Your internet BB speed ?

[Kim]

But how does the fibre get from the cabinet to my house? They seem to claim that they offer FTTP. I assume it has to follow the path of the copper wire but they've not put any in.

Some men with ladders will come and install the last couple of hundred metres as needed.

[Greenbank]

FTTP will require an engineer coming out to assess how to get the fibre to your house.

The phone lines for our building (house converted into 3 flats) are two separate cables (with 8 cores in each) that come in through a plastic conduit that, I guess, goes all the way from the wall of the house to the BT chamber of horrors that runs along underneath the pavement. So for us it should just be a case of engineers poking through a feeder and pulling the new fibre cable through, then badly botching it to the outside of the building and drilling through the wall at a really unhelpful location (probably in my daughter's bedroom).

This is the main reason that Full Fibre uptake will be slow, it's a hell of a lot more work than switching the pairs in the existing cabinet over to the DSLAM side for FTTC.

I can easily make do with the current 70Mbps I get from BT Fibre 2. There are only 3 of us in the flat and nothing 4K yet. (Streaming 4K can require up to 25Mbps depending on the compression. 3 people watching different 4k streams [Movie, TV, Sport] could start to saturate a 70mbps fibre connection.) But some occasional bits of work stuff would go from tens of minutes to under a minute, which could be useful (although that's generally an excuse to visit the kettle. Shunting the other way takes much longer, so to make that ~12 times faster would be really nice.)

[ian]

Probably like Virgin then. Come, get our service! Oh wait, we can't be bothered installing it. We will send you a letter advertising it every month for the rest of eternity though.

The BT cabinet isn't far away. It's a shiny new one they put in after we moved here (hence our once-upon-a-time dalliance with Virgin, BT were offering the less than blistering speeds of ADSL when we moved here).

Anyway, we don't need FTTP, I'm just idly speculating as it came up when I googled broadband availability for our postcode. I assume there's a secret tunnel up the hill that pops up at the front of our garden (where the telegraph pole lives). Actually, thinking about it, someone had accessed the cover at the base of the pole some months back (a mystery at the time, someone had unearthed yet another mysterious portal in the garden, we put it down to tidy techno-badgers).

[ScumOfTheRoad]

I have Hyperoptic and it is bloody marvellous.

I live in the docklands are of London and the ADSL service was terrible. The exchange is a long distance away in Bermondsey.
I read that the same lines put in for the docks are still in use. During the summer the rate woudl dip to ludicrously low speeds or just fail.
I assume due to sthermal expansion somewhere.
I also read that there are no junction boxes. Lines all go direct to the exchange, as they were used as alarm lines to warehouses.
You dont want the crims intercepting the lines.

Hyperotpic comes along and will wire up an entire building, if the whole building takes the service. Thereis a router cabinet in the basement.
Cat 5 lines run up the risers to every flat. Great broadband speeds and we take their telephone service.
I am on their 50Mbps package and get that speed, I am happy with that.

It is possible to opt for up to 1Gbps with them.

[Greenbank]

https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/fibre-first

links to here:

which is a twee video with some descriptions of what happens. They can run it from a telephone pole.

It does seem to make it sound like it's one bit of fibre all the way from your property to the exchange, but in reality I think it'll be fibre to a more local point (cabinet or more localised concentrator that'll serve a bunch of properties, possibly even on top of an existing telegraph pole if that's how you get your phone). The tricky point is that the concentrators will probably need to be powered.

[Kim]

Interesting thing I learned about BT's FTTP implementation is that clusters of n premises share an optical segment (they join the fibres with beam splitters), and the upstream is time-division multiplexed.  Hence the service is asymmetrical.

[citoyen]

The major factor in broadband speed is the length of the bit of copper that carries the broadband signal - so this is between the two bits of equipment at either end (your broadband modem/router and the DSLAM at the other end). The longer the cable the slower the speeds possible.

In days of old the wire went from your broadband router/modem all the way to a box at the exchange. This could be miles, and that means broadband speeds under 10Mbps.

Case in point:

We used to have copper wire all the way from the exchange, six miles away. Our connection made road runner's look fast.

Then they installed fibre to the cabinet, but our cabinet was a mile away, so the last mile was still copper wire. It was an improvement, but still barely deserving of being called broadband.

