I’m looking to arrange broadband at our new home that we move into in July. I’ve no existing contract to move over, so I’m a bit anxious because it’s a semi-rural location and the post code estimates vary wildly in their predictions, and I’m looking at having to commit to a 12-18 month contract.

How on earth can I commit to a significant contract length without knowing what they will actually be able to provide me? should be able to ‘try before you buy’.

SSE seem to be offering the cheapest deal for a half decent speed (says fibre is available, but being a rural postcode I’m bracing myself to find out that it isn’t). Anyone have any experience of SSE? Is there actually any real difference between the suppliers, seeing as they all use a couple of companies infrastructure anyway?

Cheers in advance…

Put your exchange into samknows to see if fibre is really available

Been with them for a year and they seem very good. Customer services are easy to get through to and they actually call you back when they say they will. Getting 32mbit downstream speed about 3km from exchange.

I switched to them about 6 months ago and have had no issues.
Seems more reliable and better speeds than when I was with talk talk, and I’ve had no need to speak to customer services.

What jonk said, what’s available is mostly dependant on what your local telephone exchange is equipped with and whether it has fiber to your nearest street box, and also how long the copper cable from the street box is to your house, which if rural could be quite far.

If you have a post code for the address or a phone number for the property, that will help too, as you Can get all the info from samknows.

Rather than samknows, try this:

http://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.AddressOutput

You can stick in the post code and it will give you the list of houses which you can choose from, or if you know the number you can use that. It’ll tell you if fibre really is available, as well as estimated speeds for that and ADSL services from BT. For a lot of rural houses the cabinet can be fibre enabled, but the copper is too long to support VDSL so it makes no difference…

Once you have your estimated speed, all providers are going to be the same pretty much, as they are likely all to be using BTs network to get to your house. The main difference is price, and the quality of service they provide – how much bandwidth that they have between them and the internet, is it enough to meet the demands of all their customers.

I’m in a similar situation – looking to move to the sticks – the cabinet is fibre enabled by several K from the village so I’m stuck with 2.5meg DSL. If the move happens I’m going to investigate setting up a point to point wifi link to somewhere that can get a decent connection!

The problem isn’t always whether fibre is available according to Openreach, it’s whether the provider is prepared to pay for the initial cost of running it to your house and installing the Openreach modem.

In my case, only BT was telling me that fibre was available, so I’ve been forced to go with them to get it installed. Which is a pretty painful experience so far. Only just over 11 months to go until I can ditch them and hopefully find someone with the faintest idea of how to run a customer service operation.

There are two types of fiber connection though, fiber to (street) cabinet (fttc) and fibre to property. These lines are leased to resellers such as plusnet and tal talk etc.

The speed of The former is reliant on the distance of the copper cable from the cabinet to the house.

fttc is the only likely one rurally, though someone down the road from me apparently paid 9K to get fibre into his house (that no one else appears to be able to benefit from which is odd). He’s either a stock broker or a bull***** don’t know which – but it is a pretty big house!

So if Openreach have run a new cable into my house, rather than use the existing master socket, that means I’ve got FTTP?

BT have today sent me my third Home Hub and Youview+ box, which is a bit perplexing. But should at least mean I’ve got two of each to sell on while I’m waiting for them to sort out my service.

Not necessarily – they could have run a new copper cable in…

If you have fibre to the house you will have an extra modem etc inside, same as about half way down:

My Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) Installation – Part 2

We took out their starting offer of 18months free standard broadband (2 years phone contract) at our new rural house in case the speeds were really poor. Initial contact was good, speeds are as average as we expected, about 4meg, and its been fine since. As far as I know they are just another reseller like the Post office etc, so coverage should be good as theyre just leasing other folks lines afaik.

I’ve just bought the unlimited fibre option for 20 per month including line rental. The internet service and is good and the modem is OK.

Communication was good through the process but fell down at the installation point.

1) they arranged an openreach engineer but one never showed up – thats OK, I already had fibre
2) didn’t get confirmation of change over day so had to guess
3) router admin password (serial number) doesn’t work – haven’t got around to dealing with that yet but all the standard stuff works fine.

Probably not as good as plusnet for service (IME) but they are 1/3 of the price and to be fair I haven’t tried phoning customer service to resolve

to be fair I haven’t tried phoning customer service to resolve

That’s when the real fun starts.

If you have fibre to the house you will have an extra modem etc inside, same as about half way down:

Wooohoo! Got all that. Is that likely to be potentially faster in future, provided I give them lots of money?

I live rural and have done in our last house too. My advise would be to go with BT initially as no one else will do as much to get you connected IME. Once you know youve got an OK phone line/fibre etc. then switch to a cheaper provider after the 12/18 months are up.

In our last place BT replaced a telegraph pole which involved 4x4s a cherry picker, lots of engineers etc. All for £20 per month.

In our current house the BT chap climbed several trees to cut back foliage and got a cherry picker in to replace 100M of cable between our house and the lane we live off. Took them all day.

Wooohoo! Got all that. Is that likely to be potentially faster in future, provided I give them lots of money?

Yes. It’ll be faster than fibre to the cabinet with copper to your house as theres no signal losses. Chap in the linked article was getting close to 200M – other providers (eg. gigaclear) who do fibre to the premise offer up to 1 gig over the same technology. But it’s pretty spendy!!