Does anyone know if BT Fibre is to the house or just to the nearest box in the road?

It’s to the nearest box AFAIK, the last run to the house is through the old copper telephone connection

Infinity? Its FTTC – fibre to cabinet (box).

You can get fibre to premises (leased line) but it is eye-wateringly expensive (1 month LL == 1 Year FTTC).

Thanks both.

That’s what I thought. But they are saying min 50meg on fibre where the best they can get on full copper is about 4meg. I was surprised that it would jump that high?

I’ve got bt fttc (from plus net)
Consistently get around 68meg. The cabinet is just over the road.

Infinity? Its FTTC – fibre to cabinet (box).

You can get fibre to premises (leased line) but it is eye-wateringly expensive (1 month LL == 1 Year FTTC).

Really?

I pay £46 pm to Zen for a FTTH package the equivalent from BT is around £49 pm…..

I dunno but I signed myself up for fibre with his shower of reprobates a couple of weeks back. So far:

– Received 2 routers through the post, one of which I’ll need to send back
– Had the engineer turn up to a cancelled appointment, I’ll be lucky to have it in by Christmas now
– Never managed to get through the customer services in less than an hour

I’ve got 1 day left to cancel on the cooling off period and will be doing so. Doesn’t matter how fast it is when it’s this big a waste of time. Their customer service score on Which? is terrible, I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

tomd

Was that supposed o be fibre to the house or just to the box in the road?

ta

Ring up BT to check, but 95% of homes are to the cab. Only a few are done Fttp, and that’s generally new developments.

A leased line is not the same as Fttp, in the sense of the product costs. If you go on the BT website it will tell you, anything about 100m/b is to the home, below is to the cab.

I had FTTP as I was on a nice new build. But moved so back on FTTC, but had to use ADSL for a while to we were cabled up. 200m/b down to 2m/b was quite a shock!

@michaelbowden: The connection on copper will be copper all the way from the exchange, basically max speed drops with distance. With FTTC the only bit of copper is from the cabinet to your house which unless you happen to live next to the exchange is going to be a lot shorter so less attenuation of the signal = higher speed.

The above isn’t quite right – the reason the speed drops on copper is that there’s inherent noise on copper cabling and the signal you are interested in gets closer and closer to the noise so the equipment can’t distinguish it. It’s a bit like talking to someone at a party – they have to be quite close for you to hear them and as they move further away they become less distinct in all the general hubhub.

As a reference we have fibre optic to flat in Paris its 200mps as we didn’t think we needed the full 300. I check the speed regularly as we do get 200. My old BT connection typically ran at 0.75-1.5 and cost 20% more. We are massively ripped off in the UK. Rant over.

To the box I believe

Thanks all.

^ massively ripped off in the UK? no, you’re just taking advantages of living in a city. France is as shocking as the UK in the Alps for example.. infact it’s worse where I lived (higher contracts, lower allowances and oversold).

If you want to compare like for like to Paris it’d be london, you can get 1gb connections for bugger all if you’re in the right catchment.

200m of copper from the cabinet to our house. 55Mbps unless it’s on a go slow, which isn’t that often.

I was told by an AV guy that the way to think about it is like water supply. You probably only have a 15mm main as incoming but good pressure. The main in the road is much bigger. Copper is like 15mm the whole way, so when your neighbours are online your pressure goes down. Fibre is like a big fat pipe and so when everyone else is on it your pressure is still good. Made sense to me anyway!

BT are clever little ****. I live in a village with 3 very visible cabinets around it with the big “Fibre is here” stickers on them. Signed up for BT Infinity, was given a guaranteed minimum of 29mbps. Turns out the fibre is from a cabinet over a mile away in another village. Never had a connection over 16mbps since living here, the engineer we called out said we were lucky to be getting that.

No-one else can offer an equivalent fibre service better or cheaper, as BT have the usual rural monopoly. If I go back to ADSL I’m looking at 1.5mbps, if I go through another provider, BT have admitted to me that they’ll throttle the connection and I’ll be lucky to get over 9mbps. All the guaranteed minimum means is that I can cancel my contract if it isn’t met, but any other deal is worse, either on price or connection speed. The fact that this company is given billions of taxpayers money to put stickers on cabinets then goes about its business in such a ridiculous manner amazes me.

Double check with BT themselves, as the info above is not entirely correct. We moved in the summer and all of the broadband online checkers (including BT’s own website) said the best we could expect was 2mbps as we were moving to an old rural property.
When I rang BT to cancel my then BT Infinity the lady tapped some keys and said I could get FTTP where we were moving to, as the fibre line went up the road past our new place. As we were already Infinity customers then it would be classed as a house move (not new contract) so there would be no extra cost for install (it actually worked out cheaper than we were paying as I went through the retentions team).
We are now constantly getting 56mbps download for less than £30pm.