Then not so long ago they installed new cabinets at intervals all the way along the road, so we're now connected to one that is probably no more than 100m away. With no other changes, I'm now getting ~50mbps downstream, ~20mbps up.

[ian]

Hmm, the techno-badgers definitely dug out the access to the telegraph pole on our property a while back. Possibly that's what they were up to. Or something else. They didn't bother to let us know. Not that we were super bothered, it's a scruffy bit of verge that I let grow to discourage vehicles driving over it, featuring the abandoned NTL manhole. The Asbestos Palace and grounds are riddled with portals to other domains in space and time. It's not just Hell you can visit, you can pop back to the mid-80s.

[Blade]

Had notification from Virgin Media today telling us that they have upgraded our broadband from 70 Mbps to 100 Mbps at no extra charge.

Ran a speed test and am now getting 73.5 Mbps download and 8.73 Mbps upload. 

We're 50 feet away from their big green box.

[marcusjb]

Getting FTTP is currently problematic as Openreach are effectively limiting their service delivery to anything excluding internal works until 1st June (at the soonest).

So FTTP (which requires the ONF internally) is off the cards currently (unless you meet certain criteria regarding critical national infrastructure, emergency services or certain vulnerable customers).

Upgrades such as ADSL-->FTTC can progress normally as there's no internal works.


Glad we're on FTTP (though we're actually using less bandwidth with Mrs. JB's business in the ditch at the moment) - rural Derbyshire and 300Mbps (can go higher, but that does us for running two businesses including one that moves around huge photography catalogues daily).

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Interesting thing I learned about BT's FTTP implementation is that clusters of n premises share an optical segment (they join the fibres with beam splitters), and the upstream is time-division multiplexed.  Hence the service is asymmetrical.

What? I guess that is BT re-implementing their beloved party lines!
You all pay BT - but they put in only one set of infrastructure.

[jdsnape]

What? I guess that is BT re-implementing their beloved party lines!

It's a (the?) standard way of deploying FTTP infrstructure in an affordable way, they're using a standard called GPON:

http://www.gpon.com/how-gpon-works

[Mr Larrington]

But how does the fibre get from the cabinet to my house? They seem to claim that they offer FTTP. I assume it has to follow the path of the copper wire but they've not put any in.

I'm not convinced it is available, and to be honest, I don't need it (I have Fibre 2 and it's sufficient). But then I don't need a phone line either. Virgin also keep sending me fibre offers, but they have no cabling either. I assume they're trawling for demand.

It's tricky to make out where my fibre originates but it crosses Larrington Towers Road from the telegraph pole on the other side attached to the existing landline string, and then descends the wall into a box nailed there by a couple of lads with a Transit and some ladders.  They spent some time in a hole across the road too.  Nice Man Errol from BT then did the rest - running a fibre from the outside box along the wall, into the porch and through a slightly-widened existing hole into the Atrium and thus to a box attached to the wall next to the front door.  This last is where your Ethernet cable from the router plugs in.  And, mirabile dictu, it all worked first time.  Except that Nice Man Errol put a nail through the wire from the doorbell

[ian]

Actually, I checked the BT site and it says the only fibre I'm likely to get is from Mr Kellogg's butt-affirming and healthy nocturnal habit affirmin' All-Bran.

Who knows. Anyway, I get 70 Mbps down the pipes as it stands before the mothership VPN clenches like a man who's fighting a desperate rear-guard action against the Delhi curse.

[Russell]

Miss R has moved back in with us for the duration and is working from home which involves hi def graphics and so on.  She has been having problems with the VPN dropping out so I suggested that she connects by wire rather than wifi.  I checked and my laptop downloads at around 20 on wifi and 220 on wired.  So I dug out a long cable and then we found that new MacBooks don't have an ethernet port anymore!!

[ian]

Miss R has moved back in with us for the duration and is working from home which involves hi def graphics and so on.  She has been having problems with the VPN dropping out so I suggested that she connects by wire rather than wifi.  I checked and my laptop downloads at around 20 on wifi and 220 on wired.  So I dug out a long cable and then we found that new MacBooks don't have an ethernet port anymore!!

