Superfast broadband upgrade, coming to the boondocks

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.

Don’t count on it. I was rung by BT yesterday telling me that I can now get fibre….. I had it installed (Zen) in June!
Keep an eye on the Bt page that says if you can get fibre.

Whats the diff between FFTC and FFTP?

About 260mbps! FTTP does fibre all the way to your property cutting out the crap copper from your house to the cabinet.

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.

I think there’s a lot of sense in that. People tend to think that faster = better. It does to up to a certain level – 10mbps is 10x better than 1mbps but 40mbps isn’t 4 x better than 10mbps as generally you just don’t use the extra capability.
It’s the same as fast cars v slow cars.
In our other house we have 40mbps and it’s great but the 12mbps that we get here is actually fine for our needs (streaming and 3 girls with phones glued to their hands).
I’d like a better upload speed because of work but then I can just do bulk uploads overnight.
At the moment more than 40mpbs is fairly pointless, but this may change in the future as the way TV is delivered changes. But then we’ll all have different/better ways of connecting anyway (see my earlier post).

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.

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”

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”

Since I know you all care:
Well-predicted aracer; the useless **** have now marked us up down as under review. My money’s now on June 2016 😐

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

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:

Wired:

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 Deadlydarcy Top Tip ®

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…