What Speed broadband do you want?

[GTG]

I don't believe so. There are ducts to all the houses from the cabinets. It would simply be running about 150m of fibre through the ducts to the house. The BT FTTPoD price structure changed in February this year, meaning you now get the option of a 12 month contract at much lower price, v's a cheaper install (several £k) previously, but tied to a 3 year contract at £300+/month. The new strtucture means you pay more up front, but save more longer term.

BT is rolling out ultrafast in some areas of the UK, whch is effectively the same product, but without the upfront installation: https://www.productsandservices.bt.com/broadband/get-ultrafast/

As I said in earlier posts. BT have put fiber to the house over large chunks of Wales that did not get fiber to the cabinet and are using a method called fiber to the node. Most of the country will have it in the end that did not fiber earlier on.

The put my fiber underground, dug my path, rebuilt my path, installed all the gear. We paid £0.00 as did all our neighbours, just £24.99 a moth unlimited.

Fiber is everywhere here, they replaced all the copper everywhere, the fiber is like a spiders web, everywhere you look when out driving.

 

[Andrew Moore]

I had 300meg virgin and now have 76meg bt/sky.

The bt/Sky doesn’t get throttled. The packet loss is minimal. The latency is superb.

Virgin was great 75% of the time. The other 25% due to packet loss, high latency and throttling was pants.

A solid low latency 50meg line is all you will need the rest is just a waste of time.

 

[Nostromo]

As I said in earlier posts. BT have put fiber to the house over large chunks of Wales that did not get fiber to the cabinet and are using a method called fiber to the node. Most of the country will have it in the end that did not fiber earlier on.

The put my fiber underground, dug my path, rebuilt my path, installed all the gear. We paid £0.00 as did all our neighbours, just £24.99 a moth unlimited.

Fiber is everywhere here, they replaced all the copper everywhere, the fiber is like a spiders web, everywhere you look when out driving.

I don't think bt will be putting any new cables/fibre to my house, I'm ½ a mile down a private driveway. All the bt services are underground.

 

[Neilc28]

As I said in earlier posts. BT have put fiber to the house over large chunks of Wales that did not get fiber to the cabinet and are using a method called fiber to the node. Most of the country will have it in the end that did not fiber earlier on.

The put my fiber underground, dug my path, rebuilt my path, installed all the gear. We paid £0.00 as did all our neighbours, just £24.99 a moth unlimited.

Fiber is everywhere here, they replaced all the copper everywhere, the fiber is like a spiders web, everywhere you look when out driving.

I was under the impression FTTN/FTTRN is copper from a distribution point (node), much like FTTC except it vastly cheaper to deploy from BT but still has the same speed limit. Do you have the node on your premises? As that's a little weird for BT to do that when it would normally cater for multiple households.. Genuine question out of curiosity..

 

[GTG]

I was under the impression FTTN/FTTRN is copper from a distribution point (node), much like FTTC except it vastly cheaper to deploy from BT but still has the same speed limit. Do you have the node on your premises? As that's a little weird for BT to do that when it would normally cater for multiple households.. Genuine question out of curiosity..

The nodes are on every lamp post in sight. As soon as someone orders any type of BT infinity they send out a team of engineers and assess if it is humanly possible to run fiber from the nearest node to your house.

They installed 2 white boxes in the house, the fiber went into one of them and the other is a power back up or something.

Then you plug the modem into the white box and they estimated it can go about 300+ mbps but I picked 55 mbps limit although it always seems to run much faster than that, I seen it hit over 100 so 55 limit is not all that strict really.

 

[GTG]

I don't think bt will be putting any new cables/fibre to my house, I'm ½ a mile down a private driveway. All the bt services are underground.

My one is underground, they feed it through. There are plastic tubes down there and it looked easy to me.

They put fiber down miles of farm lanes that don't even qualify as a road at all.

 

[GTG]

I was under the impression FTTN/FTTRN is copper from a distribution point (node), much like FTTC except it vastly cheaper to deploy from BT but still has the same speed limit. Do you have the node on your premises? As that's a little weird for BT to do that when it would normally cater for multiple households.. Genuine question out of curiosity..

