Hello STW

I live in a rural-ish area (about 1.5km from cabinet) and have a FTTC broadband connection, supplied by talktalk, which is “40/2” down/up.

My download speeds are pretty decent at about 12Mbps. Up, however, is only 0.5Mbps which is painfully slow for any kind of sending or cloud backup.

Other providers (e.g. BT) do a 40/10 service as standard.

When I speak to Talktalk, they tell me…

There’s a predicted sync speed range for your line give by BT. This gives the maximum and minimum expected speeds both upstream and downstream. The speed range applies regardless of the speed that your service is capped at.

If your upstream predicted range 4Mbps-8Mbps and your router was currently in sync at 2Mbps on our fibre medium service then you’d expect to see speeds between 4-8Mbp on fibre large (or 40/10 if it was available)

Unfortunately your upstream predicted range is only 0.5Mbps – 1.1Mbps, this would apply regardless of which service you are on, medium, large (or 40/10)

I’m struggling to believe this because a couple of Openreach engineers have told me different – that basically, the line length means I lose about 75% of the “top line” speed on both up and down. If I got a 40/10 service, I’d expect my upload speed to improve fivefold.

(I am aware the 80/20 service uses a higher frequency and is more severely attenuated by line length, so it’s unlikely to provide a benefit.) (Also, to complicate matters, none of the online availability tools recognise my relatively-new postcode or even my phone number)

Can anyone tell me who’s right here? Talktalk or my friendly Openreach engineers?

Cheers!

Bob

Are you certain that you’re on FTTC?
They look more like ADSL speeds…

+1 for ADSL.

In which case it syncs to the highest frequency it can, although playing around with the termination in your house might help a bit.

(I used to work for a company making ADSL modem chipsets but I never really understood all the magical low-level stuff).

Case for: I’m paying for Fibre. The Openreach engineers digging around in the cabinet on an unrelated phone related issue a few weeks back didn’t doubt I was on Fibre.

Case against: Your doubts. Talktalk do not fill me with confidence.

How would I check? You have me thinking!

My router says Line Standard = VDSL, but I’m not sure that clarifies things.

Because none of the online availability tools recognise my postcode or phone number (including talktalk!) I struggle to get any kind of info!

It does sound like ADSL speeds but VDSL is faster, I’m presuming you have an openreach fibre modem and your router?

All connected to the phone entry point at the house and no extensions? All connections in good nick and tested with a PC on a cable not on wifi?

Look at your router – it should give you a clue as to what your on.

Sounds about right for fibre at that distance from the cabinet. We’re 1.5km from our cabinet and get 10 down and 0.9 up.

I’ve had the BT engineers out and they say that my line is being limited and although it could be increased it would be flaky.

We’ve had the installation for 18 months and TBH it’s fine, and I work from home in IT business and have 3 teenage daughters who stream everything all the time.
I have a 40Mb connection at another house (300m from the cabinet) and I can’t really tell much of a difference unless downloading > 1gb.

Modem/router is the Talktalk “superrouter” (Huawei) for fibre connections. It’s connected to the master socket and I am absolutely 100% sure there are no internal issues/interference – I’ve had several Openreach guys confirm that after numerous visits for another fault.

The downstream speed is consistent with FTTC at my distance from the exchange so I need to assume I am getting FTTC. (EDIT – like sharkbait says)

My big question then is around the 40/10 vs 40/2 products and whether the upstream component would improve with the former, given no other changes to equipment or line?

Cheers all

B

I have a 40Mb connection at another house (300m from the cabinet) and I can’t really tell much of a difference unless downloading > 1gb.

Sharkbait be thankful you have girls then 🙂 I’m guessing most of their streaming is faceache and youtube rather than 20GB game downloads for their consoles

This is true!

My router says Line Standard = VDSL, but I’m not sure that clarifies things

Thats FTTC for sure then!

How is the quality of your line for voice calls? There is some pretty ancient copper in the UK and the *DSL standards can only do some much with frayed damp twisted pair!

Actually it seems that 10 down when 1.5km from the cabinet is slow according to this.

Now When I had a BT engineer round he insisted that I had over 3km of copper before the fibre connection, which confused me because I really am 1.4km from the cabinet and I reckon I can trace the phone line all the way – but I decided he was right because he’s the ‘engineer’. But I’ve just realised that his distance figure would actually take me to the exchange in the village.
I thought the idea of the fibre enabled cabinets was to get exchange speed at the cabinet.

Are you certain that you’re on FTTC?
They look more like ADSL speeds…

FTTC is ADSL!

FTTC means “Fibre To The Cabinet” and then good old twisted pair phone cable from the street cabinet to your home (which is just ADSL or a derivative thereof).

If you’re a long way from the cabinet, you’ll have poor ADSL speeds and fact the Cabinet has a nice fat Fibre connection is irrelevant.

My big question then is around the 40/10 vs 40/2 products and whether the upstream component would improve with the former, given no other changes to equipment or line?

Hmm. Been a while since I did anything fibre related (including the world’s most painful wholesale deal with BT Openreach for 80/20).

You need to remember that the line behaviour is “balanced” for the optimum between speed and accuracy using dynamic line management (DLM). Each operator uses its own DLM (i.e. that’s with TT, rather than BTOR). It may well be that this is set to permit the optimum down/up for your line. It is largely automatic (running on various algorithms) but there can be a manual element to it IIRC.

Phone TT back and insist the tech team put you through to the Service Management Centre (SMC). This is UK based and the highest level of customer tech resolution.

If you don’t get anywhere, email me and I’ll see if I can get someone to look into it.

Yeah, kinda, except that the line type is VDSL on the router and not ADSL. My router (luckily) can do both ADSL and VDSL, so the change from ADSL to FTTC was a simply matter of changing profiles.

I do not think that a normal ADSL router can talk VDSL/FTTC because the frame type or something is different.

To anyone who thinks those speeds look like “normal” ADSL, ADSL maxes out at 24Mbit down and around 2MBit up. Anything higher than that is not normal ADSL, generally cable or FTTC.

Upload is generally shoddy unless you pay good money for it *and* are well connected. I decided to move my off-site photo backup to Amazon Glacier recently and waited until Christmas when I could just leave my computer uploading for 10 days.

If you’re 1.4km from the cabinet that that just sucks, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. Unless you go for FTTP (premises), which may (will) involve a huge installation cost to lay a piece of fibre to your house.

Ok, FTTC / vDSL is fibre to the cabinet, your service is delivered to your house on a length of copper wire from the cabinet. Between the cabinet and exchange is a fibre optic link with virtually no loss of speed etc.
ADSL is supplied to your property from the exchange by a copper wire.

FTTC works best when the length of copper is as short as possible. The tail off in speed is quite significant once the copper gets over 1km in length.
Given that your download speed on FTTC is about a quarter of the max service speed, the upstream is similarly about a quarter of the max speed I’d say that your speeds are about right.
If you go to sam knows and put your details in, it should give you an idea of the speed over ADSL and give you an idea of how that would compare instead.

If you go to sam knows and put your details in, it should give you an idea of the speed over ADSL and give you an idea of how that would compare instead.

We had about 2.5 up before changing to ‘fibre’ and now about 10.

What happens if you plug the router into the test socket (remove the NTE5 faceplace)?

How dare you suggest such Cougar, you know the demarcation point as much as I do 😉

@ourmaininthenorth – cheers for that. I’m in discussion with a talktalk person via their support forums and have challenged his assertions on how it works… if I get a satisfactory response, great, but if not I’ll seek out the SMC.

Fibre

#jealous

Edukator – Troll

Fibre
And that is relevant to the UK how exactly??