[Closed] Superfast broadband upgrade, coming to the boondocks

Let me know what happens; BT have been hauling fibre optic cables through the tubes under our pavement so I'm interested.

They are doing Much Marcle Mark! End of March apparently. Since my eldest has been claiming 'media povety' with our 3meg ish on a good day if it's not raining, this is good news.

If we get 10 meg (2km away) consistantly I'll be delighted.

Although the exchange will be fiber enabled it doesn't mean your standard ADSL speeds will change. They will simply be able to offer you their fiber package.

This still uses the copper from the exchange to your house so is still line length dependent and will still cost more.

[img] [/img]

Can I take the opportunity to post this up? Fibre to the house, suddenly Hull isn't such a backwater 😉

Had my parents upgraded last week - location-wise - very similar circumstances and speed to what you have. The new speeds haven't settled down, but 50-75Mbps down and 15-17 up are common.

EDIT: the above speeds with Fiber.

I could help though even if they don't fibre to your door.

The copper to our door is capable of supporting 5MB at least. With BT, SKY or anybody else other than TalkTalk from our exchange the best we could get was 0.5 to 1MB at best. That was purely down to the number of people on the exchange and the kit and line capacity out of the exchange. So a backbone upgrade on the exchange could do wonders still.

Actually the it's FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) so the fibre goes from the exchange to a large green box in the street. You'll then have a copper connection from your house to the cabinet as you do now (tho using VSDL instead of ASDL). Assuming the cabinet isn't too far from you and you get in before the neighbours take all the capacity, you should be golden.

Stoner, with Fibre (FTTC) distance from the exchange isn't relevant. Its how far you are from the cabinet (green box on the street) and whether your particular cabinet is enabled. The speed drops off quite dramatically if you are more than 1km from the cabinet too.
You can have FTTC in the local exchange, but if your cabinet isn't enabled you cant have it.

Its how far you are from the cabinet (green box on the street)

In my parent's case - they are about 200m from the green cabinet.

It also depends whether the thieving barstewards think they can make enough profit from your cabinet. If they can't you're stuffed.

Moved to BT Infinity this week on their unlimited "bling" package.

I'm about 100m from the street cabinet and get 75Mbps download, 15Mbps upload. All depends how close your local fibre-enabled cabinet is.

Exchange <-Fibre-> local cabinet <-Copper-> Your house

I haven't gone blind yet.

Stoner, find your cabinet (just follow the telephone poles and they'll lead you to it). We're getting our soon but we're 1.2km away from the cab so will 'only' get about 17Mb download..... better than the 2 we get now but not as sweet as the 39 I'm on right now by the beach!

Don't fall in the trap of thinking you have to get FTC fibre from BT, have a look round and see what other companies are doing. I get mine from Plusnet (which some pedant will now point out is owned by BT). Unlimited usage 60 Mpbs down, 12 Mbps up for me.

Any company which resells BT broadband can resell FTTC.

we're about the same distance as you from the exchange and get high 20's to mid 30's. High of 38mb on a supposed 40mb line.

cheers guys. I guess the question is whether they will take fibre from the exchange to the our village green box. I was hoping our ADSL would improve even if they didnt but I guess it wont.

We are about 4-500m from a green box but the green box is 4km+ from the exchange. Do they have to dig up the main road to get the fibre from exchange to village box? (The exchange is the next, bigger, village further along).

They'll run the fibre through the existing ducts or on the existing poles. How many houses are served by the green box? Is there convenient power? If the answer is "lots" and "yes" you're laughing.

<edit>Unless your wiring is aluminium</edit>

I think we're aluminium.

Thats you then, unless its 6061-T6.

From what I've read aluminium is something of a downer - luckily we've had all our cabling between the house and cabinet replaced within the last 3 years.
Stoner you could see if you could get fibre to your property. Would cost about £3K installation but monthly costs are the same. You get around 300Mb down then!!

We are about 4-500m from a green box

Don't assume it's "the" green box*. They're either upgraded or just newly installed boxes. You can spot them - taller than usual and with apitched (ie not flat) top.

I remember having fibre on only the third enabled exchange in the country. Now I live in the Northern Boondocks wet string gives a faster signal....

Don't fall in the trap of thinking you have to get FTC fibre from BT

Ah, the old BT marketing machine. And to think, they claim they're not a monopoly....