Here it is. They ran the fiber from what I assume is a node directly into the underground BT ducts that had the copper.

 

[Graham]

Here in the South of France they are doing it better as well, The UK is far far behind in the technology side of things with BB.
Here is my pre fiber speed (avg) and 10 mins after they installed it, wow, I was impressed.

 

[afasoas]

200 Mb/s down and 12 Mb/s down with Virgin Media.
~4Mb/s down and 0.7 Mb/s up with the aDSL line, which is used for failover. It should be more and lately has been down for days at a time as the line is degraded. Ongoing battle to get this resolved.

Average bandwidth utilisation over the last year? ~400 Kb/s in either direction.

I'd be quite happy with:
1) 20-30 Mb/s synchronous on both lines
2) IPv6
3) 5 public static IPs
5) Quality redundant peering
6) low latency
7) No traffic shaping or filtering
8) No restrictions on hosting my own services
9) Use my own equipment or an ISP provided modem which I can configure to route rather than NAT
10) 99.95% reliability with SLA
11) Reasonably price (£30-£40 per month including VAT)

I'm probably asking for too much, but the point is bandwidth is really low on my list of priorities. I might next year convert both lines to business lines so that I can get the public IP addresses and then switch to running dual firewalls in a redundant configuration. This means I can upgrade them without breaking my internet connection and be less fearful of a problem with the hardware running the firewall carking it when I'm on-call.

 

[Mr Bump]

In Greece at the Crete house and getting 21mbs to Athens download and 1mbs upload

 

[neil_g]

200 Mb/s down and 12 Mb/s down with Virgin Media.
~4Mb/s down and 0.7 Mb/s up with the aDSL line, which is used for failover. It should be more and lately has been down for days at a time as the line is degraded. Ongoing battle to get this resolved.

Average bandwidth utilisation over the last year? ~400 Kb/s in either direction.

I'd be quite happy with:
1) 20-30 Mb/s synchronous on both lines
2) IPv6
3) 5 public static IPs
5) Quality redundant peering
6) low latency
7) No traffic shaping or filtering
8) No restrictions on hosting my own services
9) Use my own equipment or an ISP provided modem which I can configure to route rather than NAT
10) 99.95% reliability with SLA
11) Reasonably price (£30-£40 per month including VAT)

I'm probably asking for too much, but the point is bandwidth is really low on my list of priorities. I might next year convert both lines to business lines so that I can get the public IP addresses and then switch to running dual firewalls in a redundant configuration. This means I can upgrade them without breaking my internet connection and be less fearful of a problem with the hardware running the firewall carking it when I'm on-call.

Running ha firewalls, now that's dedication

 

[onomatopoeia]

10) 99.95% reliability with SLA
11) Reasonably price (£30-£40 per month including VAT)

I think you'll struggle with getting both of those on a single service, or indeed any kind of minimum uptime SLA on a service provided over the public telephone network infrastructure.

At the moment I have 80/20 on a single FTTC line, a /48 of IPv6 addresses and a /28 of IPv4. The ISP I use does not shape or filter traffic, nor does it block any sites. Latency is good, I host internet accessible servers for SMTP, IMAP, SSH, SVN, HTTP, HTTPS and a couple of others that momentarily escape me. I use pfSense as my firewall and PPP router and my FTTC install is old enough that I have the Openreach (Huwaei) VDSL modem. My single line costs more than you are prepared to pay for two, and I don't get an SLA, because what ISP would offer an SLA when they are dependent on a third party for the inftrastructure to the client premises and backhaul that does not also provide a similar SLA on the wholesale service?

I am considering getting a second line and bonding them (so they both use the same login and the ISP has equipment at their end that sends packets down both links, which I have to reassemble. Though they can also run them as failover), but that will put my costs over £100/month, which seems quite high.

 

[Neilc28]

200 Mb/s down and 12 Mb/s down with Virgin Media.
~4Mb/s down and 0.7 Mb/s up with the aDSL line, which is used for failover. It should be more and lately has been down for days at a time as the line is degraded. Ongoing battle to get this resolved.

Average bandwidth utilisation over the last year? ~400 Kb/s in either direction.