To be fair, the RJ45 plug is bigger than the body of any Macbook (and has been for several years). You can buy a USB>ethernet adaptor for not very much.

[Greenbank]

You can buy a USB>ethernet adaptor for not very much.

And then a USB-C to USB(-C) hub to accommodate that fact that you didn't have enough spare USB(-C) ports to plug the adapter plus everything else in.

Or you could look into why your wireless is slow. I have no problems maxing out my broadband connection (70Mbps) over wireless.

[ian]

It's the trade-off between svelte and swanky or a behemoth festooned with ports. All that's plugged into my Macbook is a power cable and external monitor.

As per the other thread, my new meshy wifi things currently has me bathing in wifi. The Macbook that was lolling around at 18Mbps yesterday is currently claiming 585 Mbps.

[Afasoas]

The second line proved to be insufficient for two of us working from home ...[/url]

I am jealous as even your poor 2nd line uploads 7 times faster than ours. We are both working from home. Mrs. road-runner now gives piano lessons via Whatsapp, Zoom and Skype. Today 3 of her 5 students had poor enough connections that they had to postpone the lessons.

No need to be jealous. The newly provisioned vDSL threw up the white flag of surrender in the small hours. A call to new the communications provider confirmed all was not well. The Broadbean switch over was not a success. System says "validation failure".  36 hours without a second line, and aDSL from the old communication provider is restored, after a fault was logged with their provider.

I'm still none-the-wiser. I've grokked that the switch over process is called GPL-NoT+ (Gaining Provider Lead - Notice of Termination, 2015 vintage) and that validation (of assets) is done early on in the switch over process.

I wish I could justify AAISPs non-too-thrifty £45 per month but I don't want to commit to coughing up that much with the uncertainty around. The new provider now seems to have cancelled the order. I'm trying to get some confirmation from a human¹ as to what actually happened and whether it's possible to try again.

[1] codeword expired?

[citoyen]

I checked and my laptop downloads at around 20 on wifi and 220 on wired.

I was about to comment that this sounded odd to me, and that I get the same speeds on both my laptop and desktop...

Then I remembered that my desktop connects wirelessly too. 

However, we do have one computer in the house that is connected by ethernet (it's right next to the router) so I just tested that one and it's no faster.

We also have powerline extenders to provide wireless hotspots around the house and the connection speed is generally pretty good with those too.

[ian]

I have been compulsively testing speed all day (I never much bothered until recently and probably won't again soon, I'm mostly an 'it works). Before new gadgets, I got about 45ish Mbps on my office iMac via wifi and about 12-18 Mbps on the Macbook (on the other side of my desk). I think laptops, in general, don't tend to have great antenna placement as they go where they fit. I used to get full whack (70) over a powerline.

With the new gadgets, I even get 65 Mbps wireless at the bottom of the garden and in the garage.

It does nothing against the giant spiders. Or the yeti.

[Kim]

Got around to investigating the RED ALARM on the BT analogue line yesterday.  I assumed that this was the TDM400 card suffering droid rot, but I got nothing with an analogue phone (no dialtone, no RevK instructing our-favourite-telco engineers not to steal this pair), and couldn't even measure the requisite 50 voles (admittedly by poking probes at a RJ45 plug, which is suboptimal).  Went back to the master socket, and same thing.

Concluded that the shenanigans of a couple of weeks ago (the line - which isn't able to make or receive phone calls - rang for no apparent reason) was probably an our-favourite-telco engineer stealing the pair somewhere between the cabinet and the POTS side of the exchange.  So I removed the filter and POTS wiring from our end.

The VDSL immediately re-synced at 75/20, up from a previous 65/20 or so.  The modem was reporting an attainable rate of 82.something megabeans last night, which I thought was impressive for an 80 megabean service (presumably it wouldn't sync above 80).

[Poly Hive]

Thanks to Openreach supplying a fibre cable from the cabinet in Jedburgh we are now cruising at 140meg from 4.1.

Lush.

PH

[Wowbagger]

180 into my computer and 43 over the wifi.

[DuncanM]

I haven't checked speeds since I set my work laptop up on a Cat 6 cable to the router.

Very asymmetrical, but can't exactly complain!