The only downside (as mentioned above) is the terrible customer service from BT. All the operators have been courteous and responsive when on the phone, but as soon as they hang up its like they disappear into a black hole as nothing they have agreed on the phone gets done! It has taken from the 5th august until 2nd December to get the FTTP line up and running, I dreamt of only spending an hour on the phone trying to get through!
We only got by as I had a 4G over wifi dongle for day to day stuff.

I was told by an AV guy that the way to think about it is like water supply. You probably only have a 15mm main as incoming but good pressure. The main in the road is much bigger. Copper is like 15mm the whole way, so when your neighbours are online your pressure goes down. Fibre is like a big fat pipe and so when everyone else is on it your pressure is still good. Made sense to me anyway!

That’s an explanation of contention ratio not the difference between copper and fibre.

Really?

I pay £46 pm to Zen for a FTTH package the equivalent from BT is around £49 pm…..

So few people can actually get that its barely worth mentioning.

Part of the cost of a leased line is the fact it is the fact all the quoted bandwidth is yours, I.e. no contention. They also have a much higher better SLA (and typically come with a ADSL backup line). Domestic grade services are all shared between multiple subscribers.

@alexx the city is a fair point although in central London we only got 10-15 max

I have BT fibre to the property. It took nine months to get installed.

It works out at £90 a month for broadband, two TV 4k recording boxes with all channels and telephone.

Infinity 4 i think its called. 330 mbps.

So few people can actually get that its barely worth mentioning.

Part of the cost of a leased line is the fact it is the fact all the quoted bandwidth is yours, I.e. no contention. They also have a much higher better SLA (and typically come with a ADSL backup line). Domestic grade services are all shared between multiple subscribers

But its not a leased line, its not eye wateringly expensive and the number of homes its available to are significant.

I think your confusing leased lines and domestic fttp offerings from BT-Openreach & Virgin. I can assure you it has no ADSL backup and its cheaper than a BT FTTC Infinity package.

My experience of BT;

Signed up to their Infinity broadband around this time last year when we moved house. 12 month contract, reasonably priced, free £125 Sainsbury’s gift card.

6 months of chasing later, still no gift card. Gave up on that one.

Moved house to a new rental property just a few streets away from our old one in October. Gave BT a month’s notice to move the contract via their online system, automatically signed me up for a new 12 month contract at a higher rate (about £15 a month extra, the highest like-for-like residential broadband in the UK).

Phone was transferred on the correct day but no broadband. Gave it 24 hours then called them. On hold for an hour before the call was answered. Went through the usual “turn router on and off” bull before they confirmed the issue was their end and an engineer would need to come round on Tuesday.

Got a call on the Sunday from their India call centre. Fault traced to a general outage in the area, broadband coming online on the Tuesday so engineer visit cancelled.

Tuesday comes, no internet all day.

Call up on the Wednesday (only 40 mins wait this time), sorry sir, there actually wasn’t an outage on the days we said there was, so we’ll need to send an engineer round. Next appointment is in 10 days.

Engineer comes 10 days later, straight away says “I know what the problem is, they’ve connected you to the wrong box, you’ll need to call them back, tell them what they’ve done, and they’ll need to cancel your whole package and set up a new one. I can’t connect you to the right box without their approval [computer says no etc]”.

Called BT, tell them what the engineer said, “sorry sir, we need to wait up to 72 hours for the engineer’s report to come through because we can’t action instructions on the customer’s word alone.

Wait 72 hours, call them back, engineer’s report has gone through, ok sir, we’ll reconnect you in 7 days.

7 days comes, reconnection FINALLY, internet works. They send a new router without asking me for some reason.

Get a call from their “customer services” manager, as I’d raised a complaint right from the start. “Sorry for your inconvenience, you won’t be billed for the month you were without service, and here’s £40 goodwill credit on your account”. Fair enough.

Next bill arrives a week later, £15 more expensive because I lost the promotional rate by moving house, £7.95 charge for the delivery of the router I never asked for, full charge for the month without Internet. Email the customer relations manager back, no response after a week.

Called up to query the bill, got put through to the Indian call centre. After half an hour of repeating myself, “sorry sir, we will amend the bill, refund you for the router delivery, and credit your account.”

1 week later, nothing, call up again, this time get put through to the UK call centre. Ask to log a complaint, ask to speak to the complaint manager I spoke to before, “yes sir, sorry, I have emailed her now, a complaint has been raised, she will call you within a couple of days.

2 weeks later, nothing, call them again, this time put through to India. “Sorry sir, there is no record of any complain, nor is there a record of the last two phone calls, the bill has not been amended either.”

At this point. I just gave up.

As soon as they inevitably put their prices up in the new year and I can then ask to get out of the contract without penalty then I will do it. Worst customer services I have ever experienced, and we were saddled with Npower for a short while.

AVOID!!!!!!