I'd be quite happy with:
1) 20-30 Mb/s synchronous on both lines
2) IPv6
3) 5 public static IPs
5) Quality redundant peering
6) low latency
7) No traffic shaping or filtering
8) No restrictions on hosting my own services
9) Use my own equipment or an ISP provided modem which I can configure to route rather than NAT
10) 99.95% reliability with SLA
11) Reasonably price (£30-£40 per month including VAT)

I'm probably asking for too much, but the point is bandwidth is really low on my list of priorities. I might next year convert both lines to business lines so that I can get the public IP addresses and then switch to running dual firewalls in a redundant configuration. This means I can upgrade them without breaking my internet connection and be less fearful of a problem with the hardware running the firewall carking it when I'm on-call.

Never going to happen on standard connections, because if they did, the leased-line and EFM models would effectively die, losing massive amounts of revenue from Virgin and BT... It's a very nice thought though!

 

[anisah]

Many of you are very fortunate, we live in rural Lincolnshire. On a good day the upload speed is 100kbps (note this is not a mistake it is kilobytes per second) and similarly the download speed is about 1000kbps. We consider this to be really good as a few months ago it was 36kbps and 640kbps respectively. We live about 1.5 miles from the exchange and we have been told, quite emphatically, that there are no plans to upgrade our lines in the foreseeable future - this probably means within my lifetime!

All we can hope for is a major disaster which means the lines have to be replaced as the more modern lines pass by the end of our track, about ¼ mile away. We live in hope of change!

 

[afasoas]

I think you'll struggle with getting both of those on a single service, or indeed any kind of minimum uptime SLA on a service provided over the public telephone network infrastructure.

At the moment I have 80/20 on a single FTTC line, a /48 of IPv6 addresses and a /28 of IPv4. The ISP I use does not shape or filter traffic, nor does it block any sites. Latency is good, I host internet accessible servers for SMTP, IMAP, SSH, SVN, HTTP, HTTPS and a couple of others that momentarily escape me. I use pfSense as my firewall and PPP router and my FTTC install is old enough that I have the Openreach (Huwaei) VDSL modem. My single line costs more than you are prepared to pay for two, and I don't get an SLA, because what ISP would offer an SLA when they are dependent on a third party for the inftrastructure to the client premises and backhaul that does not also provide a similar SLA on the wholesale service?

I am considering getting a second line and bonding them (so they both use the same login and the ISP has equipment at their end that sends packets down both links, which I have to reassemble. Though they can also run them as failover), but that will put my costs over £100/month, which seems quite high.

My post served to illustrate the other aspects of an internet connection that could be prioritised instead of bandwidth.
VM come fairly near to meeting my uptime requirement and to be fair to them, whenever there has been an issue, they have had an engineer out in 48 hours. But their model is based on offering more and more bandwidth in return for jacking the cost up at over twice the rate of inflation.
As for the ISP v. OpenReach fiasco, that again is a feature of a neoliberal approach to essential services.
I'd like to see some municipal owned providers spring up.

 

[Nod]

7.71^ and 1.92v (both Mb/s) here on a much shared Wi-Fi connection. 17.16/11.29 respectively last time I checked at home. TBH, anything's better than dial up used to be, especially since we don't do much streaming.

 

[Bristolian]

We had a power cut yesterday morning and after the power came back on the Virgin router wouldn't reboot properly - que call to VM and another Indian "technician" telling me everything is working okay. After some harsh words he reluctantly agreed to get an engineer to call this morning.

So the engineer rocks up and does a master reset on the router followed by a check on the incoming signal - it's pants! Low power level and loads of noise on the line so he takes a mooch up to the local cabinet and 15 minutes later comes back and tries again. Incoming signal is now within specs so he does a speed test ... 205Mb/s down and 20Mb/s up. All of our computers, tablets and phones are working great - result. Then extra time hits when he reconnects all the extras connected to the router and the speed plummets to about 30Mb/s - Boo! Hiss! A few minutes later he tells me the new WD Home NAS is the culprit - tried different ports on the router/different cables but the result is always the same

We're currently running sans NAS and I'm looking forward to a conversation with WD's tech support in the morning. VM are back in my good books. Just shows how fickle I can be

 

[tijuana taxi]

We get on average 15 Mb/s over copper, not far from the exchange and perfectly adequate for our uses.
Could have Infinity, but seems pointless paying out for something we don't need or want.

