Fibre broadband

[keithmac]

We're on Virgin Media, 100mbps.

With both kids on YouTube/ Netflix on their tablets and us streaming a film to the TV it doesn't break a sweat.

Been extremely reliable over the 10 years we've had it in our house.

The Superhub 2 was a good upgrade, I got 80+ mbps over wifi (5ghz) when testing a few months back.

We had broadband over BT at work and it was horrendous, they've gone over to fibre for a reliable connection.

Was offered 200mbps from Virgin but honestly can't see the need for it..

 

[bruce1530]

I’m involved with a small charity which depends on internet access. This is in pretty much a city centre location.

The green box in the picture below is the fibre cabinet which serves our street and the surrounding area.
Our front door is the one with the roller shutter. The fibre box is literally half a dozen paces from us.

Yet we are the only building in the street that cannot get fibre broadband!

 

[keithmac]

^^ You honestly couldn't make it up!.

 

[bruce1530]

It’s because we are connected to the black cable which you can see going along the wall. Which then drops down the channel at the corner of the building, and into the ground. And re-emerges at the exchange, a mile and a half away!

You would think that getting that cable re-routed to a box just a couple of yards away would be a quick simple job.... but it seems that yes, we’re on schedule to be migrated, sometime within the next 2 years....

 

[Dan B]

If you try ordering a second line and a broadband at the same time (known as "Sim Provide" apparently ) then I wonder if that would be provisioned from the cab next to you instead of running another mile and a half of cable. Might be worth a try. You can cancel the old line once the new one is up and running.

http://forum.kitz.co.uk/ has a wealth of posts about what you can and can't persuade BT OpenReach to do and how to go about it. Changing your cabinet seems to be one of the more complicated/less likely options

 

[Sandra6]

You don't realise how good it is until you have to manage without.
We moved to a new build estate a year ago and Persimmons and open reach somehow fell out over the whole issue so we didn't get it. At the end of my street, within sight of my house, is a fibre cabinet, yet we have copper. We get less 0.5 meg some days. We've never gone over 1.

 

[ColinJ]

[QUOTE 4715400, member: 45"]So he's stuck with about 5 gig through his phone cable.[/QUOTE]
I assume that you mean 5 Mb/s!

 

[SpokeyDokey]

I've moved out of the city & into the sticks, used to get 300mb/s on cable, now get 50mb/s. I've gone back in time 10 years.

Much better than the 2mb/s that we get here.

 

[ColinJ]

Ooh, my cabinet is now officially at the 'design' stage, with fibre BB available in the coming year!

They put the plastic pipes for the fibre in a few weeks ago - LINK.

I am only about 200 metres from the cabinet so hopefully I will get full speed.

Hmm - the new cabinet was installed before Christmas but they are supposedly still waiting to get a power cable to it. Openreach have been saying that it should be working within 4 months for ... at least 4 months!

Anyway, hopefully it should be connected up soonish but I am now wondering if it is going to be worth me spending the extra money... I typically currently get 14-16 Mb/s and I live alone so that bandwidth is mine, all mine! It is fast enough for general web browsing, Netflix, iPlayer in HD and so on. I don't have a 4K TV and probably won't get one in the foreseeable future.

I am 200 metres from the cabinet so I am likely to get just over double the download speed that I get now. The improvement in upload speed should be more significant - I only get 0.75 Mb/s at the moment.

I do like a really snappy Internet connection but am I likely to notice much change? If webpages that currently take 2 seconds to load start loading in well under a second then that will be good. I am a very quick reader so I like to be able to browse through sites at full speed.

I was wondering if all of the handshaking that goes on when downloading complex pages will be sped up significantly by the much quicker upload speed?

 

[smutchin]

Hmm - the new cabinet was installed before Christmas but they are supposedly still waiting to get a power cable to it. Openreach have been saying that it should be working within 4 months for ... at least 4 months!

Anyway, hopefully it should be connected up soonish but I am now wondering if it is going to be worth me spending the extra money... I typically currently get 14-16 Mb/s and I live alone so that bandwidth is mine, all mine! It is fast enough for general web browsing, Netflix, iPlayer in HD and so on. I don't have a 4K TV and probably won't get one in the foreseeable future.

