posted by peterthepainter (Post 6096332)

Most notably this business of (to quote Ya.com sales) "their control over the line and therefore the technology at both ends, makes it better now" :unsure:

It seems to me, the only likely difference with Ya.com billing me for the line is in the accounts department, and has no bearing on telephony hardware or software anywhere?:sneaky:

Rubbish, I'm afraid. The biggest restriction to upload/download speeds is due to contention ratio i.e. installed capacity vs available network capacity. This is called backhaul, and this restriction occurs far upstream of the local network.

In other words, a 20:1 contention ratio does NOT mean that you and 19 other neighbours running at 1Mbps share a single 1Mbps connection, it means perhaps you and 3,099 customers share a single 155Mbps connection.

Smaller providers generally have significantly less (orders of magnitude less) network capacity and redundancy behind them. How this affects real-world performance in somewhere like the UK can depend on 101 factors... in Spain, this becomes 1,001 different factors!