 

[Box Brownie]

We get on average 15 Mb/s over copper, not far from the exchange and perfectly adequate for our uses.
Could have Infinity, but seems pointless paying out for something we don't need or want.

Your situation sounds like you are possibly "direct connected" to the exchange i.e. no intervening street cabinet.

I know you said you could get BT Infinity but have BT stated that explicitly because your speed I have only heard of been for those direct connected. Normal fibre is FTTC and as it's name states this is to the cabinet.

 

[Nikon f1.8]

Why do you need 200 -300 Mb/s download speeds ????

We have Sky here at 40Mb/s and it is more than adequate for us, i don't think we could ever use the full bandwidth even with SkyQ, my Mac and the wifes iPad all going at once.

 

[damianmkv]

I'm on VM150 and over the passed 3 weeks have been getting downloads between 10 and 15 mb/s

Called VM, no known faults - we'll send an engineer. 2 days before he was due, they cancelled as there's a fault in the area but when you check the status, there are no known broadband issues.

Last weekend, my down was down to 0.76mb/s..called VM, booked another engineer. Yesterday, they cancelled it again as there's a fault in the area. Check the status, no known issues...

Both call centre people I spoke to say that my router has low power and needs an engineer to check it...I've re-booted it, reset it etc etc

As said above, when VM works it's great but when it fails they're hopeless.

 

[neil_g]

Why do you need 200 -300 Mb/s download speeds ????

.

Multiple users all streaming hd/4k content it comes in handy. Combined with other normal traffic like Facebook, email etc etc it all adds up.

If you're partial to pc games, the frequency in which they release multiple gb patches is frustrating on a slow connection.

Plus vm 200mb is the same price I was paying
for sky adsl at about 15mbps. So why not

 

[tijuana taxi]

Your situation sounds like you are possibly "direct connected" to the exchange i.e. no intervening street cabinet.

I know you said you could get BT Infinity but have BT stated that explicitly because your speed I have only heard of been for those direct connected. Normal fibre is FTTC and as it's name states this is to the cabinet.

Before I retired from BT after working for them nigh on 40 years I had a fairly significant role in the development and introduction of ADSL and Infinity.
Speeds over copper are not only governed by distance, conductor size and sometimes materials used are also important.
Other lesser factors also enter the equation to give a final line loss measurement.

If served direct by copper (known as E/O) the last I knew of was that Infinity couldn't be provided as no Cabinet and accompanying Dslam exist.
My line is made up of entirely copper with reasonably large diameter conductors, also in reasonably close proximity to the exchange.

Not sure if its changed, but even FTTC had a length limit, last I knew it was approx 1.4km from the cabinet.
Daresay technology has changed somewhat in the nearly five years since I left, have to say I didn't feel the need to keep informed.

 

[Box Brownie]

Before I retired from BT after working for them nigh on 40 years I had a fairly significant role in the development and introduction of ADSL and Infinity.
Speeds over copper are not only governed by distance, conductor size and sometimes materials used are also important.
Other lesser factors also enter the equation to give a final line loss measurement.

If served direct by copper (known as E/O) the last I knew of was that Infinity couldn't be provided as no Cabinet and accompanying Dslam exist.
My line is made up of entirely copper with reasonably large diameter conductors, also in reasonably close proximity to the exchange.

Not sure if its changed, but even FTTC had a length limit, last I knew it was approx 1.4km from the cabinet.
Daresay technology has changed somewhat in the nearly five years since I left, have to say I didn't feel the need to keep informed.

Your time at BT and all its previous "names" indeed covered AFAIK many significant changes to the voice and in recent years data comms down an (in many places?) archaic infrastructure. As you say not all is copper........I was told not that long ago there is still a heck of a lot of aluminium (placed for cost savings when copper price went high?) add that to poor & degrading joints it is a wonder that data was possible.

