Aluminium to copper upgrade?

Garyj881 · 27 Jun 2018 at 19:15

Hello,

My currenty ISP is ZEN internet, I am on their FTTC service. Before I joined I was estimated to see 35Mb/s but have only ever seen 22Mb/s. After a few Openreach visits I was told I am not reaching my estimated speed due to running on aluminium cable not copper as expected. Infact the whole housing estate is the same.

From this I accepted nothing could be done other than another house move. This was until yesterday when I was browsing EE's website. They rang me just now to offer a sales pitch, they offered me a better speed than current and I replied with it won't happen due to the aluminium cable. He said can I quote you to replace the aluminium with copper?......what??...My first thought would be 100K. He said no where near that, they don't need to dig up the road, they would just thread in a new copper cable at half their usual price, working out at £30.

I'm like wow, sound too good to be true. I rang Zen, who confirmed I'm out of contract and said they could do the same copper install for £78 but wouldn't price match on the broadband.

A few qestions here and yes, I know theres are a lot of variables.

I'm 2 miles from the cabinet. Will the copper line be much better? currently syncing at 22Mb/s what can I expect on the new line?

Is EE ok as a provider? I assume they use BT's network. Any traffic shaping or throttling or anything bad in general?

My contract with Zen is up but I am struggling to stream video contect when my son is gaming and partner is also streaming, plus mobile phone use on top.

The current speed is unsustainable.

Quartz · 27 Jun 2018 at 20:17

Garyj881 said:
My contract with Zen is up but I am struggling to stream video contect when my son is gaming and partner is also streaming,

This may be better fixed by bandwidth shaping at your end. Just get yourself a router that can do it.

Quartz · 27 Jun 2018 at 20:20

Garyj881 said:
Will the copper line be much better?

One thing a new cable will have is fewer splits and joins. Hopefully none, of course, but getting a 2 mile continuous run may be asking too much.

Given that you're with Zen, you likely have a static IP address. You will almost certainly not have this with EE.

bremen1874 · 27 Jun 2018 at 20:40

Garyj881 said:
I'm 2 miles from the cabinet. Will the copper line be much better? currently syncing at 22Mb/s what can I expect on the new line?

Are you sure it's 2 miles? At that distance you wouldn't expect anything much over 10Mbps.

An estimate of 35Mbps would point to a line no more than 0.5 miles long.

TJM · 27 Jun 2018 at 22:11

Openreach won’t run a copper line from the cabinet to replace a line that works. They might do the last few metres from the nearest distribution point, although I wasn’t aware that was offered.

Caged · 28 Jun 2018 at 00:53

EE are lying to you

Hotwired · 28 Jun 2018 at 02:50

Or there's a misunderstanding about how much wire gets changed.

Threading two miles of wire along a tube is a fair bit for £30.

Orcvader · 28 Jun 2018 at 09:16

Are you sure that's not 2 miles from the exchange? Because 2 miles from the cabinet with those speeds sounds like a miracle. 35mb will be roughly 600/700m but even then depending on how it reaches the cabinet, as mentioned they may not fully replace it, especially if a good portion runs underground.

pcfarrar · 28 Jun 2018 at 09:24

I know a guy at work who had an aluminium cable replaced by BT. He had continuous disconnections for 6+ months and got nowhere trying to get BT to fix it. They only managed to get the line replaced once he discovered one of his old friends worked at Openreach. Engineers then came out of hours and swapped the cable.

r7slayer · 28 Jun 2018 at 09:53

Openreach when replacing line tend to tap it. So where every they replace the line it tends to be only a few meters and usually replace it with aluminium for smaller replacements and copper for bigger replacements. As this will help keep people within their estimates. I have aluminium at the end of my street which i didn't know until a really good open reach engineer looked at my line when i was getting horrendous packet loss and couldn't find any obvious issues. He said that the line has been replaced at the end of the street with aluminium and hopes it's nothing to do with that because it can be a pain in the ass to sort. He some how fixed it by doing loads of different things. Replaced my master socket, replaced the box at the top of the pole. Changed ports at the cab. cut and redid the wiring at a junction box in the house where the line comes in before the master socket to check for damp. All sorts.

But aluminium is cheaper than copper so they will use this. I doubt going from copper to Alu will increase your speeds much perhaps a 3-4 Mpbs or slightly more if lucky.

bremen1874 · 28 Jun 2018 at 10:14

From talking to their people I was under the impression that aluminium was no longer used for anything new.

r7slayer · 28 Jun 2018 at 11:12

bremen1874 said:
From talking to their people I was under the impression that aluminium was no longer used for anything new.

Lol i wish that was true. Because i have a line replacement at the end of my street that's not that old and is aluminium.

BigT · 28 Jun 2018 at 11:55

As a sufferer of poor speeds and aluminium cable I sympathise and its interesting to know that this is even an option of swapping out some of the cable for copper for a price. I was unaware. But I have to agree with a previous poster that you can't be 2 miles from your FTTC cabinet and get 22Mbps ( https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2013/chart-bt-fttc-vdsl2-speed-against-distance ). That sort of distance yields well under 10Mbps. Aluminium cables in part + being about 3.5Km from the cabinet as the cable is laid gives me a whopping 5Mbps on my fibre service. So slow some providers won't even sell me it, but it's better than the 112Kbps I get on ADSL since I'm also miles from the exchange!

Garyj881 · 28 Jun 2018 at 16:13

To put things straight, I worded it wrong.

I am 2 miles from the exchange, but the the green cabinet is probably less than a quarter of a mile away.

Also for the two members above, I'm not planning on swapping out copper to aluminium. It's the total opposite. I'm currently on aluminium from the cabinet and was advised by both ee and Zen, for a price they can install a new copper line to my house.

TJM · 28 Jun 2018 at 16:32

Garyj881 said:
Also for the two members above, I'm not planning on swapping out copper to aluminium. It's the total opposite. I'm currently on aluminium from the cabinet and was advised by both ee and Zen, for a cost the supply to my house can be swapped to copper by installing a new line.

The ISPs can offer a new line but it won't be copper.

As far as we know, every line in your estate is aluminium so there will not be spare and accessible copper lines running past your house. There is no chance of Openreach running a copper line from a cabinet to a property for anything other than the full commercial rate unless the line is broken and there are no spares available nearby. They would need a team to pull the cable through, do the jointing at various points along the line (your line isn't a single continuous piece of aluminium) and clear any underground blockages.

When the ISP says a new line can by feed into your house, they mean (or should say) a spare existing line from the distribution point outside your house. It won't help unless there is something wrong with the last several metres of the line.

Garyj881 · 28 Jun 2018 at 17:05

I understand what you're saying but ee and Zen are saying different. I will get it in writing first and post back with the answer.

#Chri5# · 28 Jun 2018 at 17:55

Garyj881 said:
I understand what you're saying but ee and Zen are saying different. I will get it in writing first and post back with the answer.

And still get another pair off the same aluminium cable

Caged · 28 Jun 2018 at 20:05

The only way to get aluminium replaced with copper if the all the multi-pair cables are aluminium as well is to get some ****** to lift a manhole and rip out all the old cable with their pickup

blueacid · 11 Jul 2018 at 12:38

Caged said:
The only way to get aluminium replaced with copper if the all the multi-pair cables are aluminium as well is to get some ****** to lift a manhole and rip out all the old cable with their pickup

They're not such big fans of doing that. Ally hasn't got quite the same resale value as copper!