Would no internet access put you off buying a house?

Rather higher frequencies than that – when I was looking at the RF interference, which was also about 20 years ago, they were using ~3MHz modulation (hence an issue with the HF comms band which is what I was involved with), and I’m assuming the frequencies are higher now given rather higher data rates. Though otherwise I agree with your comments – PLT had much bigger issues as the lines are essentially unshielded – though that also illustrates that even very high currents in the communication lines aren’t an inherent problem provided they’re at a different frequency!

Has it occurred to the OP that asking online how important Internet access is might just be missing an important demographic for whom the Internet isn’t important.. But they are very unlikely to have seen the question.

Yes. Friend of mine recently refused to buy any house without ultra-fast broadband, its about re-sale in the future

we get between 0.5 and 2.3 mb depending on the direction of the wind it would seem…..

doesnt bother me.

We get 200Mb.

My son still says he can tell when his sister’s streaming videos when he’s playing game online with his mates.

I’d have a mutiny at .5Mb…

Has it occurred to the OP that asking online how important Internet access is might just be missing an important demographic for whom the Internet isn’t important.. But they are very unlikely to have seen the question.

Stick a note up in the local post office

Ha, yes i see your point imnotverygood. We were getting 0.4mbps before we gave up & got a 4g tablet (which is still pretty crap). It did bring it home to me when we had some guests at Christmas & me 14 y/o sort of neice asked for the wifi password & she just looked at me blankly when i said we don’t have broadband.
FWIW, it wouldn’t put me off, but i can use the net at work & aren’t into social media or streaming stuff.

We get 200Mb.

My son still says he can tell when his sister’s streaming videos when he’s playing game online with his mates.

Way more likely to be your wifi bandwidth here, especially if both are on cheaper/older devices that can only do 2.4Ghz (or you have a 2.4Ghz router).

Rather higher frequencies than that – when I was looking at the RF interference, which was also about 20 years ago, they were using ~3MHz modulation (hence an issue with the HF comms band which is what I was involved with)

Oh they must be using something faster and going up in frequency a bit but I don’t know what comes after 1 MHz ADSL. I suppose I should have gone to wiki to find out what they do today.

I get 150 Mbps FTTC so fitting Shannon-Hartley down some dodgy copper doesn’t really bother me. And my day job is at rather higher frequencies.

yes, would need a minimum 20mb line.

I get 150 Mbps FTTC so fitting Shannon-Hartley down some dodgy copper doesn’t really bother me.

FTTC is only Fibre to the Cabinet, the connection to your house is still twisted pair….

Open Reach are duty bound to offer all addresses fibre by the end of March 2016 – frankly they’re never going to do it, but there is at least hope!

the end of March 2016 is frankly an outright falsification they can’t achieve it by then even if they wanted to!

In my village all but one cabinet has fibre the last cabinet (the one I’m connected to) isn’t commercially viable because when it was put in ~20 years ago they took the easy option and didn’t put it near a sufficient power supply.

Now OpenReach are saying they can’t afford to update it and the community should raise the money to do it! As a community we’ve declined OpenReach’s offer for us to pay for their poor planning but the battle is ongoing!

I ended up emailing their CEO and got referred to their ‘High Level Complaints Front Office’ team and I’ve had some sensible dialogue with them about the cabinet and for what’s it’s worth they’ve said “The current situation is that cabinet 8 is in our plans to be upgraded in the next financial year – 2016/2017.” So we MAY get fibre in that cabinet by April 2017 meaning it’s taken about 3 years to get them to agree to anything! t

I wouldn’t buy a house without decent broadband/fibre because it’s so much hassle to get OpenReach to do anything and by the time they do it’s out of date!

How does interference from a local mast affect internet that is coming through a cable. Or is it the Wi-Fi in the house that doesn’t work as it’s getting swamped by the signal from the mast?

I’m not much more or an expert but All Sorts of Shenanigans can happen down the wire. We had what turned out to be a RAIN problem, fixed after 7 engineer visits. Cause was a dodgy laptop charger in a house a few doors up on the other side of the street. Mixture of technician, detective and diplomat needed to fix that one!

Absolute clincher. There are ways around it but the net is life.

If it was some historic or very rural house, then no, I wouldn’t be put off buying it without internet access. If, however, it was just a plain, modern house with no access simply due to an engineering/infrastructural question, the lack of internet would probably make me feel murderous.

Hmm, well I’ve checked and it looks like I was wrong. Standard frequency range seems to be up to ~1MHz.

The technology they were looking at for higher data rates was VDSL which does appear to use higher frequencies (what was being tested wasn’t in commercial use at the time – 512kbps was normal back then for ADSL and they were researching higher data rates) I mistakenly assumed that was what we now had and were referring to as ADSL, whereas it seems that is a completely different thing and they’ve simply squeezed higher data rates into the same bandwidth. I probably should have known that given that the issue of interference with HF comms largely went away.

