Fibre broadband

[fossyant]

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.

Computer speeds make a difference. I'd say we don't extract the full speed of BT Infinity 2 out of out home requirements - it's usually server download bandwidth. I wish ITV player and some others did HD cachup. We watch tones of Netflix HD content, with the kids gaming at the same time, but believing the stats, our old connection should have done it, it didn't - too much buffering.

 

[SpokeyDokey]

Just signed up for the B4RN rural Broadband initiative that goes live in our little village in around 2-3 months time.

Fibre to house and the speed at the router is 1000mbps. Not that anyone would need that but it future proofs the house so to speak.

 

[Sea of vapours]

Coincidentally, two days ago, I was finally reached by the B4RN (Broadband For Rural North) network. Being very rural here, my not-yet-cancelled copper broadband is showing 1.3 Mbps download and 0.7 Mbps upload. The B4RN connection is showing 873 Mbps download and 976 Mbps upload at the moment. Roughly a one thousand times improvement

 

[Globalti]

All around the country, communities are growing tired of the empty promises of Openreach and are installing their own community broadband. Here's an absolutely inspiring example from Scotland: https://balquhidder.net/

 

[Racing roadkill]

I’ve spent the last 20 years developing the guts of most ISP’s infrastructures. V.O.I.P. and Video were the 2 big drivers. In the U.K. we are still miles behind the U.S.A. But things are improving. At least we don’t see copper anymore ( long replaced by alloy).

 

[ColinJ]

All around the country, communities are growing tired of the empty promises of Openreach and are installing their own community broadband. Here's an absolutely inspiring example from Scotland: https://balquhidder.net/

Would that happen to be somewhere near where you intend to retire to...?

 

[Globalti]

That was the clincher, as much for the broadband as for the kind of people we will have as neighbours, people prepared to muck in and do things.

 

[ColinJ]

That was the clincher, as much for the broadband as for the kind of people we will have as neighbours, people prepared to muck in and do things.

It's an impressive achievement! Not just doing the actual work, but managing to persuade all the landowners to allow the fibre to be laid across their land. I imagine that they would all have to sign some legally-binding agreement that the network could be maintained in the future. (It would be a right pain if somebody took over a property, damaged the fibre, and refused to allow access to fix it!)

 

[bruce1530]

The telcos - and I guess the community broadband people - will not install any infrastructure unless there is a formal wayleave agreement between them and the landowner to allow maintenance access etc.

It’s less hassle now than it used to be, as a result of the 2017 Electronic Communications Code of Practice and a subsequent standard wayleave and costing agreement developed by the National Farmer’s Union and the County Land & Business Association.

 

[ColinJ]

The telcos - and I guess the community broadband people - will not install any infrastructure unless there is a formal wayleave agreement between them and the landowner to allow maintenance access etc.

It’s less hassle now than it used to be, as a result of the 2017 Electronic Communications Code of Practice and a subsequent standard wayleave and costing agreement developed by the National Farmer’s Union and the County Land & Business Association.

Interesting - I had never heard of a wayleave agreement before, but it is obvious why they are needed.

 

[Globalti]

The vast majority of the cabling follows roads and access tracks but last Sunday 30 villagers got together and pulled an 800 ft section of cable manually through woodland.

 

[SpokeyDokey]

Coincidentally, two days ago, I was finally reached by the B4RN (Broadband For Rural North) network. Being very rural here, my not-yet-cancelled copper broadband is showing 1.3 Mbps download and 0.7 Mbps upload. The B4RN connection is showing 873 Mbps download and 976 Mbps upload at the moment. Roughly a one thousand times improvement

That's a good speed.

Will be interesting to see what we get here in practice - the 1000mbps (down and up) at the router is a given apparently. Using wi-fi will obviously degrade it a tad which I guess is what is causing your slightly lower numbers? Not that the drop matters tbh.

Ironically we only had Openreach install Superfast here just over a year ago. We had similar numbers to you prior to that and currently have around 40 Mbps down and 7 Mbps.

We're not expecting any great change to what we experience with Hyperfast apart from better stability as well as future-proofing the house.

One of the factors that make's our B4RN project a little easier (offsetting the terrain issues that we have here) is the fact that one of the UK's main fibre-optic North to South routes lies very close to our village - broadly speaking tracking the A6 road and the Euston to Glasgow rail link.

Makes a change for small rural communities to be at the cutting edge of infrastructure as we are often forgotten about by central and even local government (without wishing to overly-politicise the thread).

One of our upsides is that the cost per month is lower than our BT package - we'll be paying £30 pm pus £8.50 pm for VOIP if we want a landline and the ability to use our mobile phones indoors, via the app' that comes with VOIP (the name of which currently eludes me), is a bonus as we live in a poor mobile phone signal area due to the hills.

Downside is we lose BT Sport and, hence, our Champions League viewing - we'll have to find a way around that!

 

[Globalti]

Watch the YouTube video that's on the Balquhidder site I've linked above.

 

[byegad]

76mg here and thats the fastest we can get. No virgin. We can stream HD movies at the same time as two machines are gaming and others web browsing, you tube. 20mg broadband struggled.

Copper to the house but the green box is only 100m away.

We also have unlimited data, and need it with the kids.

We're 12 miles from the nearest proper town and similarly have fibre to the cabinet some 50 metres away. We get 75. Going Fibre to the house would get just over 100. As we can stream HD TV and have 2 computers and 2 phones browsing at the same time, I see no reason to pay for the last few metres of fibre.

 

[Sea of vapours]

Using wi-fi will obviously degrade it a tad

Quite a large tad unless you have devices supporting 802.11ac connections. 50% reduction in my case, to 400Mbps on most devices. Not that it matters for anything other than moving very large files around. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing a full 1Gbps when wired; equally, I'm not bothered, merely a little interested, but not sufficiently to investigate as yet.

The whole 'dig trenches / drill holes / community' thing is really rather good I think. It certainly took a lot more physical effort on my part than most house services tend to (20m of trenching and tunnelling). The trunking to get to me is several kilometres across fields and under dry stone walls - also pretty pleasing somehow, when it disappears seamlessly within a few days of being laid and covered over.