They're talking of speeds "Upto 80Mbps", but Im guessing that's for those right on the fibre yes?

Yep. Similar effect to ADSL, only the run of copper is much shorter, and that's the bit that slows over distance.

I think we're aluminium.

As is most of the Lake District - when aluminium was way cheaper than copper in the 60s, it was used widely in these areas. Of course, they hadn't envisaged its use for data transfer, at which it's pretty dire.

With luck, the PCP upgrade may result in a copper upgrade to the home.

*If you lot can use ADSL and VDSL freely, please call it a PCP (primary cross connection point).

Am on talktalk. Was getting 2.5 Mbps down and 0.5 up. Upgraded to fttc and now have 7 down and 1 up. Home to cabinet is 1.2km. Judging by what you are all getting, I'll be putting a long support call in on Monday.

TBH, we'd be more likely to install a shared WiMax system in the church tower that's across the road from the the green box rather than replace aluminium.

Will see what happens over the course of the year.

[quote=Stoner said]TBH, we'd be more likely to install a shared WiMax system in the church tower that's across the road from the the green box rather than replace aluminium.
Will see what happens over the course of the year.

Streaming grot 24x7 from the Church tower 😆

Modern day call to prayer ? The minaret of filth 🙂

WoooHooo!

Just seen a news report that there's been another £1m thrown at BB in our county that explicitly is allocated to our village (among others) so that means fibre to the green box 600m away, definitely. I wonder if it means some investment in the last mile too? Either way it's going to mean huge leaps in speed here. 🙂

A tory MP round these parts is in a v safe seat so could sit back and not bother with much, but ours has been banging BT and the dept of Media & Culture & Sport around the back of the head about broadband for ages so fair play to her.

There was activity around the Green Box locally, digging up of tarmac and stuff, so I'm hoping that a fibre upgrade might be in the offing.
The box is over the road from me, I could chuck stones at it from my front gate... 😉

we're getting it in June, apparently

prepare for a slew of "what HD streaming deathporn site" questions

One day I too will reach the fabled 1mb/s that I currently dream of, despite being a 10min drive from the capital...

Hmpfff.

I was due to get it feb, then march, now its april-september.

So don't hold your breath....

A tory MP round these parts is in a v safe seat so could sit back and not bother with much, but ours has been banging BT and the dept of Media & Culture & Sport around the back of the head about broadband for ages so fair play to her.

Careful now, you're starting to sound like you might be thinking about voting Tory.....

Double WooHoo!!!! - just seen the contractors pulling cable through conduits from the exchange direction to the green box in the village.

Coming soon to a househusband near you soon: more high speed, HD grot than you can shake a soggy stick at!

So how long from now does it take them to glue the pipe into the magic box and get us all connected up to superspeeds?

So how long from now does it take them to glue the pipe into the magic box and get us all connected up to superspeeds?

That varies depending on contractor and the urge they have to complete that particular box. They'll need to sort the kit at the other end of the line too which may take time.

[img] [/img]
Fibre to the house, varying between 35/45 Down and 17-20 up, I could go higher if I paid more.

I'm in a modern housing estate on the edge of a decent sized city, and I get crap all.

Stoner you're still looking at a couple of months before they'll take orders I think.
How far from the cabinet are you? We're 1.2km by road but BT say it's more like 3km - we 'only' get 12mbps 🙁
Possibly tempted by fibre to the property, but I've been told by a guy who probably should know about these things that physical connections will likely become obsolete and we'll connect wirelessly to a local 5g hub.

Depending on your area Stoner you may have an equivalent of our local site [url= http://www.connectingcambridgeshire.co.uk/ ]Dreams of one day getting more than 1Mb[/url]! Unfortunately it doesn't seem to detail any other regions this has been done for.

December2014-March2015 for me, I may even be able to watch a whole youtube video without caching by then, maybe!

Ah well, Im sure those vultures at BT will be in touch as soon as they sniff an opportunity to sign me for a superfast contract.

Maybe they'll have one of their winter/spring/summer/autumn "sales" that are the same as the previous season sale :rolls:

https://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/WMHSW I presume. Checking ours we also have the same date for FTTC, but not for FTTP https://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/WMPOW - they have been doing quite a bit of work here, and I know they were putting in new cables.

