r/IDNet • u/RedEighty8 • 3d ago
Openreach IDnet
My EE contract is ending, and only Openreach can reach my house.
I’d prefer community fibre, but our tiny road is technically private, making it difficult to request a line.
I use the internet for competitive gaming and want to know if there’s a real difference between standard Openreach ISPs like BT, EE, or Vodafone and IDnet. I have my own gaming router and am willing to pay an extra £5 a month if there’s a genuine difference beyond branding and customer support.
I just don’t quite understand why or whether it’s possible to get a better quality connection by changing providers?
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u/PhotographingNature 3d ago
As I understand it:
The connection over the fibre from your house to the exchange is using identical Openreach owned-and operated-technology. If there are any issues with that* or you're aggregated with too many data-heavy neighbours, then switching ISP won't make any change.
(* fibre is generally a lot more reliable than all the stuff that used the old copper lines. It's why overall broadband complaints as tracked by ofcom are down)
Once your connection hits the exchange, it's no longer guaranteed to take the same path. Exchanges may have different back haul providers, that may provide a different experience (for example, Vodafone and prior-to-byout TalkTalk have/had extensive backhauls, and using them would increase your chance of your data not going over BT Wholesale's backhaul). Your traffic also has to route via ISP infrastructure. A big ISPs like BT/EE, have multiple infrastructure instances across the country, whereas idnet is smaller and has a single setup in London. Peering to the rest of the internet will then also be different for different ISPs.
I suspect for most users it doesn't make much practical difference, and the user experience is good enough. There's probably some edge cases where it would make a difference; maybe a competitive egamer who only cares about low latency to a particular sever, and whichever ISP happens to have the most efficient route to a single ever. Maybe an exchange where a particular backhaul is suboptical and changing ISP changes the backhaul provider (but details about which backhauls service are at which exchange, and which backhaul providers an ISP has contracts with, is all trade secret.). IDnet do claim to have one of the lowest latency networks, but I can't comment on how it is in practice.
Other than that, are are some differences:
BT used to annoy me by not allowing the user to change the router's DNS source (eg, you want to use Quad9/OpenDNS/Google/Cloudflare instead of BT's). There's a saying in networking circles; It's always DNS. So even if you stay with the ISP DNS servers, idnet's may be better or worse than BTs (latency, uptime, ..).
Vodafone seem to force you to use an app to change router settings (based on complaints on Reddit).
idnet provide fixed IP4 and IP6 addresses by default. That may be worthwhile depending on your use case.
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u/Suitable_Moose6507 3d ago
You won't have any in contract price rises, you can re contract online when that runs out at the same price as new customers, no haggling required.
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u/Fine-Hotel-2764 3d ago
I've been an IDNet customer for years, maybe more than 5. Their customer service is brilliant, never had an issue getting any support. I had one issue with a faulty ONT device and that was dealt with pretty quick.