Not that it is anything other than of academic interest to this discussion – any radio waves from a mobile mast will be in the GHz range so in a completely different part of the spectrum.

Well if somebody has defective (and illegal!) kit dumping interference onto the wire that’s a different issue and all bets are off – I’m still dubious about problems being caused to a copper TP due to RF interference – not if the wire isn’t defective in some way.

Just don’t mention it when your selling?.

When we sold our last house, I neglected to mention the 15 stone Rottweiler and bull mastiff pup that had recently moved in next door, and were left out all day. And only took viewings after dark….

Way more likely to be your wifi bandwidth here

We’ve got Cat 5 looped all over the house so I don’t get wi-fi slow down in my office and he doesn’t in his room in the loft conversion 🙂

My son still says he can tell when his sister’s streaming videos when he’s playing game online with his mates.

In FPS games and the like it tends to be ping time that is critical, not (just) throughput.

And yeah if he is on wifi and his sister is also on it streaming movies to a tablet or something then that could hit wifi performance regardless of your internet speed.

Edit: but he is wired it shouldn’t.

Given 200Mbps broadband data rate, wired connection (or more likely router) could still be a limitation depending on how it’s connected if somebody is using a lot of BW – I’ve certainly seen rate issues in wired networks.

tbh, I think it’s all a bit princess and the pea – he’s claiming he knows but in reality he’s never been able to pin it down. It’s probably some teen he’s playing against in Canada’s fault 🙂

[edit] Just did a test: 19ms ping, 185 up 12 down and there’s other people using the connection. He’s got nowt to worry about.

Our street, 35 houses were stuck at 1.0 meg whilst the surrounding streets were all on fibre. Due to the shitty wiring when houses were built in 92 BTO say there was nothing they could do.

However I

Emailed CEO more than once http://www.ceoemail.com/%5B/url%5D

Contacted my local councilor/MP/MSP to get BTO to do something about the shite wiring we had.

Sometime later local council had an initiative to get “super fast broadband” to all in our area, again emailed anyone and everyone.

Got all of the street to register for fibre (don’t actually have to take it)

Just got to keep at it.

Thanks bruneep.

It may be a little trickier for us, our hamlet is probably not even 20 houses. The ones at the bottom can apparently get something faster than regular BB. But we’re another 100m or so away from the cabinet but can’t get anything other than BB.

I’d be happy with 5mb to be honest!

Some rural locations have access to a service similar to (or the same as) that offered by Vfast for those who live too far from the exchange to be supplied internet down the wire.

Re uploads hogging download bandwidth on slower broadband connections: get a throttler to limit the upload rate of any application you use to upload, that way you can still surf the net while the 8gb video uploads to youtube overnight. On Linux, there’s trickle (and yt-upload). On Windows, I think netlimiter can do it.

Just today after having had a 4g phone for the past fortnight, I have been thinking that I’ll probably cancel my broadband and landline when my minimum contract ends. Been really paying attention to how much I use it, and the answer is not much! 4g is faster than my BB anyway so am using that rather than BB on my phone, can let my iPad use the phone data, will see how much it uses in total. Will just have to put up with not downloading sky box sets at 2Gb per episode 😐

So, in short, no, it wouldn’t put me off. As long as 4G is available…

The interference is known as REIN, and you can pick it up with a standard AM radio (Google it). Street lamps, electrified railways, ham radios and faulty chargers/household goods can cause it at any point along the route.

I don’t think fibre everywhere by March 2016 is true…possibly a universal service obligation stating a minimum speed by whatever technology is suitable.

I also don’t think you can accuse BT of poor planning when they sited a green cab 20 years ago away from any power supply! It was never envisaged that we would need DSLAM cabs with power. My cab was also uneconomically viable for the first few years…ended up being livened up via part funding from BDUK cash. It’s a business at the end of the day, you don’t see Virgin pushing their coax/fibre into rural areas.

However, when you look at the numbers, the speed of the FTTC rollout is mind boggling a huge investment in the network over a very short period. Long may it continue…

If it didn’t have Virgin high speed I wouldn’t even consider it.

I love the interwebs me.

the net is life

I may be a thirty-something country bumpkin but is it only me who finds this all a bit kind of tragic?

You Don’t need Virgin if you have FTTC and your streeet box is reasonably close to your house, I had plusnet FTTC andwas averaging about 72mb dl.

Anyway, 4g I couldnt cope with as most are capped to about 25gb per month dl max, and if you dont watch TV etc, and stream everything you can chew through 300GB per month quite easily.

Sure – standard electrical noise from high current stuff which can generate noise in the relevant frequency bands (some ham radio does use those bands – ADSL interferes with them!) Not masts (I presume mobile phone masts) which is what the OP was being told. I reckon he’s being fobbed off by the BT “engineers” who don’t know what’s causing the intereference and aren’t RF engineers so don’t realise they’re wrong about it being the RF.