Not sure how much difference FTTC will make, given we're doing fairly well on old fashioned copper since they upgraded us to ADSL2+ which you don't seem to have got (more than doubled our speed)
[img] [/img]

Yes, we're Hanley Swan exchange here. Whats the diff between FFTC and FFTP?

Anyway, a baked bean tin and some taught string would be an improvement on our current speeds:

[img] [/img]

and that's not even in the evening. iPlayer is pretty much unwatchable at night.

Uncannily like Toby1 for speed of getting things up and running - I saw the bloke fitting the green box just before last Christmas and things were up and running in March.

You should have super high speed grot for Christmas.

Ah well, Im sure those vultures at BT will be in touch as soon as they sniff an opportunity to sign me for a superfast contract.

Whats the diff between FFTC and FFTP?

Whats the diff between FFTC and FFTP?

Fibre To The Cabinet, Fibre To The Premises

Anyway, a baked bean tin and some taught string would be an improvement on our current speeds:

Ouch!

As nice as it might be to have faster, TBH our current speed is plenty good enough for what I do (I have a feeing it's now better than the school which pays lots for a dedicated line) - I first noticed we'd got the speed boost when downloading some Linux ISOs and they'd arrived before I realised.

My brother is in tewkesbury and he has 60Mb. He thinks he shouldnt have paid for such high speed when he could survive quite happily on 20Mb which would have cost less.

Samknows suggests "RFS date set : 30/09/2014"

wuddat den ?

Where's my sexy goats ??!! 👿

He thinks he shouldnt have paid for such high speed when he could survive quite happily on 20Mb which would have cost less.

seems to me (not having researched all that much) that the benefit of FTTC looks to be better deals on quite big data usage (2 kids, new smart TV, and 2 parents who work at home quite a lot) rather than massive speed (I get > 15 already)

when downloading some Linux ISOs

Yup. We need all this bandwidth for the distros....juuuuust the distros. 😀

As an aside, I have a 152mb connection now, it's ridiculous. Thing is, with Virgin Media, it doesn't really work out massively cheaper to drop to a more sensible tier. As it's all rolled into a package.

Luck you in Malvernistan - I live in NW London and I don't have fibre !!

Samknows suggests "RFS date set : 30/09/2014"

I wouldn't believe that - was several (maybe 6) months after our supposed 21CN WBC date that our speed went up.

I have a 152mb connection now

There's only so much doge/cheezburger you can watch you know.

You'd think...

I wouldn't believe that - was several (maybe 6) months after our supposed 21CN WBC date that our speed went up.

I'm getting Infinity activated today, fingers crossed about the speeds, currently lucky to get 2meg off peak down to cock all at peak times, feels like the old dial up days!!

I've all but given up with getting FTTC anytime soon. I was supposed to have it available by March 2014 according to BT, its regularly slipped back again and again and now says available March - September 2015. Talk about being vague.

It seems that BT are enabling the exchanges that are deemed to be financially more viable before the others.
A mate is a solicitor at our county council and he oversaw the signing of an agreement (and large payment to BT) with BT to ensure rural exchanges were fibre enabled. Things moved fairly quickly after that.

T-Mobile Germany and EE have successfully completed LTE-A trials with maximum achieved of ~300Mbps down to mobile dongles. The limiting factor in rural locations will be proximity to a suitable base station and in urban locations, cell contention.

But still pretty amazing that radio waves will soon be able to deliver the kind of downlink speed that it takes fibre to deliver currently.

Actually it's a bit daft - what does any one person need a 300Mbps downlink connection for?

Actually it's a bit daft - what does any one person need a 300Mbps downlink connection for?

I'd be able to get my distros nice and quick

Mega - the cabinets could/will be used as hubs. it does seem to be the future.

sharkbait, my exchange has been enabled for over a year. They're pissing about with the cabinets nearby. It seems to be an issue with the ducting they blow the fibre down. Blockages in them it appears.....

We went from sub 2mb on ADSL to 16Mb on Fibre. Upload is still under 1MB but downloading is now usable!

As people say fibre drop off at distance is very different from ADSL. In our office we "upgraded" to fibre and download speed dropped from 8mb to 4mb. 🙁

ADSL 2 speed drops off to have a useable speed up to approx 3km from the exchange, FTTC tends to be quite slow (12Mbps) once you get over 1km from the cabinet.

My parents have got fibre, they get about 30MBps. They live in a small rural town and just surf occasionally. They don't watch Netflix or anything.