Where we are I am approx 5.5miles from the exchange but some improvements appear to have been made ~ with FRIACO download was under 1Mb/s, got ADSL it leapt to 1.5, then Max ADSL sent >2..........fast forward we now get around 3.2 . These increases under Max with no obvious infrastructure updates would seem to be down to exchange level upgrades/improvements in the kit installed.

FWIW my cabinet which is approximately 500M away has spare FTTC capacity but I have yet to justify the more than doubled cost over ADSL but the upload speed would then make cloud storage backup practical

 

[tijuana taxi]

Your time at BT and all its previous "names" indeed covered AFAIK many significant changes to the voice and in recent years data comms down an (in many places?) archaic infrastructure. As you say not all is copper........I was told not that long ago there is still a heck of a lot of aluminium (placed for cost savings when copper price went high?) add that to poor & degrading joints it is a wonder that data was possible.

Where we are I am approx 5.5miles from the exchange but some improvements appear to have been made ~ with FRIACO download was under 1Mb/s, got ADSL it leapt to 1.5, then Max ADSL sent >2..........fast forward we now get around 3.2 . These increases under Max with no obvious infrastructure updates would seem to be down to exchange level upgrades/improvements in the kit installed.

FWIW my cabinet which is approximately 500M away has spare FTTC capacity but I have yet to justify the more than doubled cost over ADSL but the upload speed would then make cloud storage backup practical

Price of copper not only went through the roof, but more importantly became virtually unobtainable due to unrest in certain African countries.
Who could have foreseen ADSL when Aluminium conductor was originally used, at the time it was purely speech transmission that was guaranteed.

I agree that parts of the underground plant are in a poor state of repair, some of it due to questionable decision making regarding time and money spent on maintenance.
Other factors include lack of space in existing duct routes and in certain places under the highways themselves especially in central London.
Few other little known facts about lack of FTTC is objections to siting of additional fibre cabinets by individuals and other parties.
They need to be within 50m of the existing cabinet and require a mains electric feed for cooling fans (not the same one used by street lighting)

When ADSL first became available software had to be developed to enable loss calculations which ultimately decided who could or couldn't receive the service.
This equation took into consideration all the factors I previously mentioned, in borderline cases engineers in the field made more detailed calculations

Finance has always played a major part, some areas deemed not economically viable, the problem when shareholders need to be satisfied and profit is king.

 

[onomatopoeia]

with FRIACO download was under 1Mb/s

There's an acronym I haven't heard in a while! Would be surprised if you got more than about 0.053 Mb/s in the days of FRIACO, unless you had ISDN 2e where a giddy 0.064MB/s was possible (or double if you used both channels).

 

[Box Brownie]

There's an acronym I haven't heard in a while! Would be surprised if you got more than about 0.053 Mb/s in the days of FRIACO, unless you had ISDN 2e where a giddy 0.064MB/s was possible (or double if you used both channels).

Can't remember the exact figure but now you point out the sort of level.........: scratches head: think it might have been around 350kb/s ???

The one thing that sticks in my head was downloading anything 'big' felt like sucking a thick milkshake through a very thin straw ~ to think now I happily download multi GB sized files via my modest ADSL......it would be a new wonder to have FTTC by comparison!

 

[Bristolian]

Why do you need 200 -300 Mb/s download speeds ????

We have Sky here at 40Mb/s and it is more than adequate for us, i don't think we could ever use the full bandwidth even with SkyQ, my Mac and the wifes iPad all going at once.

It's not all about the down speed. If you're with VM then the up speed is considerably slower than the down - like a factor of 10 - so to get a decent up speed (e.g. cloud backups, etc.) then you need a high down speed.

 

[MK1 Photography]

We are on BT here fibre to the cabinet 1930’ s copper wire we get 22 mbs download and 8 mbs upload and TBH it’s fine.
We live in a lane in Buckinghamshire

 

[seaodyssey]

We used to get 1.7mbs on a good day with a following wind. Talktalk wanted £32.00pm for it's bit of wet string so we Upgraded to FTTC and now get 38mbs for £25.00pm with Vodaphone. Vodaphone and Cityfibre are installing FTTP in our location anytime now but we have no idea on the price, so we may stay at the £25PM option.

Pete