Does anyone else recall the deal with fibre broadband?

[N0bodyOfTheGoat]

I've just done a test setup of our new TP-Link NX200 5G SIM router (~£190 from Amazon) with a Three SIM supplied directly from Scancom, one-off fee of £90 for 500GB per month until Jul '28 (it would have been ~£140 for SIM from their Amazon shop, lots of links to direct Scancom deals at HotUKDeals dot com).

The SIM thankfully arrived today having ordered it on Friday, because when I saw it was sent via Royal Mail, I had visions of waiting for it until very close to Xmas!

Literally a case of setting it up while doing as little as possible to our existing landline NowTV BB, taking the PC's cat5 cable out of the NowTV router and putting it in the NX200, which isn't in an optimal position for this test due to free electric point limitations.

I'm not as PC savy as I used to be, but getting this setup working to a wired connection to my pc was very simple. There's a firmware upgrade option that I can either let the route upgrade itself, or I can go to the TP-Link site and download a firmware file, but I'm doing neither for now. When I do, it keeps config settings.

While the https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest results are nothing like as good as I've had on my 5G mobile's Three SIM, but still a respectable ~82/30Mbps compared to our NowTV ~25/6Mbps, the latency for gaming in Rocket League was a rock solid 28-32ms. A quick 800MB download from Steam had a max download speed of 14.8MB/sec, approx 5x quicker than our landline NowTV can manage.

So early days, but happy days so far, looking good to give NowTV 30 days notice in about a week's time if things still look good.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

We have had 2 lots of engineers come out to install 'full fibre*' they keep wanting to stick a big ugly box on the wall outside a bit like the old Sky/BSB fitters of yore, I've told em to go away (in less polite language) they either fit it where I want and where it is tucked away or we'll change provider.

* the box has been sitting in the hall for over 3 years, still in its packaging.

I've had my providers ring me up and say we can do full fibre for the same price you are paying for the standard connection.I ask them what that actually entails.They say we'll have to put a box in by the front door and drill some holes in the brickwork.......Boss said NO!

 

[raleighnut]

I've had my providers ring me up and say we can do full fibre for the same price you are paying for the standard connection.I ask them what that actually entails.They say we'll have to put a box in by the front door and drill some holes in the brickwork.......Boss said NO!

Pretty much the same as here.

 

[StuAff]

I'm still very much liking 900 mbps each way, thank you very much. Does it make much difference most of the time? Nope. As I put it in my talk to the local Apple user group last year...
"Do I need this?
No, no you don’t (but you do want it)
Will it really be much faster?
Frankly, much of the time, you won’t notice much of a difference, if any at all. Email, web browsing, Zoom calls, video streaming- even 8K on YouTube, let alone 4K…if you have a fast enough connection for this now, 900mbps won’t do better. If you can’t play that video/handle that task, it’ll be down to your device not your connection. And if that file you want to download is hosted on a service that can’t or won’t give you that kind of speed, it’ll still be slow- or less slow, your connection might no longer be the slowest part of the chain. And it doesn’t matter."

It really, really doesn't matter. I'm paying less to Toob now for that speed than I would have been to Plusnet for 55-60 mbps downstream. Now, finally, Openreach have done the necessary upgrades and I can get Plusnet FTTP- still more expensive than Toob, even before the baked-in price increases, and much slower upload (115mpbs). Toob are currently offering £25 a month, again (though my renewal was at £29 I got three months free after a call, so actually cheaper)- Plusnet is starting at £30.99, £34.99 from March, £38.99 from March 2027.

Perhaps you never, ever, do large file downloads- be it buying a new game, or an OS update, or so rarely you think higher speeds aren't worth it. Toob offer a 150mbps service (still three times faster than my old Plusnet connection) for £22. Do I want to spend three whole quid a month less for that? I'll manage. But I'll save hours of my time by spending the extra.

For example, I have quite a large library of games (mostly Windows, some Mac) acquired over the years from Steam & the Epic Game Store (most of the latter were of course free....). Once I finally had enough space for them (in 2023, Black Friday deal on an SSD) I gradually downloaded all the Steam games. Three or four hours each in many cases on the old connection, many games now 70-80GB plus, and nothing else doing with it at the time. So that's about an hour if I went 150mbps, much better, of course. Once I had the 900 connection, I downloaded all the Epic library, 1.04 TB at the time. That would have been 42 hours on the old connection, 14 hours on 150 mbps…for me, 2 hours 45. When the macOS Tahoe update was released, the full installer (12GB or so) took about three minutes to download. Might buy Cyberpunk 2077 in the current Steam sale. 159GB…so 6.5 hours, 2.5 hours, or 23 minutes. As for the upload speed, that's about fifty times faster than I used to have. Cloud storage, even for big backups, suddenly becomes accessible and convenient.

Full-fibre doesn't cost more to run, it's not 'wasted' if you aren't using all of it. It won't change life in the same way the first broadband connections did, or even the jump to FTTC from ADSL, as helpful as it was. But when it's an advantage, it's a very, very real one.

PS: Those who 'just don't want it' are out of luck. Just like the analogue TV switch-off, it'll be no upgrade, no service.

 

[SpokeyDokey]

I am not understanding the problem of having a box fitted to an outside wall or having a hole drilled through a wall.

Our box is a small matt grey thing 8" x 6" x 1" with a thin black cable running to it. Pretty unobtrusive and the hole is obscured by the box. The hole also having been properly drilled at an upwards angle from outside to inside.

There is a small single plug sized box on the inside of the house which is connected by cable to the router.

A really neat installation, imo.