Meanwhile their son lives in a major city, watches lots of streaming media and works from home a lot, and gets bugger all.

scaredypants - Member
The BT pdf initially had us down for June 2014, then September and then we disappeared off the thing altogether - was hoping that meant we were "active"

Had a letter this week offering an Infinity upgrade! Tried the web, and it said it couldn't offer BT Sport as we already had it, or some such malarkey, so I phoned them. Spoke to a nice lady who phoned back yesterday, and said she could give me Infinity 1 with unlimited broadband and evening/weekend calls, exactly as I have now, for exactly the same price, with the sport channel for my dad, which is around £16/month. It would have been £23/month via the web. Connection next week with a new Homehub 5 for the cost of the postage.
Sorted. And the green box is just over the road.

Stoner - you've described my house - we were 5km from exchange, 500m from the cabinet and we're getting 2mb down, .6 up and a gaming ping from 50-90ms.

In April we got FTTC and now we get 36mb down, 6 up and I joined the ranks of the LPB's on cod with a 19 ping.

You should be somewhere close to that - the openreachguysaidwe would probBly get 40-45 down but I didn't feel it worth the extra £10 a month for BT's 76mbpackage so stuck to their 36 pack.

What BT pdf?

Molgrips, you find the code/colour they've assigned to your exchange and then download the roolout list at the bottom

[url= http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/ ]here[/url]

That roll-out list is misleading though as your exchange might be accepting orders but that doesn't guarantee your cabinet or house will be getting fibre, I'm moving next month and my exchange is now accepting orders but after checking with bt they are not running fibre to my street/cabinet as there have not been enough requests.
I'm a bit pissed off at this as I have to have a minimum of C21 (so about 16 in real terms) to get a reliable upload speed for my work so I'm going to have to sign up with virgin cable with their unreliable service and poor customer interaction.
BT could offer 6mb which for London is pretty dire, could accept that for a remote rural location not a city.

I'm going to have to sign up with virgin cable with their unreliable service and poor customer interaction.

Virgin Media over here. Rock solid with only a few outages over the last 5 years.

Wireless:

[img] [/img]

Wired:

[img] [/img]

MrSmith, I'd definitely say those lists are misleading; in fact IMO either innocently overoptimistic or deliberately so in order to secure more funding. I'm wavering toward the latter due to the amount of to&fro movement I've seen for our exchange

Virgin Media over here. Rock solid with only a few outages over the last 5 years

I hope I get the same, but I have been spoilt with Zen who have been great.

I hope I get the same, but I have been spoilt with Zen who have been great.

As for customer service, going to give them a ring in a bit to ask where my Superhub 2 has got to, need it for dual 2.4ghz/5ghz, so will let you know how they fare 8)

cheers Smudger666, that's useful to know.

fingers crossed.

It was woeful last night. Even late, getting on for midnight.

They've been digging holes and laying posh cable (no toilet humour please) all week here on the dark side of whinlatter - couple of months til it arrives they say. That's about 8 months after we were informed stoner. Good luck. p.s. your non-darkening woodstain recommendation worked a treat, ta.

Don't assume it's "the" green box*. They're either upgraded or just newly installed boxes. You can spot them - taller than usual and with apitched (ie not flat) top.

And a huge sticker on the front trumpeting the arrival of fibre speeds.

My exchange has gone from 'accepting orders' to 'under review', so it appears the normal BT openreach efficiency is in full swing. BT would happily have taken my dosh for infinity a year ago, clearly without any prospect of it being delivered to my cabinet.

I pulled in the spine cable (fibre) and blown fibre tubing (for blown fibre bundle to each cab) for my estate, however they decided my cab (which only serves a small part of the estate) wasn't economically viable!

The houses three doors down and a house directly opposite can get FTTC but not me 🙁 Fingers crossed that BDUK funding will allow the council to upgrade my cab during the next wave.

Good luck. p.s. your non-darkening woodstain recommendation worked a treat, ta.

no worries boxelder. Osmo stuff is actually a [b]Deadlydarcy Top Tip ®[/b]

We have the ability to get FTTC, but i am putting it off until I can decide whether I should be divorcing my wife or not.

My current provider (PlusNet) gets me the below from the local exchange (miles away). FTTC would put me 50 yards away from late 20th century broadband speeds. This is also less than 10 miles from Cambridge...

[img] [/img]