I am 200 metres from the cabinet so I am likely to get just over double the download speed that I get now. The improvement in upload speed should be more significant - I only get 0.75 Mb/s at the moment.

You're in pretty much exactly the same situation as me - we're currently about a mile from the cabinet but a new cabinet was installed before Christmas, probably a bit less than 200m away, and we're still waiting for it to be connected. We had a BT engineer round a couple of days ago to check for a fault on the line because we've been having a few problems and he tried to investigate the new cabinet to see if it was active but couldn't even get inside it. Hard to get any information out of BT about when it will be up and running.

Like you, my current download speeds are more or less OK (around the same as yours), but it's the upload speed that really concerns me - we get 0.56mb on a good day, which is a problem for me because I work from home and need to be able to share files with colleagues.

As I understand it, once the new cabinet is online, we should be able to get the increased speed on the same package from our ISP (Sky) so it won't cost any more for faster internet. But maybe I'm mistaken in that.

 

[ColinJ]

Hmm - the new cabinet was installed before Christmas but they are supposedly still waiting to get a power cable to it. Openreach have been saying that it should be working within 4 months for ... at least 4 months!

Damn - I had been checking the BT Wholesale ADSL checker since April and until last night it had been showing FTTC would be available here from today, but now it says that it will be March 31st, 2019!

I don't really need it for downloading - ~15 Mb/s is quick enough for HD streaming and I won't be going to 4K TV any time soon. I don't often share the connection with anybody else. If I started doing regular big uploads (e.g. to a YouTube channel) then I would want a faster connection than the 0.75 Mb/s upload speed that I get now.

 

[fossyant]

Fibre isn't all that quick - it also depends on the servers - but, going from 20mb to 76 mb means we aren't causing any 'gaming issues' when we download/stream movies as well as two kids gaming, 20mb used to jitter a bit, despite the bandwidth being downloaded being within range.

It's improved 'response rate' that's better with fibre. Don't expect massive improvements Colin if your broadband is working well.

 

[ColinJ]

Fibre isn't all that quick - it also depends on the servers - but, going from 20mb to 76 mb means we aren't causing any 'gaming issues' when we download/stream movies as well as two kids gaming, 20mb used to jitter a bit, despite the bandwidth being downloaded being within range.

It's improved 'response rate' that's better with fibre. Don't expect massive improvements Colin if your broadband is working well.

I am using my old laptop today (and generally do) because I prefer its keyboard and trackpad to those on my new one. This one can feel quite sluggish on certain websites and I had been blaming my broadband for it, but when I visited the same sites on my new laptop they seemed really responsive in comparison. Obviously the speed of the laptop must be a significant factor too.

I haven't uploaded much to YouTube, but when I did do it, it was painfully slow. I'd definitely appreciate > x10 faster upload speeds for that.

 

[Kajjal]

The thing to watch out for with home internet connections is there are two sides to it.

The first is what speed your home will connect at and how stable it is.

The second is the capacity and quality of your ISP's infrastructure.

You can have a really high speed and stable connection from your home but due to your ISP having poor quality, under capacity infrastructure the actual speed and quality of connection you get in use is very poor. Nothing at all to do with your end and if you changed to a good quality ISP the performance would be a lot better with nothing being changed at your end.

 

[ColinJ]

The thing to watch out for with home internet connections is there are two sides to it.

The first is what speed your home will connect at and how stable it is.

The second is the capacity and quality of your ISP's infrastructure.

You can have a really high speed and stable connection from your home but due to your ISP having poor quality, under capacity infrastructure the actual speed and quality of connection you get in use is very poor. Nothing at all to do with your end and if you changed to a good quality ISP the performance would be a lot better with nothing being changed at your end.

I have been with PlusNet here for 3 years now and the performance has been pretty good.

I am only 250-300 metres from the cabinet and that is about 500 metres from the exchange so I should be able to get a pretty quick fibre connection when they eventually hook up the cabinet.