BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

g67575 said:
I wonder how common aluminium lines are in the UK? I'd guess 10% of all Openreach lines?
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I'd imagine houses/areas older than the 90s.

Armageus said:
The same will no doubt be true even when gigabit connections become the norm - web pages or whatever the main services are at that time is, will continue to grow and absorb that capacity.
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True. How different the Internet was back in 2007 - 2015. Now nearly every site is becoming and wants a subscription from us or you're blocked or it's half covered. Yet littered in ads as they scream you're using adblockers while still paying.
 
I don't believe it. Forcing on interleaving (had to ask Openreach) reduced packet loss on my line to around 0.001%, at least according to Stadia, and games are streaming smoothly.

Maybe only useful on particularly crappy lines though? Latency is somewhat high though now. No need to cap my upload speed either.

Additionally, no CRC errors, can only see Forward Error Corrections since sync.
 
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The engineer rang up a number then asked them to make the change. According to my ISP, interleaving remains active on the line if manually enabled by Openreach. The customer has to ask for it to be disabled (I'm glad about this).

It's a trade off, as my line latency is now around 30ms (or higher). The lady he rang was supposed to enable it on the upstream only, but it appears to enabled on the downstream also. When the engineer was making the call he complained about the remote tech support (gave me a strange sense of Deja vu :cry:).

This is what I can see in my modem stats:

GgUo6ZN.jpg


The delay parameter suggests around 20ms of additional latency.

With a bit of tweaking, its working perfectly now (no packet loss even to Germany), according to this online testing tool:
https://packetlosstest.com/

All I had to do was enable Flow Control and Adaptive Interframe Spacing on my network adapter. MTU is set to 1492 on all devices, which was helpful before interleaving was enabled. QoS Packet scheduler curiously negatively impacted results if enabled.

Excellent Bufferbloat results here also:
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=86ef28fd-3e89-4128-a398-610fe4e456ed
 
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Our area is pencilled to get FTTP by December 2026 but this morning a van pulled up outside our house from these guys

https://www.opalsgroup.com/

2 guys got out, walked down the road (we’re covered by telegraph poles), got back into their van, sat there for about 15 mins and then drove off. Hopefully it’s a sign that things are starting to move along
 
My line's interleaving has now been completely disabled for a day (interleaving set to 1 on downstream and upstream. The interleave depth was reduced in stages), it must've been turned off by Openreach's system.

Not happy, as my line problem was fixed for a couple of days.
 
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g67575 said:
I wonder how common aluminium lines are in the UK? I'd guess 10% of all Openreach lines?
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Fully depend what was installed or repaired when, there could be alu or copper of varying gauges too.

Be suprised how much of an impact a slightly different gauge could have on performance
 
g67575 said:
The interleave depth was reduced in stages), it must've been turned off by Openreach's system.
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That will be DLM, a completely automated system that ensures your line works to the best of its ability. It works fine for 99% of the population, and will know more about your lines performance than the openreach engineer who reset your line.

Honestly I still think you are chasing a problem that no one would ever notice, just because you've fiddled around with some settings and are watching a packet loss stat.
 
cheers for that input.

As I've said, my line is choppy / glitchy when running Google Stadia /other streaming services without interleaving.

Had similar issues on video chatting software, harder to verify these now.

Whether or not people notice similar issues would be down to the characteristics of the line, and what they use their line for.

It's not like when they marketed FTTC, the small print said 'By the way, your video streaming could be unreliable', even when the sync speeds are generally fine.

Since interleaving was disabled, I've also seen some SES reported and loss of signal on the line also. Line went down a few weeks ago for a few hours, but I imagine that's typical.
 
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You should start looking at alternative providers for your Internet connection, ones that don't use your Openreach FTTC cabinet. This could be Virgin Media, 4G/5G, or a fibre altnet.

DLM is turning off interleaving because your line is stable, if this is causing issues with Stadia then it won't get fixed. You will not get some sort of special profile applied to one port on an ECI cabinet, Openreach aren't putting any more effort into their FTTC platform, they're (anecdotally) not even bothering to address issues caused by full cabinets.
 
Who knows, might get 5G in a year or so (can get a weak outdoor signal now via Three apparently). 5G requires a lot of infrastructure, small cells etc...

FTTP hopefully later on in 2023, but still in planning stages for my area apparently (but confirmed). Virgin isn't coming to my town, as far as I can tell.
 
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I think you'll have to pay if you want a better line (specifically, higher download rates). ~60mbps is still good. Average for FTTC is generally 40-50mbps now I think.

can get that to 100mbps+ with line bonding.
 
You should clarify that you're 'stuck' with a 60Mbps connection and have already posted your rant about this

smeemi said:
I have FTTC max speed around 60 megabit.

My area is not in the FTTP plans at all.. so based on government it could take minimum 2032 until I can get a higher speed.

I can't get virgin media.. although that's a whole separate story.

Do the government really expect us to continue to be on 60 megabit for the next 10 years. I find that ridiculous.

Other options are

Fibre on demand - damn expensive
Starlink- even more expensive

No 5g in my area either.
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I am also 'stuck' on 60Mbps FTTC with no other options currently - 4G gets to about 12Mbps here. I have worked from home a day a week for the last five years, and full-time since March 2020, and my connection has never been the limit. I'm curious what you're being prevented from doing with your connection that is in line with the UK median.
 
Yup, should be same as Sky. both are DHCP based providers, so should be easier to configure with a lot of modern routers (recently brought an Asus router that disconnected frequently on a PPPoE connection).

Suspect that's because much of the world has now moved over to DHCP connections.

You might have to set DHCP 'option 60' or similar, if using your own router.
 
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